A CEO who shows up to work late and leaves before most of his employees is likely not going to be a CEO for very long as they will either run the company into the ground through bankruptcy (and not paying attention to the employees) or the board of directors is going to notice that things are being seriously neglected and will get fired. That isn't to say that a good CEO can't on occasion take the day off early to pursue something of a life, but my experience is that a typical CEO is very much a workaholic and tends to put in even longer days than most of the employees... usually in meetings to find out what is going on in the company or interviewing employees. Really good CEOs tend to even "get on the line" and do some occasional grunt work.
Examples of good CEOs in the past were folks like Dave Thomas (of Wendy's restaurants) who made it a habit to put on the apron and grill hamburgers at least a few hours each week, and Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart) who didn't hesitate to spend a few hours simply stocking shelves in some of his stores if for no other reason than to meet customers and find out the work environment of his employees. That is how you get to know your company and get it to grow.
Yes, there are lazy CEOs that also don't care about the companies they are running. Those companies are also ones I think you should look to short sell their stock if you know about them too.
Another example of a CEO that is a major workaholic is Elon Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Then again he wrecked his second marriage (as well as his first) simply because he spent so much time at work that he hasn't been able to deal with his respective wives and their needs. I admire what he has accomplished, but his personal life is going to hell because of what he does to earn the money he is making. I'd also suggest that most successful CEOs are much more like Elon Musk than a lazy idle rich child working for "daddy's company".
The problem with a spacecraft made of heavy metals is that it drops like a rock through the atmosphere, hence it needs a huge amount of shielding due to the reentry speed when it finally hits the lower atmosphere.
An astronaut with a much more minimal shield doesn't have the same problem due to the lower overall density of the astronaut as composed to a heavy spacecraft, so the altitude where the pressure starts to push back against the astronaut would be much higher, and the astronaut could "skip" across the upper atomosphere at the trade-off of taking longer to descend compared to a conventional spacecraft. By taking longer for the descent, the energy can also be dissipated over a longer period of time (less heat at any one time) and the shielding doesn't need to be all that much larger than the astronaut themselves and certainly can be much thinner than what is used for spacecraft. It could even be built into the space suit itself.
So no, the speed isn't the only factor here to consider, and even the "g-forces" the astronaut would experience in such a descent would be considerably less than what the astronauts experience in the inside of a spacecraft as well... for the same reason.
I'm not saying that it would be easy for somebody trying to go through a personal re-entry without a spacecraft, but it could be survivable and they wouldn't necessarily burn up in the atmosphere... especially if some minimal level of precautions were taken into consideration. If anything, it may even be that doing a straight drop from altitude might be more dangerous than an orbital descent.
Due to the substantially lower density of the human body, even a fall from orbit isn't necessarily all that dangerous. One of the issues facing spacecraft designers is that the vehicle is usually made of metal and has an overall density that is quite high (from not just the shell of the spacecraft, but also all of the instruments and supplies as well).
It has been proposed that one possible rescue mode for astronauts in orbit is to perform one of these extreme altitude descents. There still are many things which aren't known about such extreme jumps, so efforts like Baumgartner's can genuinely be something that may end up saving people's lives in the future. In theory, the problems that faced the final crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia could have been survived had those skills and that option been available to those astronauts.
The dangerous part is if you start to spin, there isn't much you can do to stop it from happening.... drogue or not. This is because of the extreme altitude as there isn't much air to interact with at all.
Kittinger's first Excelsior test at "merely" 76,000 feet nearly cost him his life when he went into a flat spin eventually rotating at 120 rpm before he finally got it under control after passing out due to the fact that his main chute automatically deployed and broke the spin. This problem also happens to high altitude aircraft, but they usually have some kind of rudimentary control surface to work with and some high altitude aircraft even have "thrusters" to help with aircraft orientation if it becomes a problem... at least being able to partially control the jet exhaust in some manner.
When you get to a lower altitude, the drogue chute is much more useful and can be used.... but you need to get to that altitude where it can be useful in the first place. This is called extreme skydiving for a good reason.
You are likely talking about a documentary regarding Joseph Kittinger, the guy who currently holds the high altitude jump record and set that record in 1960. The reason why it hasn't been tried again is in part due to the fact that such jumps have been perceived as being extremely dangerous. Project Excelsior, on the third jump by Col. Kittinger, finally did reach an ultimate velocity of 614 mph, or about nine-tenths of the speed of sound. Basically going the speed of many commercial jetliners if you want a comparison.
Part of the current effort for extreme altitude sky dives is in part to suggest an alternative re-entry method for astronauts that might be able to simply parachute to the Earth from LEO using a small thruster pack and perhaps a surfboard sized reentry shield. On top of that, it is one of the few major international aviation records that might be possible for somebody with private funding to break instead of a major military organization.
No, there hasn't been somebody who broke Mach 1 (aka the speed of sound) due to free fall. The extreme altitude being attempted by Baumgartner is going to get to that velocity though, in part because the air is so thin at that altitude that it won't offer much resistance until he gets much lower.
Josephus did write about the followers of Christ and his histories are one of the few reliable references to the early Christian church. As to specific references to Christ himself, I will grant that the references are dubious at best. Then again you could argue a similar dubious reference for many historical persons of the era.
What was demanded was some sort of citation for historical documents from the era, and I gave an example of a historian of the era whose writings are about the best that you can get considering the region of the world and somebody familiar with local customs and culture that was the province of Judea in the Roman Republic in the 1st Century AD. If it was just Josephus alone that could provide such documentation, I'll admit it is pretty weak, but there are other historical documentary references to consider as well. That anything survived the Jewish rebellion which happened shortly after the ministry of Jesus should be amazing by itself.
To be perfectly blunt, the fact that a rather ordinary Jewish rabbi from this era has any historical documentation at all is unusual, as the historical existence of anybody who wasn't a senator or emperor (or a local provincial king) was hardly documented. The best documentation really is the various "gospels" of the New Testament. What is being asked here is independent collaborative evidence on the presumption that the New Testament is a flawed set of documents needing collaboration from outside authorities. That is one way that the records of Josephus have been used as they do confirm at least some parts of the New Testament in terms of independent records of other historical people and institutions mentioned in the New Testament documents, as well as confirming cultural customs of the people of Judea of that era.
Perhaps the best source of historical information about Jesus of Nazareth is Josephus, where clearly Jesus was mentioned explicitly due to the role that his followers played in the events during the 1st Century AD (not called that BTW in his records). It isn't a perfect reference and I'll admit that you can interpret other individuals instead of the historical person that is claimed to have founded the Christian religious philosophies, but it also isn't correct to claim that no contemporary sources of information exist about him either.
