Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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The F-35 Story
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It is also intended to be a VTOL aircraft for the Marines, a carrier fighter for the Navy, and an export fighter for the RAF. It is expected to act as a fighter when it is not playing bomb truck. (A job the F/A-18 does very well already)
The last time we tried to build a plane that versatile (that is, a design by committee), we ended up with the F-111, a disappointing aircraft about whom a USAF general once said "The only good thing about the F-111 was that the damn fool Russians went and copied it." (He was referring to the Su-24, an even more disappointing aircraft)
The best planes are first and foremost good flying machines. If you have a good airframe and engine combination, you can get a plane to do a lot of different jobs by simply cramming different avionics and weapons in it. Witness the F-15E Strike Eagle. The F-4 Phantom. The Corsair. We had a really good flying machine in the Raptor. Economies of scale would have driven the price down if we hadn't abandoned the program in favor of the empty promises of the F-35. The JSF is NOT a good airframe. It has only one engine, which is normally slower but cheaper...but we contracted to two different suppliers to build two different versions, so it wasn't cheaper, and it is still slower. It uses a horrendously complex system to achieve VTOL flight, which should insure the mechanics are kept unhappy and cancel out any sortie rate benefits it should enjoy from being VTOL. It will not be able to remain stealthy while carrying a bomb load any larger than the Raptor. Since its primary role is bomb truck, and the greatest need for stealth is when approaching a target, there seems little point in suffering the expense of a stealth design on an aircraft that was supposed to be cheap. We are going to end up with a plane with one less engine and shorter range than the Navy likes, a VTOL hangar queen for the Marines, and a fighter-bomber for the USAF with the price tag of a Raptor and performance little better than the F-16.
Having flown an out-of-trim aircraft, I would dispute that. Control pressures can rapidly build to an unmanageable level at high speeds without proper trim.
The development of a foolproof lie detector that REALLY worked would alter civilization in ways so profound and far-reaching that the technology would probably face overwhelming resistance to its adoption. Its widespread acceptance would shake the modern legal system to its foundation, revolutionize diplomacy, destroy countless careers and reputations overnight and make the media the single most powerful political force on the planet. Religion would be rendered impotent as a source of both political authority and spiritual comfort.
The control of the flow of information, and of the machines that verify its validity, would become paramount to those who wished to rule.
This idea overlooks the inherent plasticity of the brain, also a scientifically proven fact. People's brains can change, and so can their propensity for anti-social behavior.
It would likely be one rag tag group of mercenaries against another, neither possessing the training, discipline or organization to accomplish much more than bankrupting each other.
Well, let me bust your bubble: I lived in Carmel, IN long before the roundabouts (and other symptoms of the yuppie influx) arrived, and I still visit the town periodically. My last visit, I had the misfortune to encounter several of the new roundabouts. I can only conclude from the angry gesticulations of the other motorists that I was doing it wrong. I'm not an inept motorist: Northern Indiana roads are generally child's play compared to the tangled mess that is Cincinnati. But the roundabouts humbled me pretty quickly. (The posted sign was little help, and seemed to suggest that I should simply swerve violently from side to side to avoid being hit)
They strike me as a solution to a problem that would've been adequately solved by a stop sign. Odds are, if there is too much traffic for a stop sign, there is too much traffic for a roundabout. I hear residents complain about them during rush hour a lot. One direction of traffic invariably ends up being shut out.
It is worth considering just WHY the blighted area they locate the company into will begin to prosper. Employees of the company itself will, by and large, still prefer to commute, at least until the slum their company is located in gets rehabbed. The rehabbing will start when the taxes the company pays begin to filter into the surrounding area's infrastructure: after all, the drug lords and gangbangers aren't going away until that part of the town begins fielding policemen. The yuppies won't come until they start building decent schools nearby.
