Patentability here is dubious at best; it uses completely well-known phenomena (presumably just temperature changes due to pressure change and/or conversion of mechanical energy).
The one thing I don't like about most ideas that "I'm not giving any details until it's patented" is it probably means that it's too obvious so "unique things" must be found.
Considering the sheer number of possible physical explanations that have popped up here on Slashdot in a short period of time, whatever this is should fail the "obvious to one skilled in the art" test.
Content creators need to be assured of recompense for their work. Until someone comes up with a better way of assuring payment for digitally-reproduced work, the system we have is...all we have.
I have to disagree. The only time content creators need to be assured of compensation is if they are required to or contractually obliged to produce that content. Otherwise, the content-production is an activity with some associated risk.
This highlights what I think is a common fallacy that seems to be along the lines of "If I create something, I'm entitled to have someone pay for it, and pay what I want them to pay." This is not how the universe functions. If I create something and offer it for sale, there is some balance between how many people are willing to pay me some amount for that thing and how many things I'm willing to provide at some price. There is no guarantee that people will want to trade (money) for what I offer. The only time that I'm guaranteed to receive pay for something is if I "create for-hire". That system did work way back when, although it had the nasty side effect of guilds and being all about who you (or your relatives) know rather than anything fundamental like raw ability.
Until we have a system and a public which realizes that value is not something that can be mandated, but something to which we must adjust (rather than people adjusting their values to match what we want), we will always have to deal with things like this.
The video cameras? Not a fun idea to entertain, as far as a citizens point of view would go.
You know, I don't understand why people get upset about cameras in public places. I am a logical citizen, and I don't think there is a fundamental issue with the concept that there is no such thing as "privacy" in a "public" place - such as a street corner.
I see it this way: If it is possible for someone to stand at the corner and observe you, then what's the difference between that and having a camera there and a person in a room watching you? I suppose the only difference would be that you might know the person is there (unless the person is hiding) where you might not know the camera is there.
If that's the case, simply require all the cameras to be painted bright orange so people cannot claim "I didn't know I was being observed."
My personal assumption, when I'm in a public place - on the street, in my car, etc - is that I am being observed, so I behave appropriately for that assumption. Whenever I want to behave otherwise, I do so behind closed doors on private property.
The only thing that would concern me is if there is further intrusion into the idea of private property, and there's enough concern there as it is.
Umm....there are no chains there at the moment, yet the people have no means of leaving. That, and they have no desire to leave the area - it's their "homeland" so to speak.
So, your suggestion is just to deport them to where you someone wants them for labor?
Well that won't work, so why not just let them farm the land nearby or start their own mill or whatever? Oh, wait - there are pesky things called loan officers, credit scores, people that own the existing buildings, etc. that prevent people from using otherwise idle resources. Also, who's going to educate this population when they relocate, or to try and make ends meet where they are?
The problems are not easy to solve, and they are not all due to "coal mine" practices from the past. There are real issues with suddently making professions irrelevant. Think of it this way: if, tomorrow, we had automatic lawnmowing equipment that was safe, instantly available, required no fuel, etc. what would you do with all the lawncare folks? They cannot "instantly" be absorbed into the existing marketplace. That is the fundamental issue...
Yes, we have better jobs now that more than made up for the loss of carriage repair, etc. However, at the time those professions were eliminated, there was no equivalent replacement. I think it's a matter of immediacy and geography as to why people dislike offshoring: In the span of a general career, the effects of efficiency gains do not usually make it back to the geographic location where [high-value-job-A] was lost; so, while the folks who used to do job A now have to do menial job X, efficiencies happen, so maybe their children can get high-value-job B. In the meantime, they have to scrimp and save.
Perhaps there are some examples where efficiency gains have immediate effect in a locale, but I doubt it is that common. Look at all the modern "ghost towns" in textile areas, for instance (I spent the Christmas holidays down in an old mill town in South Carolina) - those mills are gone, and no high-value jobs will be in that area for quite a long time; longer, in fact, than most of the old workers will probably be alive.
I agree that, in the long run, greater efficiency is good and raises standards of living. The trouble is, the improvement due to that efficiency rarely immediately effects the areas that get "thrifted" out, and the timeframes involved generally are longer than most people have savings to support. It is the unfortunate reality of social and educational inertia, in my opinion.
The GP didn't say that the same jobs were created; I think the statement was that there are more jobs now than there were then.
You've hinted at the issue that has been around for quite some time, and that will remain: all jobs are not equal. That is, if I lose 100 architect jobs, but gain back 500 retail jobs, I have a net change of +400 jobs; but that says nothing about the real value of those jobs, nor about the wealth-generating ability of those jobs.