The standard you are proposing here is that we must have e-mails, tweets, and video footage of the guy from cradle to grave in order to accept the historical existence of somebody. By that standard, nobody ever existed in the world prior to about 1950 since obviously there is no proof that they ever existed.
One of the worst aspects of documents from this time period is that the collapse of the Roman Empire also led to the loss of a whole bunch of records that could have been used to determine the historical existence of somebody like Jesus. Still, enough has survived that it most certainly is trolling to suggest Jesus didn't exist at all or making stuff up out of your behind that such records or archeological evidence can't be found to indicate his existence as a historical figure.
So I'm thinking the poor thing is just going to get overheated, give up, and die like the rest of his kind did.
Explain how you have gained such amazing insight into how Mammoths became extinct? While there may be some theories on what happened, I don't think the fact that the climate warmed up at the end of the ice age is the only reason or factor to consider or even that these researchers have ignored the fact that Mammoths did thrive in a different climate than African elephants.
That is part of why I mentioned Scratch at the beginning of this discussion. Scratch has literally tens of thousands (more like in the hundreds of thousands at the moment) of software submissions that can be broken down by age, gender, and geographic location (ethnicity isn't being recorded to the best of my knowledge). In terms of the ages of the kids, it ranges from 3rd graders to college graduates developing software with those tools (with the sweet spot being mostly middle school kids with some high school kids doing most of the work).
As far as the quality of the submissions, most of them are very primitive in that development environment, and I'm not sure if a proper survey of the submissions has really been done, but my point is that the raw data is available from real content that can be evaluated if somebody would want to slug through that mass of data. Being MIT, I know some scholarly studies of the development environment have been done over the years. It just takes some graduate student hungry for a master's degree to plow through that data and try to massage it into a useful publication... or some professor wanting to enslave a group of graduate students for his own behalf to make that evaluation.
The point here is that this seems like a blatant advertisement for a commercial service where it seems like Slashdot is putting advertisement in as stories themselves. Rather than being objective "journalists" or at least throwing stories up that seem to be "news for nerds" for something really innovative or original, this is rehashing something that has been done elsewhere a whole lot better with source code that you can obtain a license to freely modify and redistribute.
Keep in mind that the "free" in "free software" is not an economic disadvantage for those developing the software, but rather the freedom to reuse that software in a more productive way if you don't like what the primary developers are doing.
If you want to put this in game terms, it is the difference between modding for Runescape (that has draconian anti-hacking prohibitions and will do account bans on the forums including in-game banning if you promote hacking), vs. something like Minecraft (where the developers encourage the modding community with forum discussions) or even something like Ryzom that is completely open source and you can change anything. World of Warcraft is on that continuum more toward Runescape, but modding is a bit more tolerated. That is the freedom I'm talking about. Or if you want to compare compilers, compare Lazarus vs. Delphi or GCC vs. Microsoft C++.
People who develop software tools can certainly try to make money off of their efforts, but more often than not if you go with a proprietary solution you are stuck when the company who developed those tools gets into some financial trouble (aka they go bankrupt) or you get on a treadmill of never ending upgrades that you simply must pay for as an annual fee with "vendor lock-in" where the prices seem to escalate the more you use them. Or perhaps the developers simple get tired of even supporting the software and you end up with some abandonware.
Yes, open source/free software can be abandoned as well (especially if it is a one-man show in terms of the development efforts), but in that case a motivated developer can "take over" the development effort on perhaps another server. Bitcoin is an excellent example, where the original developer has left the project but its continued development seems to be going very strong. Open Office/Libre Office are very good examples where a fork in the effort can happen for very legitimate reasons even if there is a core development team continuing development.
I have some friends who have been able to make money off of open source software. You can't use the RIAA/MPAA type of distribution channels to make money (or more like a traditional proprietary software publisher), but that doesn't stop you from making money in other areas like consulting or offering paid customers custom bug fixes and early updates before other users.
While you may not need a commodity as a currency which is derived from elemental metals, grain, cattle, or giant rocks, it does need to be something that is restricted from production or difficult to acquire. A fiat currency can fill that role, which is one reason I think something like Bitcoin is a possible alternative currency (its production is mathematically restricted.
In that sense, I sort of agree with you about the Federal Reserve in terms of how the Board of Governors can arbitrarily create U.S. Dollars out of nothingness in unlimited quantities and "loan" that money to whomever they choose at whatever rate of return they desire (at the moment zero percent interest to all major banks). I also find it interesting how the Federal Reserve is loaning money to banks at zero percent interest only to let those same banks buy up federal treasury securities at a higher rate of interest with that money and those banks can pocket the difference.
Because of that, auditing the Fed isn't really going to accomplish much as they can continue to load literally trillions of dollars to their buddies to make essentially whatever amount of "profit" they want to give to those friends. I wouldn't mind getting a similar kind of gig, borrowing a trillion dollars and earning 4%-10% on that money and pocketing the difference. Yes, some of that money does end up getting loaned to foreign banks, individuals, and even governments for the purchase of things like federal treasuries as well. Isn't that grande?
All in all, with the technology improvements we've had in the last hundred years, our currency should have deflated tremendously, maybe even 100 or 1000 times. The interesting question then becomes, "where did all the extra money go?"
Much of that extra "money" went into the wealth that is or at least was America. It is in the homes, factories, farms, highways, stores, and much else that is this country. That is where that "extra money" went. Some portion of it admittedly went into the pockets of con artists and there were also some people due to circumstances and ingenuity were also able to legitimately earn some of that money, but for the most part it went into the pockets of ordinary Americans.
Scratch is a development environment that not only is easy to learn, but is free as in beer and speech (as it is open source under the MIT license and CC-by-SA for most documentation and source code). There are also several variants that have been done by people other than MIT that are interesting as well, as it has been around for many years.
While this may be a useful tool, shilling for some group trying to make a quick buck doesn't seem right.
BTW, I agree with people complaining that Slashdot seems to be putting advertisements into the stories themselves. This isn't right and it does diminish what quality is left in the website.
The damage values and data are used for more unusual block types or minor variants, like the material types for stairs or the contents of a chest. Much of that could be put into a custom chunk in a PNG file though that could be expanded or restricted depending on how much detail has been added by players in the area.