In other words, tax money (and the occasional greased palm) makes it happen. Forcing the company to set up shop locally simply means they have to pay local property taxes. They will continue to hire qualified employees wherever they can find them, and automate or outsource their jobs when they cannot. Most of their employees will still be living in the burbs. Once the slum gets rehabbed, rents will go up, and the poor people living there will move to another old and neglected neighborhood, which will become the new slum. The company employees will get tired of commuting and move into the shiny new neighborhood and the restaurants will open and everyone will pat themselves on their backs for their civic ingenuity. The wealthy residents of the nice new neighborhood will applaud the influence of capitalism and the free market on job creation and the displaced poor people will continue to complain about rich people bleeding them dry and shoving them around.
That's the crux of them matter, isn't it? If you believe that the economy is a zero-sum game, then socialism is the only ethical solution. If you believe it is non-zero-sum, then capitalism makes more sense.
I tend to think economics is a zero-sum game. Money is an abstraction of resources, and resources are a finite thing. Technology makes us better at extracting resources more efficiently, which is why it has resulted in economic expansion over the years...but there is always a cost. It's hard to work around the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I think a mix of socialism and capitalism works best, because it encourages expansion while avoiding the worst deprivations of scarcity.
I think that is true. One thing I learned after getting my pilot's license was that almost all pilots have a morbid fascination for NTSB reports of air accidents. They compulsively read them in an effort to find out what caused them and how they could have been avoided. The idea that it may have simply been dumb luck is anathema to them, despite the fact that many air accidents fall into this category.
I used to filled with moral outrage about the stupidity of people like McCarthy, but over time I've come to accept their stupidity as both inevitable and self-limiting. After all, if they and their minions are dumb enough to let their kids die of a preventable illness, their dimwitted bloodlines come to a screeching halt, which is a good thing for the species in the long run.
I think one thing that gets overlooked in the race to "think of the children" is that the children are simply little bundles of more of the same DNA that started the mess in the first place.
Natural selection is not a gentle process, but it beats a planet overpopulated with idiots.
For a couple thousand dollars one could purchase a lathe and drill press, and crank out plenty of handguns for next to nothing..
I know someone who makes his own guns...old fashioned flintlocks, which he creates from little more than a piece of wood and a metal rod using hand-powered tools. It is not a trivial process, but a serious craft. It takes him weeks to make one, and he charges thousands of dollars for them. I have no idea how they perform, but I imagine they are still technologically dated and largely inaccurate.
I don't think anyone is going to start banging out handguns by the truckload without a significant education on the topic and heavy personal investment. Most criminals are far too lazy to make that sort of commitment for a deferred result. That's why they steal stuff. Someone willing to take the time to learn to use a drill press and other tools necessary for metal work would be more likely to get a job in a machine shop than start their own arms factory.
So what happens when we eventually achieve this automated capitalist utopia that runs so efficiently that it only requires a handful of programmers to keep it running? It seems to me it doesn't really matter how low priced a service is if everyone who needs it is unemployed.
Free market cheerleaders make several baseless assumptions in situations like this. One is that the benevolent corporation will pass its savings on to 'the consumer'. This seems unlikely, since energy companies are monopolies in everything but name, so there is no competition to drive their prices lower. The other is that wonderful new job opportunities will open up to absorb the displaced meter readers. Even if you overlook the obvious life disruption caused by a cast-off union worker looking for a job in the high-paying food service or custodial industries, the present state of employment in this country does not suggest this is true. We've been automating everything for the past several decades, and the result? Our local grocery store used to have ten cashiers. Now they have two. I did not hire eight maids. I can only assume they went on to star in their own reality show.
It amazes me that the whole idea of labor-saving devices does not bear closer scrutiny in a society where the only viable means of economic survival for the majority of people is their labor.
Automation freed the slaves from their labors. Where are they now? All happily employed in the new jobs this created? No. Factories began automating decades ago. What replaced the high-paying factory jobs? Would you like fries with that?
Human resources aren't being wasted doing jobs that can be automated. They are being wasted by corporate bean counters who would love nothing better than to replace every pesky union worker with an uncomplaining robot. They are being wasted by a social system that wants unemployed people to miraculously retrain for whatever the next hot job is when they cannot even meet their own survival needs, let alone pay astronomical tuitions. They are being wasted by a society that has grown to value commerce over compassion.