Personally I don't like that the (US) economy is shifting from production to service; service produces no wealth directly, so it must rely on activity in other locations to produce that wealth. When you start talking about international distances, things can go inconvenient very quickly (just like at Europe at the moment having to deal with the pipeline shutdown. No energy (wealth) production at home and not getting anywhere from next door causes trouble. No amount of "service industry" can replace having actual tangible wealth).
In the long run, everything is probably nice and balanced - eventually manufacturing will have to come back to this geographic location because the local population won't be willing (or able) to afford to import it from other geographic locations and will be willing to produce it domestically for a tenable price. However, in the meantime, all those whose lives were spent as manufacturers are kind of stuck, because they cannot instantaneously become high-value service providers; similarly, it's unlikely that when manufacturing does return to this geography, that things will be able to rapidly shift back that way.
These types of changes happen fairly slowly - probably on the order of a generation - so the "short" times of period are felt very much by some, while others enjoy an entire generation of being able to stay where they are without having to worry about changing economic conditions.
The really bluffing thing with induction is bringing a gallon of water to boil within 60 seconds
In a residential appliance? Heating 1 gallon of water (~3.8 kg) from room temp (70 degF/21 degC) to boiling (100 degC) (delta of ~79 K) in 60 seconds requires an energy transfer of just shy of 21 kilowatts*. Even at 220V, that's upwards of 95 amps; I don't know of any residential application with wiring for 100A circuits - the highest I've seen is 60A for things like HVAC or laundry circuits. Did you perhaps mean a liter instead of a gallon? That would only require about 5 kW, which is quite reasonable.
The fastest water-heating devices I've seen are the little 1000 or 1500W devices which are a little pot with a heating element embedded in a metal bottom; those will boil about 2 cups in about 2 or 3 minutes (by experience, I don't need math for that one).
* the math: 79 K * 3.8 kg * 4184 J/kgK / 60 s = 20933 J/s
Kudos on having the wherewithall to participate in the Peace Corps! Based on your post, and because of that bit of info, I have a discussion that is probably going to incite quite a lot of reaction but is, I think, quite necessary:
How does 'journalism' prevent genocide? In my estimation, things like genocide (or other violent oppressive activities) are also somewhat economic, though with a different flavor: Those that would commit genocide (or other oppressive activity) generally do so as long as the perceived and/or actual benefits of so doing outweight the risks of continuing. So, if there is a defenseless population and there is no other group willing to provide force, then an in-power group may continue oppression. If a third party gets involved, say with the typical 'peaceful' means of sanctions, that will only work if the oppressors depend on something that the sanctions prevent. If there is a hypothetical situation where part of the US starts oppressing another part, I doubt there are really any sanctions that any other country could put on us to cause us to stop (despite what people think, in a pinch parts of the US could be self-sufficient). The only thing left is to apply force back.
The only caveat is the subtlety about what constitutes "perceived or actual benefits" - for some oppressive regimes, the perceived benefit of completely eliminating some other population outweighs the risk of being the recipient of any other physical force - this is why diplomacy can fail with groups with radical enough beliefs.
However, for systems which do have some limit of "ok, enough (threat of) force will make us back down", then I might be able to see how journalism can help, because that might cause those external forces to start threatening some measures. In general, though, I don't know that journalism can do anything, because the response of the audience of that journalism must actually act; journalism by itself doesn't do anything.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to how likely the oppressor is to back down under the threat of force; if the oppressor won't back down from mere threat, then the only recourse is something more violent, either something like a siege (what I would call passive violence) or something more direct.
I'm not sure what you're saying here - my original comment was in response to a remark about how poor people would spend their wealth [sic] on necessities, and how what poor people spend is not wealth but effort in order to obtain necessities (wealth).
It seems that you're talking about how somone with limited ability (either intrinsically or because of forced environmental difficulties - be they political or geographical) can or cannot start to increase the amount of wealth they obtain per unit effort. I don't quite think that has anything to do with setting up business, but I liken it to this: what can you do for these populations to give them that bootstrap?
Sure, education helps, but you need something fast - for instance, spend a single day or very small portions of days showing people how to store food and water; food and water storage is the number one bootstrap for getting out of poverty: it allows work now to provide necessities later; without storage, work now only provides necessities now. Once you can do that, and free up some time later that will no longer have to be used getting necessities, you're on the road to improved quality of living. It's all about the small initial investment, not some huge starve-yourself-for-a-year type of investment.
I think it's incorrect that "you need money to make money" - what you need is a little bit of investment to reduce the cost (in effort) of the things you have now, freeing up effort to be used to increase the things you have. Given a free enough environment - for instance, a place where you aren't prevented from storing food - improved quality of living should be a positive feedback system as long as effort is still applied.