Most chunks in Minecraft are pretty ordinary and mundane, used as a filler to connect one area to another. If you have some very busy players on a very active world with a large number of player-built structures, the level of detail for a particular chunk could get quite high though. Then again, such data density would be expected in those situations as well.
I like the idea of the PNG file though... it has established standards and can make for some interesting visualizations too.
It isn't quite infinite distances in Minecraft, even if effectively it is. When the software starts to have number overflows (exceeding maxint distances and such) the generation code gets screwy and produces some weird terrain that is all but impassible. There are some players who have either "warped" out to those distances just to see what would happen or have taken the time and effort to get out to those parts of the map just to see what it could be.
See also the Far Lands article on the game wiki that even has some snapshots of what happens in those distant areas.
Except for issues dealing with altitude, it is possible to have 1:1 scale maps of entire continents like Europe or North America put into Minecraft. I have played on a 1:16 scale Mercator map of the whole Earth (it is a huge map file). With the new map format, it is possible to include biome data as well. That was something missing from the map that I saw as the biome info was arbitrary and misplaced on the earlier versions of Minecraft. As I said, while not infinite, it is effectively so or at least as large as even a fairly huge group of people would want to have.
I'll agree that Minecraft does need a whole bunch of optimization for multiplayer applications.
Two areas that kill Minecraft are the mob interactions (something true for most MMO games), but also the world generation routines that are designed primarily for a single player game but ported over to a multi-player environment. This is also the reason why mounted mobs aren't in Minecraft (especially a mounted dragon) because even a one or two player server would croak in a real hurry if you were flying and generated several new chunks of world data every second.
Then again, who says that ordinary players ought to be able to create new world chunks simply by walking or moving around?
The network messages are also far from optimized and is one area that could be tweaked to significantly improve both bandwidth and CPU usage.
As for the Bukkit devs, one of the major areas of focus that they have been hired on to perform is to produce the API libraries for mods with the goal of unifying the multiplayer and solo mod APIs (or even have a formal API in the first place that makes sense). It seems that goal is sort of going to be contrary to efficient network protocols, but I might be mistaken and could even streamline the solo player version as well. Having a staff of developers rather than two guys who are just sort of slugging it through is going to be interesting. I expect to see more cleanup of the code, but fewer major feature changes... and fewer bugs on major releases.
A major problem with non-fiat currencies is that there simply is more wealth than precious metals, so you can't represent all of the world's wealth in precious metals. The result is necessarily deflationary. Also, you get people wasting their time mining which has no intrinsic value (at least Wall St. is creating liquidity and market signals... just poorly).
I disagree with this statement, but I would argue that this is closer to the truth. The main issue with using precious metals as a currency base is that you can put those metals to work with another currency system that doesn't use precious metals more efficiently (aka use copper, silver, and gold as industrial materials rather than as a currency) and on the whole allows those materials to float based on real supply and demand rather than merely because it is the currency itself.
What I completely disagree with though is the notion that deflation is necessarily a bad thing. It is bad for some bankers and the presumption that you must borrow money from some central organization in order to grow your business or finance a home, but for ordinary consumers and businesses which aren't in the financial services sector it really isn't necessarily a bad thing. The worst part right now is that the economies and financial structures of the world are geared to the presumption that inflation is inevitable.
Regardless, if gold-backed currencies came back into vogue, the value of those metals would rise to reflect true wealth from around the world.
This is interesting that you pointed out the personal motivations of Nikita Khrushchev. In the USA, much of the funding for NASA came from Lyndon B. Johnson and his personal interest in seeing the Apollo program get done. The 1950's version of LBJ is something that simply doesn't exist today in American politics, as he ruled the U.S. Senate (and indeed essentially controlled the U.S. Congress as a whole as a result) as his own private fiefdom. How he went about doing that could make him appear to be an utterly heartless bastard, but his personal support for spaceflight was certainly there... and his name upon the NASA manned spaceflight building Houston, Texas was certainly well justified (including the fact that it was built in Texas in the first place instead of Washington DC). When LBJ decided not to run for re-election in 1968, it could be argued that pretty much sealed the fate of NASA as an agency.
While it was a little bit different when LBJ became President, his political control of the U.S. Senate was still incredibly strong and could get just about any legislation he personally wanted to get passed to move through that body. If anything, it was when the Vietnam War was collapsing and some people in the Senate started to get a backbone saying "No" to LBJ that he knew his power was pretty much at an end.
While I know that some work programs do exist in American prisons, I would like to know where your sources are for such bold statements you have made in this post... particularly the "93% of paints sold in the USA are made in prison."
For the most part, many companies start to complain to state governments when prisons make a competing product (not to mention labor unions as well) and it usually becomes politically difficult to keep those products from continuing to be produced in a prison for that reason alone. About the only thing consistently made in prisons is license plates for automobiles, in part because making those is something that is already a government monopoly and doesn't require too much capital expense either. That also doesn't even start to deal with things like interruption of the product due to things like a prison lock-down or other issues that come up from simply having the work done in a prison (again... something that license plate production doesn't really matter as most DMV offices have several months or years worth of license plates available for distribution and a temporary interruption of supply doesn't hurt).
Seriously... I'd love to know your sources of information. Until then, I don't believe your figures or claims unless you are pointing out prisons which exist outside of the USA. The tone of your post is implying that these products are made in American prisons, but then you make a statement that could be interpreted as implying foreign governments are doing that instead on behalf of American consumers. At least be consistent in who you are condemning. That some prisoners in other countries are using what is essentially slave labor for making cheap products may be worth condemning, it isn't something coming from American prisons or from the "war on drugs" that is making a huge prison population in America.
There are other industrial uses of He3 besides fusion energy. One that comes to mind is the ability to use He3 as a refrigerant, as it stays in a gaseous state at a far colder temperature than any other substance (if you want to get into super conductor research for example). It also has additional applications in general nuclear energy research as well which has a consistent demand worldwide for obtaining that particular elemental isotope.
BTW, I do think that mining stuff on the Moon could be made eventually cheaper in terms of shipping costs to LEO than sending stuff up from the surface of the Earth, and certainly the delta-v is lower in terms of going from the Moon to LEO than it is to go from the Earth to LEO (much less to places like the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points). About the only way significant industrial activity is going to take place beyond the Earth is if Lunar mining starts to take place. You can also use mass drivers and railguns to push stuff from the Moon's surface to LEO (or at least the Lagrangian points), and railguns which have the necessary delta-v have already been built which exceed Lunar escape velocity. Once the equipment is built, you could get a ton of material delivered to almost any point near the Earth but in space for a price cheaper than it would take to bring a liter of water from the Earth. I also think that the price of sending a liter of water from the Earth to LEO could drop significantly as well.
There wasn't anybody in the Soviet space program willing to stand up to the politburo or able to maneuver through the political minefields like Korolev, so his death really was ultimately something that hurt the Soviet space flight efforts. That the bureaucracy he built up took more than a decade to fall apart (and never really did completely.... his "company", RKK Energia, is still in business today). The N1 was effectively cancelled in about 1970 when the Soviet Union was not going to have the first person on the Moon, which was also where the official Soviet political dogma at the time was that a race to the Moon never happened and that the whole of the Apollo program was one of needless excess of capitalist spending. It is that sort of propaganda that I was referring to in terms of official disavowal of the N1 program that essentially made going to Mars impossible.
There was an effort within the Soviet Union to perhaps revive that effort in the 1980's and a Soviet settlement of Mars with the 2017 goal as something very realistic at the time. The problems I mentioned earlier though sealed the fate of trying to get that through the political process which was necessary in the Soviet Union and kept it from becoming anything serious beyond getting MIR built. That was an impressive accomplishment for the Soviet space program though.
You seriously, really expect private industry to actually put money into research and development that doesn't have a 3 month return in the double digits without some prompting or assistance? You expect this stuff to cost less even when taking CEO's gold-plated bathroom fixtures and private jets and stuff into account? What about all those corporate bonuses that have to be paid, and stock options that need to be exercised and all that?
Private industry can be counted on to do one thing: take research paid for by someone else, "invent" things to do with it, and make themselves LOOK cheaper because they never put the money into R&D in the first place--or if they did, they got someone else to pay them for it while somehow maintaining ownership rights over the work, or getting laws passed that the government has to just give them what we the people paid for. It didn't used to be like that, but these days a company that does a lot of startup work and groundbreaking research without an immediate product is toast.
You obviously know next to nothing about capitalism, corporate charters, or what it takes to actually put together a business. All I pointed out was a potential way to encourage existing businesses to perform tasks in space and to encourage a vibrant and thriving commercial spaceflight industry that could potentially make the ability to go into space affordable because it would be in the self-interest of those engaged in the activity to do so.
BTW, "gold plated bathroom fixtures" might be of interest to shareholders, especially if that goes against the terms of the corporate charter to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". CEOs can be sued for misappropriation of corporate funds, and gold-plating executive bathrooms is one easy thing to point out excesses that need to be brought into check. If you want that to stop, make corporations to be required to answer to their shareholders and empower the ordinary investor to demand a proper accounting of how corporate funds are spent. That also would end up dealing with these "excess" bonuses you are talking about... unless those bonuses really are ended up increasing shareholder dividends or equity. CEO salaries and bonuses are something that won't ever be unlimited, and perhaps at the moment is even excessive to the point of being detrimental to the success of the company itself.
One of the reasons why many companies have a three month investment window is in part due to the regulatory environment that exists in America at the moment with SEC regulations that encourage such practices. It is also something the major "institutional investors" demand... which is IMHO something short sighted and should be curtailed in some way. It is something that can be changed BTW, but it would take some hard work in terms of changing regulations and removing some of the corruption in Congress to get it to happen. There are also other ways to organize corporations that could avoid some of the problems mentioned above as well... I just won't get into them in detail. Look up "employee owned corporations" while you are at it though, along with "cooperatives". It doesn't have to be strictly Wall Street type corporations funded by just a few mega wealthy investors.
In the right legal environment, I do expect that a for profit corporation can and would make long term investments in research and development to significantly expand the scope of humanity, including making the R&D necessary for a serious expansion into the rest of the Solar System. I am suggesting that it is the current legal environment which is holding back American companies from doing nearly as much in terms of significantly going into space and is one of the reasons why America is stuck in LEO with no native capacity to send astronauts into space in the first place.
It is a matter of degree. If you have accepted an employment contract of any kind, it is in effect a form of slavery regardless of your view of the terms. The conditions and the ability to inherit the condition of employment is the big issue that distinguishes voluntary employment contracts with slavery as practiced "in the old south".
I'll also point out that even after "slavery" was abolished after the U.S. Civil War, there still were employment contracts that were pretty close to slavery. The practice of "sharecropping" and "company towns" found in mining areas (as immortalized by Tennessee Ernie Ford in "Sixteen Tons") might have well have been indentured servitude in terms of how those employment contracts were worded. The only way to get out of the debts and those contracts were employment laws that permitted employees to simply quit their job and move on, as well as bankruptcy laws that permitted them to get out from under their debts that they simply couldn't pay back.
Slavery is indeed one of the problems of capitalism, and I'll admit there needs to be civil right safeguards put into place to avoid the problems that result in slavery. the issue here is one of freedom of movement and the ability to tell a boss to "take this job and shove it".
Landing on the Moon is going to be a much harder challenge than anything they've done so far. I'm not saying that they can't pull it off, but what China will end up doing is a "flags and footprints" mission and not something to stay any longer. You might see a Chinese flag on the Moon and perhaps duplicate Apollo.... but all of these claims that they are going to stay longer are just fear mongering.
China's drive to cut costs is at our request, and when they do what we ask, we taunt them for it. That's not a fault with the Chinese. The Chinese government is more capitalistic than the US government.
China may encourage "a free market", and certainly has a tax structure to reward business development in a way that I only wish the U.S. government would do at the moment (claims otherwise not withstanding), what China lacks is personal liberties and the ability to really think outside the box. That is something which is very much a part of Chinese culture, where engineers in China are squashed like a bug if they speak up about an issue and try to come up with a solution that hasn't been thought up by upper management.
The drive to cut cost in China, what there is of it, is a part of the fact that for the "independent companies" in China will willingly cut each other's throats in the marketplace to get the business from a potential competitor. This is one aspect of Chinese culture and government authority which has changed from say 40 years ago as private citizens are encouraged to become capitalists and take financial risks. They just can't take political risks, so they are still ever so limited in what they can do, so making cheap stuff that doesn't require imagination is what they end up making.
Japan, which does have political liberty, has engineers who do dream up some really crazy stuff and can innovate. Instead Japan (in part because it is a much smaller country compared to China) encourages monopolistic practices and the cut-throat competition to undercut each other doesn't exist in the Japanese economy. Japan hasn't always been that way and was more like China... but they made the mistake of invading the USA and in a way became more like America as a result.