Eh, as I read back over this it's a bit convoluted, but hopefully conveys my intentions...
Hrm. I guess that's true in a technical sense - I guess I'm a bit conservative and don't consider ownership under lien as "good" ownership. That is an important distinction about how if you have a lien and the bank sells, they only keep the difference between the sale price and the outstanding loan amount. However, considering that you're out one house at the end of the day, I don't think having a mortgage is as nearly as good a situation as being mortgage free.
I do appreciate the distinction though - there is a difference between ownership and ownership without lien that I previously overlooked.
The thing most don't think about: from where does that 8% return come? And does it represent a real increase in wealth, inflation, or just shuffling already existing wealth around? Do you (or does anyone, for that matter) have the capability to determine which it is?
They'd probably piss away wealth on food, clean water, or medicine, rather than sensibly investing it and watching it grow.
Oddly enough, the things you listed are wealth. Spending effort on wealth is not a waste in my book! You can trade wealth for other wealth, but that's about it. Waste is only when you create items of non-wealth, as either a by-product of wealth production or by actively destroying wealth.
I think economics would be so much easier if people changed the word 'value' to 'effort,' made it clear that the word 'money' refers to 'value', and changed the word 'wealth' to 'physical resource'. This should get rid of most of the confusion between value, money, services, and wealth.
I don't think anywhere near 70% of US people own homes. 70% might be paying to own a home, but they still have a mortgage; "the bank" owns the home. I would guess that maybe at most 20% of "homeowners" actually own their homes. Think about it - how many people do you know that have a house but there is no mortgage on it?
(That's not even considering property tax, which even if you have no mortgage, you still have to pay to keep your home).
I think you're correct. After all, if you know how to program, then the language with which you program doesn't matter. I would argue that if you cannot learn a new programming language for base use in, say, a week, you don't know how to program. (By base use I mean the basics - not the little tricky subtleties that every language has.)
I think it's more a matter of thinking logically and mathematically, and knowing algorithms, and knowing safe practices, than the particular syntax of a language. I definitely agree with Stroustrup's thoughts that a language needs to be as free as possible and trust that the user of the language knows what s/he's doing. I think it's a shame to make things cater only to the lowest common denominator - this applies to programming, driving automobiles, politics, finances - everything. It pains me greatly that all too often - especially in the USA, that the lowest common denominator seems to win more often than the experts.
What is the incentive in cooperation? What is to prevent one single non-cooperative company (anywhere in the world) from ruining it?
Unfortunately, I agree that "powerful" != "practical". What I mean is that consider MS vs Linux vs Apple; if, instead of all the people competing on three different fronts for the "best" OS, what would happen if all those people were working on the same "best" OS? Granted, this is all kind of a "what-if" kind of proposition, but it does bear consideration.
we are slow to react so this can cause a lot of problems for us
How long does it take to build a house with air conditioning anyway?
Less tongue-in-cheek: humans have this thing called 'technology' that lets us get away with a lot because we can just brute-force the environment to conditions that suit us; we also have means to move large populations across large distances in a short period of time - much faster than the climate can change, in fact.
Global climate change and its effects is not a technical problem, just as world hunger or poverty or disease are not technical problems; the problem is that people aren't willing to do what's necessary to mitigate the change.
I don't care if the climate changes or not; I only care if, because of climate change, some [guy] hordes all the food and doesn't let me move to a place where I can grow my own, or doesn't let me build greenhouses or whatever.
Ok, so maybe Eli Whitney's case isn't the best to use to support my case; however, my example is that particular device - or something similar - would be invented anyway even without patents. Indeed, your example proves my point there; the cotton gin was invented without the benefit of a good patent system!
I think as long as people have enough resources and free time, innovation will occur just because some people like to innovate.
My favorite is the line in the article about how without patents there would be no incentive for pharmas to, say, develop a new treatment.
Innovation will always be driven by necessity, not by profit. That, and laziness: if I can invent a cotton gin so I don't have to spend hours and hours picking seeds out of cotton by hand, what do I care if I don't have a patent on it? My life is still simpler. What about drugs? If enough people are getting sick, then people will pool together their resources and develop a treatment. Sure, it might not happen in the same way we know things today, but I think that patents are a form of competition, and I'm beginning to think that cooperation is a more powerful force in economics than competition, despite the prevalent thinking.
I didn't say anything about an event (loss of life, in this case) as being acceptable - I asked if it was bad. Those are distinct concepts actually. In some cases, what is acceptable for one audience is not acceptable to another audience, and I also think that 'good' or 'bad' is independent of acceptance (though I hope that people accept the good and reject the bad). (Note that if you claim that one group's acceptance is more acceptable than another, you have to have some reason for claiming that, and that connotes an evaluation of 'good' or 'bad'; without those concepts, everything is just opinion.)
Next: define 'innocent'. I can't make any kind of response to your statement "Loss of life is bad when it involves innocent people" without knowing what you mean by 'innocent'. I know what I mean by innocent, but this is a word which has so many connotations that it's not possible to discuss without a firm understanding of what is meant by that. I'm not trying to be flippant here either - do you mean "has never committed a crime ever" or "has never been caught for committing a crime" or "was not directly involved in some other business which happened to occupy their current location (by intent? by accident?) and resulted in personal [physical] damage". Those are all distinct meanings and it bears being clear on which one is meant, because our, ahem, acceptance of situations depends on that meaning.
Next: Regarding the loss of my life: be more specific. If the infamous 'we' decides loss of my life is acceptable when I'm 93 and it hurts when I breathe, I probably don't care. If I'm running around murdering people, I'd say that loss of my life is acceptable. If I'm trying to save people from a burning building, loss of my life is acceptable. Heck, even if I get hit by a car, I can accept the loss of my life. I would even accept the loss of my life as a result of crime. Now, if you're asking if I condone actions that result in any of those situations surrounding loss of my life, that's a different question.
Think about this - is a flood "bad"? I will agree that a flood can be destructive (in the short term), but is it bad? Is it good? Or is it simply a result of physics?
I know this is not on-topic, but I just had an interesting question come to mind, and I realize it is one to which I don't have a satisfactory answer because of all the possible scenarios: Is the loss of life bad?
There are so many nuances to that question I don't even know where to begin, other to know that it is an important and probably overlooked philosophical question. I know the first response of most people is "Of course the loss of life is bad!" but then you have to ask - "What life?" Because there is no such thing, for instance, of non-life-based food. Is loss of plant life not bad, but loss of animal life bad? What about non-sentient animals versus sentient animals? Domestic versus feral?
All those thoughts lead me to believe the first response to the question "Is the loss of life bad?" is "Sometimes yes, sometimes no." But I don't really have a firm way to evaluate when it is appropriate to classify it one way or the other, and I would estimate that most people cannot honestly make that distinction either - not because they are inept or unfeeling, but because people don't know enough information to correctly analyze the problem; that was even indicated by the AC's observation that
...the loss of a satellite might indirectly result in lost lives (or the lost opportunity to save lives), but I don't see how that can be compared with the direct death of many by a malfunctioning rocket.
That's actually fairly insightful, because it shows that there is no readily accepted way to evaluate the current loss of [human] life against potential future loss or gain of life. (I would posit that there are some ways to make this evaluation, but not everyone accepts those ways of thinking, hence my caveat of 'readily accepted'.)
The big problem with poverty and education, and the reason why the impovershed are usually poorly educated, is not because they don't have "tools" with which to be educated, it's that they don't have enough time to be educated - all their time is spent trying to survive, not learn. Having 0 hours in a day to learn something doesn't change how much you can learn with a computer or without a computer. I'd even question the assertion that having a computer allows you to learn more per unit time compared to learning with tradtional means, if there are perhaps one or two hours per day available for activities other than survival.
This is close to my test, but I think mine is more strict:
Give the panel of appropriate artisians the problem *and* the patent, and see if the panel can explain why the patent was made that way in no more than, say, 4 hours. If after seeing the solution and the panel cannot clearly state the way to arrive at the solution is not obvious. If, however, they can fully explain how you would take existing technology to get the proposed implementation, it's obvious and not patentable. In my mind, it's only if the combination provides *new* functionality, not *combined* functionality, that makes something less obvious; but that specific combination also has to be non-obvious.
Hypothetical examples: Obvious: combining, say, a long pole with a hedge clipper so you can clip high branches is an obvious combination: you have a pole to reach things, a clipper to clip things, combine them to clip things that are hard to reach! Obvious: Using a computer to automate any task that was previously not automated. Unobvious: Combining gears and levers to perform some mechanical task in a way not suggested by gears and levers; for instance, a new transmission that is smoother / more efficient.
I'm just curious as to what is meant by 'productivity' anyway. I hate the numbers that are thrown around in the media. I want to see hard numbers like "bushels of produce per man-hour" and things like that - not something in silly relative units like dollars of economic activity (especially when a lot of economic activity is actually not 'productive' at all - for instance, selling a house in my mind is not productivity, but building a house is. Heck, if selling a house was 'productive', I could just keep selling a house back and forth between two parties and be the most productive real-estate agent in the universe - except that nothing actually changed. Note that I don't mean that selling a house isn't valuable; it's just not, in my mind, related to productivity).