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A CEO who shows up to work late and leaves before most of his employees is likely not going to be a CEO for very long as they will either run the company into the ground through bankruptcy (and not paying attention to the employees) or the board of directors is going to notice that things are being seriously neglected and will get fired. That isn't to say that a good CEO can't on occasion take the day off early to pursue something of a life, but my experience is that a typical CEO is very much a workaholic and tends to put in even longer days than most of the employees... usually in meetings to find out what is going on in the company or interviewing employees. Really good CEOs tend to even "get on the line" and do some occasional grunt work.
Examples of good CEOs in the past were folks like Dave Thomas (of Wendy's restaurants) who made it a habit to put on the apron and grill hamburgers at least a few hours each week, and Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart) who didn't hesitate to spend a few hours simply stocking shelves in some of his stores if for no other reason than to meet customers and find out the work environment of his employees. That is how you get to know your company and get it to grow.
Yes, there are lazy CEOs that also don't care about the companies they are running. Those companies are also ones I think you should look to short sell their stock if you know about them too.
Another example of a CEO that is a major workaholic is Elon Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Then again he wrecked his second marriage (as well as his first) simply because he spent so much time at work that he hasn't been able to deal with his respective wives and their needs. I admire what he has accomplished, but his personal life is going to hell because of what he does to earn the money he is making. I'd also suggest that most successful CEOs are much more like Elon Musk than a lazy idle rich child working for "daddy's company".
The problem with a spacecraft made of heavy metals is that it drops like a rock through the atmosphere, hence it needs a huge amount of shielding due to the reentry speed when it finally hits the lower atmosphere.
An astronaut with a much more minimal shield doesn't have the same problem due to the lower overall density of the astronaut as composed to a heavy spacecraft, so the altitude where the pressure starts to push back against the astronaut would be much higher, and the astronaut could "skip" across the upper atomosphere at the trade-off of taking longer to descend compared to a conventional spacecraft. By taking longer for the descent, the energy can also be dissipated over a longer period of time (less heat at any one time) and the shielding doesn't need to be all that much larger than the astronaut themselves and certainly can be much thinner than what is used for spacecraft. It could even be built into the space suit itself.
So no, the speed isn't the only factor here to consider, and even the "g-forces" the astronaut would experience in such a descent would be considerably less than what the astronauts experience in the inside of a spacecraft as well... for the same reason.
I'm not saying that it would be easy for somebody trying to go through a personal re-entry without a spacecraft, but it could be survivable and they wouldn't necessarily burn up in the atmosphere... especially if some minimal level of precautions were taken into consideration. If anything, it may even be that doing a straight drop from altitude might be more dangerous than an orbital descent.
Due to the substantially lower density of the human body, even a fall from orbit isn't necessarily all that dangerous. One of the issues facing spacecraft designers is that the vehicle is usually made of metal and has an overall density that is quite high (from not just the shell of the spacecraft, but also all of the instruments and supplies as well).
It has been proposed that one possible rescue mode for astronauts in orbit is to perform one of these extreme altitude descents. There still are many things which aren't known about such extreme jumps, so efforts like Baumgartner's can genuinely be something that may end up saving people's lives in the future. In theory, the problems that faced the final crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia could have been survived had those skills and that option been available to those astronauts.
The dangerous part is if you start to spin, there isn't much you can do to stop it from happening.... drogue or not. This is because of the extreme altitude as there isn't much air to interact with at all.
Kittinger's first Excelsior test at "merely" 76,000 feet nearly cost him his life when he went into a flat spin eventually rotating at 120 rpm before he finally got it under control after passing out due to the fact that his main chute automatically deployed and broke the spin. This problem also happens to high altitude aircraft, but they usually have some kind of rudimentary control surface to work with and some high altitude aircraft even have "thrusters" to help with aircraft orientation if it becomes a problem... at least being able to partially control the jet exhaust in some manner.
When you get to a lower altitude, the drogue chute is much more useful and can be used.... but you need to get to that altitude where it can be useful in the first place. This is called extreme skydiving for a good reason.
You are likely talking about a documentary regarding Joseph Kittinger, the guy who currently holds the high altitude jump record and set that record in 1960. The reason why it hasn't been tried again is in part due to the fact that such jumps have been perceived as being extremely dangerous. Project Excelsior, on the third jump by Col. Kittinger, finally did reach an ultimate velocity of 614 mph, or about nine-tenths of the speed of sound. Basically going the speed of many commercial jetliners if you want a comparison.
Part of the current effort for extreme altitude sky dives is in part to suggest an alternative re-entry method for astronauts that might be able to simply parachute to the Earth from LEO using a small thruster pack and perhaps a surfboard sized reentry shield. On top of that, it is one of the few major international aviation records that might be possible for somebody with private funding to break instead of a major military organization.
No, there hasn't been somebody who broke Mach 1 (aka the speed of sound) due to free fall. The extreme altitude being attempted by Baumgartner is going to get to that velocity though, in part because the air is so thin at that altitude that it won't offer much resistance until he gets much lower.
Josephus did write about the followers of Christ and his histories are one of the few reliable references to the early Christian church. As to specific references to Christ himself, I will grant that the references are dubious at best. Then again you could argue a similar dubious reference for many historical persons of the era.
What was demanded was some sort of citation for historical documents from the era, and I gave an example of a historian of the era whose writings are about the best that you can get considering the region of the world and somebody familiar with local customs and culture that was the province of Judea in the Roman Republic in the 1st Century AD. If it was just Josephus alone that could provide such documentation, I'll admit it is pretty weak, but there are other historical documentary references to consider as well. That anything survived the Jewish rebellion which happened shortly after the ministry of Jesus should be amazing by itself.
To be perfectly blunt, the fact that a rather ordinary Jewish rabbi from this era has any historical documentation at all is unusual, as the historical existence of anybody who wasn't a senator or emperor (or a local provincial king) was hardly documented. The best documentation really is the various "gospels" of the New Testament. What is being asked here is independent collaborative evidence on the presumption that the New Testament is a flawed set of documents needing collaboration from outside authorities. That is one way that the records of Josephus have been used as they do confirm at least some parts of the New Testament in terms of independent records of other historical people and institutions mentioned in the New Testament documents, as well as confirming cultural customs of the people of Judea of that era.
Perhaps the best source of historical information about Jesus of Nazareth is Josephus, where clearly Jesus was mentioned explicitly due to the role that his followers played in the events during the 1st Century AD (not called that BTW in his records). It isn't a perfect reference and I'll admit that you can interpret other individuals instead of the historical person that is claimed to have founded the Christian religious philosophies, but it also isn't correct to claim that no contemporary sources of information exist about him either.