Correct; I encourage everyont to look up comparisons of brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) for turbocharged (or supercharged) vs. naturally aspirated engines. For identical power outputs (but lower displacement on the turbo version), the turbo version will most likely have a lower BSFC.
You can't look at things like fuel economy of automobiles because that's a complex system effect; to isolate the performance of the turbo only you have to look at the BSFC.
Slashdot Mirror
Patentability here is dubious at best; it uses completely well-known phenomena (presumably just temperature changes due to pressure change and/or conversion of mechanical energy).
The one thing I don't like about most ideas that "I'm not giving any details until it's patented" is it probably means that it's too obvious so "unique things" must be found.
Considering the sheer number of possible physical explanations that have popped up here on Slashdot in a short period of time, whatever this is should fail the "obvious to one skilled in the art" test.
I have to disagree. The only time content creators need to be assured of compensation is if they are required to or contractually obliged to produce that content. Otherwise, the content-production is an activity with some associated risk.
This highlights what I think is a common fallacy that seems to be along the lines of "If I create something, I'm entitled to have someone pay for it, and pay what I want them to pay." This is not how the universe functions. If I create something and offer it for sale, there is some balance between how many people are willing to pay me some amount for that thing and how many things I'm willing to provide at some price. There is no guarantee that people will want to trade (money) for what I offer. The only time that I'm guaranteed to receive pay for something is if I "create for-hire". That system did work way back when, although it had the nasty side effect of guilds and being all about who you (or your relatives) know rather than anything fundamental like raw ability.
Until we have a system and a public which realizes that value is not something that can be mandated, but something to which we must adjust (rather than people adjusting their values to match what we want), we will always have to deal with things like this.
You know, I don't understand why people get upset about cameras in public places. I am a logical citizen, and I don't think there is a fundamental issue with the concept that there is no such thing as "privacy" in a "public" place - such as a street corner.
I see it this way: If it is possible for someone to stand at the corner and observe you, then what's the difference between that and having a camera there and a person in a room watching you? I suppose the only difference would be that you might know the person is there (unless the person is hiding) where you might not know the camera is there.
If that's the case, simply require all the cameras to be painted bright orange so people cannot claim "I didn't know I was being observed."
My personal assumption, when I'm in a public place - on the street, in my car, etc - is that I am being observed, so I behave appropriately for that assumption. Whenever I want to behave otherwise, I do so behind closed doors on private property.
The only thing that would concern me is if there is further intrusion into the idea of private property, and there's enough concern there as it is.
I know it's not entirely the point of this thread, but:
What is "stolen" in this example isn't the code; it's the credit for the work. Credit is a scarce resource; information is not.
Umm....there are no chains there at the moment, yet the people have no means of leaving. That, and they have no desire to leave the area - it's their "homeland" so to speak.
So, your suggestion is just to deport them to where you someone wants them for labor?
Well that won't work, so why not just let them farm the land nearby or start their own mill or whatever? Oh, wait - there are pesky things called loan officers, credit scores, people that own the existing buildings, etc. that prevent people from using otherwise idle resources. Also, who's going to educate this population when they relocate, or to try and make ends meet where they are?
The problems are not easy to solve, and they are not all due to "coal mine" practices from the past. There are real issues with suddently making professions irrelevant. Think of it this way: if, tomorrow, we had automatic lawnmowing equipment that was safe, instantly available, required no fuel, etc. what would you do with all the lawncare folks? They cannot "instantly" be absorbed into the existing marketplace. That is the fundamental issue...
Yes, we have better jobs now that more than made up for the loss of carriage repair, etc. However, at the time those professions were eliminated, there was no equivalent replacement. I think it's a matter of immediacy and geography as to why people dislike offshoring: In the span of a general career, the effects of efficiency gains do not usually make it back to the geographic location where [high-value-job-A] was lost; so, while the folks who used to do job A now have to do menial job X, efficiencies happen, so maybe their children can get high-value-job B. In the meantime, they have to scrimp and save.
Perhaps there are some examples where efficiency gains have immediate effect in a locale, but I doubt it is that common. Look at all the modern "ghost towns" in textile areas, for instance (I spent the Christmas holidays down in an old mill town in South Carolina) - those mills are gone, and no high-value jobs will be in that area for quite a long time; longer, in fact, than most of the old workers will probably be alive.
I agree that, in the long run, greater efficiency is good and raises standards of living. The trouble is, the improvement due to that efficiency rarely immediately effects the areas that get "thrifted" out, and the timeframes involved generally are longer than most people have savings to support. It is the unfortunate reality of social and educational inertia, in my opinion.
The GP didn't say that the same jobs were created; I think the statement was that there are more jobs now than there were then.
You've hinted at the issue that has been around for quite some time, and that will remain: all jobs are not equal. That is, if I lose 100 architect jobs, but gain back 500 retail jobs, I have a net change of +400 jobs; but that says nothing about the real value of those jobs, nor about the wealth-generating ability of those jobs.
Personally I don't like that the (US) economy is shifting from production to service; service produces no wealth directly, so it must rely on activity in other locations to produce that wealth. When you start talking about international distances, things can go inconvenient very quickly (just like at Europe at the moment having to deal with the pipeline shutdown. No energy (wealth) production at home and not getting anywhere from next door causes trouble. No amount of "service industry" can replace having actual tangible wealth).
In the long run, everything is probably nice and balanced - eventually manufacturing will have to come back to this geographic location because the local population won't be willing (or able) to afford to import it from other geographic locations and will be willing to produce it domestically for a tenable price. However, in the meantime, all those whose lives were spent as manufacturers are kind of stuck, because they cannot instantaneously become high-value service providers; similarly, it's unlikely that when manufacturing does return to this geography, that things will be able to rapidly shift back that way.
These types of changes happen fairly slowly - probably on the order of a generation - so the "short" times of period are felt very much by some, while others enjoy an entire generation of being able to stay where they are without having to worry about changing economic conditions.
In a residential appliance? Heating 1 gallon of water (~3.8 kg) from room temp (70 degF/21 degC) to boiling (100 degC) (delta of ~79 K) in 60 seconds requires an energy transfer of just shy of 21 kilowatts*. Even at 220V, that's upwards of 95 amps; I don't know of any residential application with wiring for 100A circuits - the highest I've seen is 60A for things like HVAC or laundry circuits. Did you perhaps mean a liter instead of a gallon? That would only require about 5 kW, which is quite reasonable.
The fastest water-heating devices I've seen are the little 1000 or 1500W devices which are a little pot with a heating element embedded in a metal bottom; those will boil about 2 cups in about 2 or 3 minutes (by experience, I don't need math for that one).
* the math: 79 K * 3.8 kg * 4184 J/kgK / 60 s = 20933 J/s
Kudos on having the wherewithall to participate in the Peace Corps! Based on your post, and because of that bit of info, I have a discussion that is probably going to incite quite a lot of reaction but is, I think, quite necessary:
How does 'journalism' prevent genocide? In my estimation, things like genocide (or other violent oppressive activities) are also somewhat economic, though with a different flavor: Those that would commit genocide (or other oppressive activity) generally do so as long as the perceived and/or actual benefits of so doing outweight the risks of continuing. So, if there is a defenseless population and there is no other group willing to provide force, then an in-power group may continue oppression. If a third party gets involved, say with the typical 'peaceful' means of sanctions, that will only work if the oppressors depend on something that the sanctions prevent. If there is a hypothetical situation where part of the US starts oppressing another part, I doubt there are really any sanctions that any other country could put on us to cause us to stop (despite what people think, in a pinch parts of the US could be self-sufficient). The only thing left is to apply force back.
The only caveat is the subtlety about what constitutes "perceived or actual benefits" - for some oppressive regimes, the perceived benefit of completely eliminating some other population outweighs the risk of being the recipient of any other physical force - this is why diplomacy can fail with groups with radical enough beliefs.
However, for systems which do have some limit of "ok, enough (threat of) force will make us back down", then I might be able to see how journalism can help, because that might cause those external forces to start threatening some measures. In general, though, I don't know that journalism can do anything, because the response of the audience of that journalism must actually act; journalism by itself doesn't do anything.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to how likely the oppressor is to back down under the threat of force; if the oppressor won't back down from mere threat, then the only recourse is something more violent, either something like a siege (what I would call passive violence) or something more direct.
I'm not sure what you're saying here - my original comment was in response to a remark about how poor people would spend their wealth [sic] on necessities, and how what poor people spend is not wealth but effort in order to obtain necessities (wealth).
It seems that you're talking about how somone with limited ability (either intrinsically or because of forced environmental difficulties - be they political or geographical) can or cannot start to increase the amount of wealth they obtain per unit effort. I don't quite think that has anything to do with setting up business, but I liken it to this: what can you do for these populations to give them that bootstrap?
Sure, education helps, but you need something fast - for instance, spend a single day or very small portions of days showing people how to store food and water; food and water storage is the number one bootstrap for getting out of poverty: it allows work now to provide necessities later; without storage, work now only provides necessities now. Once you can do that, and free up some time later that will no longer have to be used getting necessities, you're on the road to improved quality of living. It's all about the small initial investment, not some huge starve-yourself-for-a-year type of investment.
I think it's incorrect that "you need money to make money" - what you need is a little bit of investment to reduce the cost (in effort) of the things you have now, freeing up effort to be used to increase the things you have. Given a free enough environment - for instance, a place where you aren't prevented from storing food - improved quality of living should be a positive feedback system as long as effort is still applied.