The standard you are proposing here is that we must have e-mails, tweets, and video footage of the guy from cradle to grave in order to accept the historical existence of somebody. By that standard, nobody ever existed in the world prior to about 1950 since obviously there is no proof that they ever existed.
One of the worst aspects of documents from this time period is that the collapse of the Roman Empire also led to the loss of a whole bunch of records that could have been used to determine the historical existence of somebody like Jesus. Still, enough has survived that it most certainly is trolling to suggest Jesus didn't exist at all or making stuff up out of your behind that such records or archeological evidence can't be found to indicate his existence as a historical figure.
So I'm thinking the poor thing is just going to get overheated, give up, and die like the rest of his kind did.
Explain how you have gained such amazing insight into how Mammoths became extinct? While there may be some theories on what happened, I don't think the fact that the climate warmed up at the end of the ice age is the only reason or factor to consider or even that these researchers have ignored the fact that Mammoths did thrive in a different climate than African elephants.
That is part of why I mentioned Scratch at the beginning of this discussion. Scratch has literally tens of thousands (more like in the hundreds of thousands at the moment) of software submissions that can be broken down by age, gender, and geographic location (ethnicity isn't being recorded to the best of my knowledge). In terms of the ages of the kids, it ranges from 3rd graders to college graduates developing software with those tools (with the sweet spot being mostly middle school kids with some high school kids doing most of the work).
As far as the quality of the submissions, most of them are very primitive in that development environment, and I'm not sure if a proper survey of the submissions has really been done, but my point is that the raw data is available from real content that can be evaluated if somebody would want to slug through that mass of data. Being MIT, I know some scholarly studies of the development environment have been done over the years. It just takes some graduate student hungry for a master's degree to plow through that data and try to massage it into a useful publication... or some professor wanting to enslave a group of graduate students for his own behalf to make that evaluation.
The point here is that this seems like a blatant advertisement for a commercial service where it seems like Slashdot is putting advertisement in as stories themselves. Rather than being objective "journalists" or at least throwing stories up that seem to be "news for nerds" for something really innovative or original, this is rehashing something that has been done elsewhere a whole lot better with source code that you can obtain a license to freely modify and redistribute.
Keep in mind that the "free" in "free software" is not an economic disadvantage for those developing the software, but rather the freedom to reuse that software in a more productive way if you don't like what the primary developers are doing.
If you want to put this in game terms, it is the difference between modding for Runescape (that has draconian anti-hacking prohibitions and will do account bans on the forums including in-game banning if you promote hacking), vs. something like Minecraft (where the developers encourage the modding community with forum discussions) or even something like Ryzom that is completely open source and you can change anything. World of Warcraft is on that continuum more toward Runescape, but modding is a bit more tolerated. That is the freedom I'm talking about. Or if you want to compare compilers, compare Lazarus vs. Delphi or GCC vs. Microsoft C++.
People who develop software tools can certainly try to make money off of their efforts, but more often than not if you go with a proprietary solution you are stuck when the company who developed those tools gets into some financial trouble (aka they go bankrupt) or you get on a treadmill of never ending upgrades that you simply must pay for as an annual fee with "vendor lock-in" where the prices seem to escalate the more you use them. Or perhaps the developers simple get tired of even supporting the software and you end up with some abandonware.
Yes, open source/free software can be abandoned as well (especially if it is a one-man show in terms of the development efforts), but in that case a motivated developer can "take over" the development effort on perhaps another server. Bitcoin is an excellent example, where the original developer has left the project but its continued development seems to be going very strong. Open Office/Libre Office are very good examples where a fork in the effort can happen for very legitimate reasons even if there is a core development team continuing development.
I have some friends who have been able to make money off of open source software. You can't use the RIAA/MPAA type of distribution channels to make money (or more like a traditional proprietary software publisher), but that doesn't stop you from making money in other areas like consulting or offering paid customers custom bug fixes and early updates before other users.
While you may not need a commodity as a currency which is derived from elemental metals, grain, cattle, or giant rocks, it does need to be something that is restricted from production or difficult to acquire. A fiat currency can fill that role, which is one reason I think something like Bitcoin is a possible alternative currency (its production is mathematically restricted.
In that sense, I sort of agree with you about the Federal Reserve in terms of how the Board of Governors can arbitrarily create U.S. Dollars out of nothingness in unlimited quantities and "loan" that money to whomever they choose at whatever rate of return they desire (at the moment zero percent interest to all major banks). I also find it interesting how the Federal Reserve is loaning money to banks at zero percent interest only to let those same banks buy up federal treasury securities at a higher rate of interest with that money and those banks can pocket the difference.
Because of that, auditing the Fed isn't really going to accomplish much as they can continue to load literally trillions of dollars to their buddies to make essentially whatever amount of "profit" they want to give to those friends. I wouldn't mind getting a similar kind of gig, borrowing a trillion dollars and earning 4%-10% on that money and pocketing the difference. Yes, some of that money does end up getting loaned to foreign banks, individuals, and even governments for the purchase of things like federal treasuries as well. Isn't that grande?
All in all, with the technology improvements we've had in the last hundred years, our currency should have deflated tremendously, maybe even 100 or 1000 times. The interesting question then becomes, "where did all the extra money go?"
Much of that extra "money" went into the wealth that is or at least was America. It is in the homes, factories, farms, highways, stores, and much else that is this country. That is where that "extra money" went. Some portion of it admittedly went into the pockets of con artists and there were also some people due to circumstances and ingenuity were also able to legitimately earn some of that money, but for the most part it went into the pockets of ordinary Americans.
Scratch is a development environment that not only is easy to learn, but is free as in beer and speech (as it is open source under the MIT license and CC-by-SA for most documentation and source code). There are also several variants that have been done by people other than MIT that are interesting as well, as it has been around for many years.
While this may be a useful tool, shilling for some group trying to make a quick buck doesn't seem right.
BTW, I agree with people complaining that Slashdot seems to be putting advertisements into the stories themselves. This isn't right and it does diminish what quality is left in the website.
The damage values and data are used for more unusual block types or minor variants, like the material types for stairs or the contents of a chest. Much of that could be put into a custom chunk in a PNG file though that could be expanded or restricted depending on how much detail has been added by players in the area.
Most chunks in Minecraft are pretty ordinary and mundane, used as a filler to connect one area to another. If you have some very busy players on a very active world with a large number of player-built structures, the level of detail for a particular chunk could get quite high though. Then again, such data density would be expected in those situations as well.