Eh, as I read back over this it's a bit convoluted, but hopefully conveys my intentions...
Hrm. I guess that's true in a technical sense - I guess I'm a bit conservative and don't consider ownership under lien as "good" ownership. That is an important distinction about how if you have a lien and the bank sells, they only keep the difference between the sale price and the outstanding loan amount. However, considering that you're out one house at the end of the day, I don't think having a mortgage is as nearly as good a situation as being mortgage free.
I do appreciate the distinction though - there is a difference between ownership and ownership without lien that I previously overlooked.
The thing most don't think about: from where does that 8% return come? And does it represent a real increase in wealth, inflation, or just shuffling already existing wealth around? Do you (or does anyone, for that matter) have the capability to determine which it is?
Oddly enough, the things you listed are wealth. Spending effort on wealth is not a waste in my book! You can trade wealth for other wealth, but that's about it. Waste is only when you create items of non-wealth, as either a by-product of wealth production or by actively destroying wealth.
I think economics would be so much easier if people changed the word 'value' to 'effort,' made it clear that the word 'money' refers to 'value', and changed the word 'wealth' to 'physical resource'. This should get rid of most of the confusion between value, money, services, and wealth.
I don't think anywhere near 70% of US people own homes. 70% might be paying to own a home, but they still have a mortgage; "the bank" owns the home. I would guess that maybe at most 20% of "homeowners" actually own their homes. Think about it - how many people do you know that have a house but there is no mortgage on it?
(That's not even considering property tax, which even if you have no mortgage, you still have to pay to keep your home).
I think you're correct. After all, if you know how to program, then the language with which you program doesn't matter. I would argue that if you cannot learn a new programming language for base use in, say, a week, you don't know how to program. (By base use I mean the basics - not the little tricky subtleties that every language has.)
I think it's more a matter of thinking logically and mathematically, and knowing algorithms, and knowing safe practices, than the particular syntax of a language. I definitely agree with Stroustrup's thoughts that a language needs to be as free as possible and trust that the user of the language knows what s/he's doing. I think it's a shame to make things cater only to the lowest common denominator - this applies to programming, driving automobiles, politics, finances - everything. It pains me greatly that all too often - especially in the USA, that the lowest common denominator seems to win more often than the experts.
Unfortunately, I agree that "powerful" != "practical". What I mean is that consider MS vs Linux vs Apple; if, instead of all the people competing on three different fronts for the "best" OS, what would happen if all those people were working on the same "best" OS? Granted, this is all kind of a "what-if" kind of proposition, but it does bear consideration.
How long does it take to build a house with air conditioning anyway?
Less tongue-in-cheek: humans have this thing called 'technology' that lets us get away with a lot because we can just brute-force the environment to conditions that suit us; we also have means to move large populations across large distances in a short period of time - much faster than the climate can change, in fact.
Global climate change and its effects is not a technical problem, just as world hunger or poverty or disease are not technical problems; the problem is that people aren't willing to do what's necessary to mitigate the change.
I don't care if the climate changes or not; I only care if, because of climate change, some [guy] hordes all the food and doesn't let me move to a place where I can grow my own, or doesn't let me build greenhouses or whatever.
Ok, so maybe Eli Whitney's case isn't the best to use to support my case; however, my example is that particular device - or something similar - would be invented anyway even without patents. Indeed, your example proves my point there; the cotton gin was invented without the benefit of a good patent system!
I think as long as people have enough resources and free time, innovation will occur just because some people like to innovate.
My favorite is the line in the article about how without patents there would be no incentive for pharmas to, say, develop a new treatment.
Innovation will always be driven by necessity, not by profit. That, and laziness: if I can invent a cotton gin so I don't have to spend hours and hours picking seeds out of cotton by hand, what do I care if I don't have a patent on it? My life is still simpler. What about drugs? If enough people are getting sick, then people will pool together their resources and develop a treatment. Sure, it might not happen in the same way we know things today, but I think that patents are a form of competition, and I'm beginning to think that cooperation is a more powerful force in economics than competition, despite the prevalent thinking.
Eh, I'm in a good mood today, so:
I didn't say anything about an event (loss of life, in this case) as being acceptable - I asked if it was bad. Those are distinct concepts actually. In some cases, what is acceptable for one audience is not acceptable to another audience, and I also think that 'good' or 'bad' is independent of acceptance (though I hope that people accept the good and reject the bad). (Note that if you claim that one group's acceptance is more acceptable than another, you have to have some reason for claiming that, and that connotes an evaluation of 'good' or 'bad'; without those concepts, everything is just opinion.)
Next: define 'innocent'. I can't make any kind of response to your statement "Loss of life is bad when it involves innocent people" without knowing what you mean by 'innocent'. I know what I mean by innocent, but this is a word which has so many connotations that it's not possible to discuss without a firm understanding of what is meant by that. I'm not trying to be flippant here either - do you mean "has never committed a crime ever" or "has never been caught for committing a crime" or "was not directly involved in some other business which happened to occupy their current location (by intent? by accident?) and resulted in personal [physical] damage". Those are all distinct meanings and it bears being clear on which one is meant, because our, ahem, acceptance of situations depends on that meaning.
Next: Regarding the loss of my life: be more specific. If the infamous 'we' decides loss of my life is acceptable when I'm 93 and it hurts when I breathe, I probably don't care. If I'm running around murdering people, I'd say that loss of my life is acceptable. If I'm trying to save people from a burning building, loss of my life is acceptable. Heck, even if I get hit by a car, I can accept the loss of my life. I would even accept the loss of my life as a result of crime. Now, if you're asking if I condone actions that result in any of those situations surrounding loss of my life, that's a different question.
Think about this - is a flood "bad"? I will agree that a flood can be destructive (in the short term), but is it bad? Is it good? Or is it simply a result of physics?
I know this is not on-topic, but I just had an interesting question come to mind, and I realize it is one to which I don't have a satisfactory answer because of all the possible scenarios: Is the loss of life bad?
There are so many nuances to that question I don't even know where to begin, other to know that it is an important and probably overlooked philosophical question. I know the first response of most people is "Of course the loss of life is bad!" but then you have to ask - "What life?" Because there is no such thing, for instance, of non-life-based food. Is loss of plant life not bad, but loss of animal life bad? What about non-sentient animals versus sentient animals? Domestic versus feral?
All those thoughts lead me to believe the first response to the question "Is the loss of life bad?" is "Sometimes yes, sometimes no." But I don't really have a firm way to evaluate when it is appropriate to classify it one way or the other, and I would estimate that most people cannot honestly make that distinction either - not because they are inept or unfeeling, but because people don't know enough information to correctly analyze the problem; that was even indicated by the AC's observation that
That's actually fairly insightful, because it shows that there is no readily accepted way to evaluate the current loss of [human] life against potential future loss or gain of life. (I would posit that there are some ways to make this evaluation, but not everyone accepts those ways of thinking, hence my caveat of 'readily accepted'.)
The big problem with poverty and education, and the reason why the impovershed are usually poorly educated, is not because they don't have "tools" with which to be educated, it's that they don't have enough time to be educated - all their time is spent trying to survive, not learn. Having 0 hours in a day to learn something doesn't change how much you can learn with a computer or without a computer. I'd even question the assertion that having a computer allows you to learn more per unit time compared to learning with tradtional means, if there are perhaps one or two hours per day available for activities other than survival.
This is close to my test, but I think mine is more strict:
Give the panel of appropriate artisians the problem *and* the patent, and see if the panel can explain why the patent was made that way in no more than, say, 4 hours. If after seeing the solution and the panel cannot clearly state the way to arrive at the solution is not obvious. If, however, they can fully explain how you would take existing technology to get the proposed implementation, it's obvious and not patentable. In my mind, it's only if the combination provides *new* functionality, not *combined* functionality, that makes something less obvious; but that specific combination also has to be non-obvious.
Hypothetical examples: Obvious: combining, say, a long pole with a hedge clipper so you can clip high branches is an obvious combination: you have a pole to reach things, a clipper to clip things, combine them to clip things that are hard to reach! Obvious: Using a computer to automate any task that was previously not automated. Unobvious: Combining gears and levers to perform some mechanical task in a way not suggested by gears and levers; for instance, a new transmission that is smoother / more efficient.
I'm just curious as to what is meant by 'productivity' anyway. I hate the numbers that are thrown around in the media. I want to see hard numbers like "bushels of produce per man-hour" and things like that - not something in silly relative units like dollars of economic activity (especially when a lot of economic activity is actually not 'productive' at all - for instance, selling a house in my mind is not productivity, but building a house is. Heck, if selling a house was 'productive', I could just keep selling a house back and forth between two parties and be the most productive real-estate agent in the universe - except that nothing actually changed. Note that I don't mean that selling a house isn't valuable; it's just not, in my mind, related to productivity).
Correct; I encourage everyont to look up comparisons of brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) for turbocharged (or supercharged) vs. naturally aspirated engines. For identical power outputs (but lower displacement on the turbo version), the turbo version will most likely have a lower BSFC.
You can't look at things like fuel economy of automobiles because that's a complex system effect; to isolate the performance of the turbo only you have to look at the BSFC.