I like the idea of the PNG file though... it has established standards and can make for some interesting visualizations too.
It isn't quite infinite distances in Minecraft, even if effectively it is. When the software starts to have number overflows (exceeding maxint distances and such) the generation code gets screwy and produces some weird terrain that is all but impassible. There are some players who have either "warped" out to those distances just to see what would happen or have taken the time and effort to get out to those parts of the map just to see what it could be.
See also the Far Lands article on the game wiki that even has some snapshots of what happens in those distant areas.
Except for issues dealing with altitude, it is possible to have 1:1 scale maps of entire continents like Europe or North America put into Minecraft. I have played on a 1:16 scale Mercator map of the whole Earth (it is a huge map file). With the new map format, it is possible to include biome data as well. That was something missing from the map that I saw as the biome info was arbitrary and misplaced on the earlier versions of Minecraft. As I said, while not infinite, it is effectively so or at least as large as even a fairly huge group of people would want to have.
I'll agree that Minecraft does need a whole bunch of optimization for multiplayer applications.
Two areas that kill Minecraft are the mob interactions (something true for most MMO games), but also the world generation routines that are designed primarily for a single player game but ported over to a multi-player environment. This is also the reason why mounted mobs aren't in Minecraft (especially a mounted dragon) because even a one or two player server would croak in a real hurry if you were flying and generated several new chunks of world data every second.
Then again, who says that ordinary players ought to be able to create new world chunks simply by walking or moving around?
The network messages are also far from optimized and is one area that could be tweaked to significantly improve both bandwidth and CPU usage.
As for the Bukkit devs, one of the major areas of focus that they have been hired on to perform is to produce the API libraries for mods with the goal of unifying the multiplayer and solo mod APIs (or even have a formal API in the first place that makes sense). It seems that goal is sort of going to be contrary to efficient network protocols, but I might be mistaken and could even streamline the solo player version as well. Having a staff of developers rather than two guys who are just sort of slugging it through is going to be interesting. I expect to see more cleanup of the code, but fewer major feature changes... and fewer bugs on major releases.
A major problem with non-fiat currencies is that there simply is more wealth than precious metals, so you can't represent all of the world's wealth in precious metals. The result is necessarily deflationary. Also, you get people wasting their time mining which has no intrinsic value (at least Wall St. is creating liquidity and market signals... just poorly).
I disagree with this statement, but I would argue that this is closer to the truth. The main issue with using precious metals as a currency base is that you can put those metals to work with another currency system that doesn't use precious metals more efficiently (aka use copper, silver, and gold as industrial materials rather than as a currency) and on the whole allows those materials to float based on real supply and demand rather than merely because it is the currency itself.
What I completely disagree with though is the notion that deflation is necessarily a bad thing. It is bad for some bankers and the presumption that you must borrow money from some central organization in order to grow your business or finance a home, but for ordinary consumers and businesses which aren't in the financial services sector it really isn't necessarily a bad thing. The worst part right now is that the economies and financial structures of the world are geared to the presumption that inflation is inevitable.
Regardless, if gold-backed currencies came back into vogue, the value of those metals would rise to reflect true wealth from around the world.
This is interesting that you pointed out the personal motivations of Nikita Khrushchev. In the USA, much of the funding for NASA came from Lyndon B. Johnson and his personal interest in seeing the Apollo program get done. The 1950's version of LBJ is something that simply doesn't exist today in American politics, as he ruled the U.S. Senate (and indeed essentially controlled the U.S. Congress as a whole as a result) as his own private fiefdom. How he went about doing that could make him appear to be an utterly heartless bastard, but his personal support for spaceflight was certainly there... and his name upon the NASA manned spaceflight building Houston, Texas was certainly well justified (including the fact that it was built in Texas in the first place instead of Washington DC). When LBJ decided not to run for re-election in 1968, it could be argued that pretty much sealed the fate of NASA as an agency.
While it was a little bit different when LBJ became President, his political control of the U.S. Senate was still incredibly strong and could get just about any legislation he personally wanted to get passed to move through that body. If anything, it was when the Vietnam War was collapsing and some people in the Senate started to get a backbone saying "No" to LBJ that he knew his power was pretty much at an end.
While I know that some work programs do exist in American prisons, I would like to know where your sources are for such bold statements you have made in this post... particularly the "93% of paints sold in the USA are made in prison."
For the most part, many companies start to complain to state governments when prisons make a competing product (not to mention labor unions as well) and it usually becomes politically difficult to keep those products from continuing to be produced in a prison for that reason alone. About the only thing consistently made in prisons is license plates for automobiles, in part because making those is something that is already a government monopoly and doesn't require too much capital expense either. That also doesn't even start to deal with things like interruption of the product due to things like a prison lock-down or other issues that come up from simply having the work done in a prison (again... something that license plate production doesn't really matter as most DMV offices have several months or years worth of license plates available for distribution and a temporary interruption of supply doesn't hurt).
Seriously... I'd love to know your sources of information. Until then, I don't believe your figures or claims unless you are pointing out prisons which exist outside of the USA. The tone of your post is implying that these products are made in American prisons, but then you make a statement that could be interpreted as implying foreign governments are doing that instead on behalf of American consumers. At least be consistent in who you are condemning. That some prisoners in other countries are using what is essentially slave labor for making cheap products may be worth condemning, it isn't something coming from American prisons or from the "war on drugs" that is making a huge prison population in America.
There are other industrial uses of He3 besides fusion energy. One that comes to mind is the ability to use He3 as a refrigerant, as it stays in a gaseous state at a far colder temperature than any other substance (if you want to get into super conductor research for example). It also has additional applications in general nuclear energy research as well which has a consistent demand worldwide for obtaining that particular elemental isotope.
BTW, I do think that mining stuff on the Moon could be made eventually cheaper in terms of shipping costs to LEO than sending stuff up from the surface of the Earth, and certainly the delta-v is lower in terms of going from the Moon to LEO than it is to go from the Earth to LEO (much less to places like the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points). About the only way significant industrial activity is going to take place beyond the Earth is if Lunar mining starts to take place. You can also use mass drivers and railguns to push stuff from the Moon's surface to LEO (or at least the Lagrangian points), and railguns which have the necessary delta-v have already been built which exceed Lunar escape velocity. Once the equipment is built, you could get a ton of material delivered to almost any point near the Earth but in space for a price cheaper than it would take to bring a liter of water from the Earth. I also think that the price of sending a liter of water from the Earth to LEO could drop significantly as well.
There wasn't anybody in the Soviet space program willing to stand up to the politburo or able to maneuver through the political minefields like Korolev, so his death really was ultimately something that hurt the Soviet space flight efforts. That the bureaucracy he built up took more than a decade to fall apart (and never really did completely.... his "company", RKK Energia, is still in business today). The N1 was effectively cancelled in about 1970 when the Soviet Union was not going to have the first person on the Moon, which was also where the official Soviet political dogma at the time was that a race to the Moon never happened and that the whole of the Apollo program was one of needless excess of capitalist spending. It is that sort of propaganda that I was referring to in terms of official disavowal of the N1 program that essentially made going to Mars impossible.
There was an effort within the Soviet Union to perhaps revive that effort in the 1980's and a Soviet settlement of Mars with the 2017 goal as something very realistic at the time. The problems I mentioned earlier though sealed the fate of trying to get that through the political process which was necessary in the Soviet Union and kept it from becoming anything serious beyond getting MIR built. That was an impressive accomplishment for the Soviet space program though.
I love this song! I am inspired to make a video using that sound track.
I had also never heard this song before, and I'm glad to have the link.
You seriously, really expect private industry to actually put money into research and development that doesn't have a 3 month return in the double digits without some prompting or assistance? You expect this stuff to cost less even when taking CEO's gold-plated bathroom fixtures and private jets and stuff into account? What about all those corporate bonuses that have to be paid, and stock options that need to be exercised and all that?
Private industry can be counted on to do one thing: take research paid for by someone else, "invent" things to do with it, and make themselves LOOK cheaper because they never put the money into R&D in the first place--or if they did, they got someone else to pay them for it while somehow maintaining ownership rights over the work, or getting laws passed that the government has to just give them what we the people paid for. It didn't used to be like that, but these days a company that does a lot of startup work and groundbreaking research without an immediate product is toast.
You obviously know next to nothing about capitalism, corporate charters, or what it takes to actually put together a business. All I pointed out was a potential way to encourage existing businesses to perform tasks in space and to encourage a vibrant and thriving commercial spaceflight industry that could potentially make the ability to go into space affordable because it would be in the self-interest of those engaged in the activity to do so.
BTW, "gold plated bathroom fixtures" might be of interest to shareholders, especially if that goes against the terms of the corporate charter to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". CEOs can be sued for misappropriation of corporate funds, and gold-plating executive bathrooms is one easy thing to point out excesses that need to be brought into check. If you want that to stop, make corporations to be required to answer to their shareholders and empower the ordinary investor to demand a proper accounting of how corporate funds are spent. That also would end up dealing with these "excess" bonuses you are talking about... unless those bonuses really are ended up increasing shareholder dividends or equity. CEO salaries and bonuses are something that won't ever be unlimited, and perhaps at the moment is even excessive to the point of being detrimental to the success of the company itself.
One of the reasons why many companies have a three month investment window is in part due to the regulatory environment that exists in America at the moment with SEC regulations that encourage such practices. It is also something the major "institutional investors" demand... which is IMHO something short sighted and should be curtailed in some way. It is something that can be changed BTW, but it would take some hard work in terms of changing regulations and removing some of the corruption in Congress to get it to happen. There are also other ways to organize corporations that could avoid some of the problems mentioned above as well... I just won't get into them in detail. Look up "employee owned corporations" while you are at it though, along with "cooperatives". It doesn't have to be strictly Wall Street type corporations funded by just a few mega wealthy investors.
In the right legal environment, I do expect that a for profit corporation can and would make long term investments in research and development to significantly expand the scope of humanity, including making the R&D necessary for a serious expansion into the rest of the Solar System. I am suggesting that it is the current legal environment which is holding back American companies from doing nearly as much in terms of significantly going into space and is one of the reasons why America is stuck in LEO with no native capacity to send astronauts into space in the first place.
You have advocated slavery. You are scum.
It is a matter of degree. If you have accepted an employment contract of any kind, it is in effect a form of slavery regardless of your view of the terms. The conditions and the ability to inherit the condition of employment is the big issue that distinguishes voluntary employment contracts with slavery as practiced "in the old south".
I'll also point out that even after "slavery" was abolished after the U.S. Civil War, there still were employment contracts that were pretty close to slavery. The practice of "sharecropping" and "company towns" found in mining areas (as immortalized by Tennessee Ernie Ford in "Sixteen Tons") might have well have been indentured servitude in terms of how those employment contracts were worded. The only way to get out of the debts and those contracts were employment laws that permitted employees to simply quit their job and move on, as well as bankruptcy laws that permitted them to get out from under their debts that they simply couldn't pay back.
Slavery is indeed one of the problems of capitalism, and I'll admit there needs to be civil right safeguards put into place to avoid the problems that result in slavery. the issue here is one of freedom of movement and the ability to tell a boss to "take this job and shove it".
Landing on the Moon is going to be a much harder challenge than anything they've done so far. I'm not saying that they can't pull it off, but what China will end up doing is a "flags and footprints" mission and not something to stay any longer. You might see a Chinese flag on the Moon and perhaps duplicate Apollo.... but all of these claims that they are going to stay longer are just fear mongering.
China's drive to cut costs is at our request, and when they do what we ask, we taunt them for it. That's not a fault with the Chinese. The Chinese government is more capitalistic than the US government.
China may encourage "a free market", and certainly has a tax structure to reward business development in a way that I only wish the U.S. government would do at the moment (claims otherwise not withstanding), what China lacks is personal liberties and the ability to really think outside the box. That is something which is very much a part of Chinese culture, where engineers in China are squashed like a bug if they speak up about an issue and try to come up with a solution that hasn't been thought up by upper management.
The drive to cut cost in China, what there is of it, is a part of the fact that for the "independent companies" in China will willingly cut each other's throats in the marketplace to get the business from a potential competitor. This is one aspect of Chinese culture and government authority which has changed from say 40 years ago as private citizens are encouraged to become capitalists and take financial risks. They just can't take political risks, so they are still ever so limited in what they can do, so making cheap stuff that doesn't require imagination is what they end up making.
Japan, which does have political liberty, has engineers who do dream up some really crazy stuff and can innovate. Instead Japan (in part because it is a much smaller country compared to China) encourages monopolistic practices and the cut-throat competition to undercut each other doesn't exist in the Japanese economy. Japan hasn't always been that way and was more like China... but they made the mistake of invading the USA and in a way became more like America as a result.