...about some Italian detective/cop, and suddenly the young daughter walks into the room, topless, and sits there for five minutes. Nobody reacted.
Now, I am not reacting to say that this is harmful or degrading or whatever. But seriously, that is tacky, just plain tacky. They know that that scene was not gripping, so they put in a contrived pair of tits to keep the average punters interested. Honestly, in European films I have seen, particularly Italian, gratuitous nudity does coincide with a lull in the pacing that needed something to fill it, where Michael Bay would make a helicopter explode. Nice side effect of censorship is that it forces film-makers to try something new, rather than the tried and true chestnuts of violence, sex and obscenity that always work if you just use a little more than last time. Not that a bit of violence, sex and obscenity isn't good, but it is good to create legal and social forces to encourage other, more difficult things to be tried.
Overall, I agree with your sentiment...I think screenwriting HAS suffered as censorship has relaxed. But given a choice between spending a million dollars blowing up a perfectly good helicopter or paying an aspiring actress two hundred bucks to take her top off, I think the European film industry made the right call. And we can all breathe easier knowing that obsessive fans seeking to emulate their favorite movie scene will be flashing their boobs instead of showering unsuspecting people with helicopter parts.
This is the sort of statement that makes me feel old. While ID4 is an undeniably silly movie, it is still eye-popping popcorn fare, if you are willing to turn your brain off for two hours. And isn't that the whole point of movies? I feel saddened that today's audiences have become so spoiled by the sophistication of modern FX that it is nearly impossible to wow them at all. I think, perhaps, effects have become TOO good....the audience is no longer participating in the requisite suspension of disbelief, expecting the filmmaker to do all the work for them. I think many vintage films still look amazing, and I am more than happy to overlook the Zipper of the Black Lagoon or Godzilla's rubber suit, or the strings holding the Moonbase Alpha Eagles aloft because I WANT to be amazed and I'm willing to go along with whatever visual conceit is thrown at me to achieve that goal. At some point, I think, you simply have to turn off your filter and say,' OK, giant spider, I'll buy that', and see where it takes you.
Otherwise, you simply become that jaded amateur movie critic who no one enjoys watching movies with. Worse, you deny yourself the enjoyment of decades of films with less than perfect visual effects.
I agree with you that the military budget isn't the only villain when it comes to out of control spending.
But your assertion that the military budget has been decreasing for the past fifty years (except for post 9/11) is not a convincing argument. "Post-9/11" means the past decade, during which the budget has increased a LOT. A good portion of military spending has not even been recorded in official budget figures, because it was in the form of emergency funding rammed through congress to support the war on terror. Our intelligence budget alone has tripled in the past three years, thanks to the additional fiscal drag of new organizations like the DHS.
Prior to 9/11, the Cold War saw our military spending ramped up so high that just trying to keep up with it bankrupted the Soviet Union.
All of which is irrelevant, because your argument is based on the assumption that spending only slightly less on defense than we were during a global war is somehow acceptable.
Military spending is vital, but it is largely non-productive. The military consumes vast quantities of resources and, under ideal conditions, does very little. When it is busy, it can bankrupt whole nations, or plunge them into political chaos. Unrestrained military activity has preceded the fall of almost every government in history.
Any ad that annoys the viewer so much that they either dismiss the website or install technical solutions to block all ads is not an effective ad. It's like a virus that kills the host before it can spread to another host. That is why diseases evolve to be less lethal over time, and not more lethal. If advertisers want to employ TRUE viral marketing, they should advertise with more restraint.
Just a little reminder that those annoying artists are one reason the entire internet doesn't still look like it did in 1990, when the most expressive visual statement programmers could muster was the BLINK tag.
Did you include the energy cost of the manufacturing and disposal of the batteries that will power your e-reader? How many batteries and e-readers do you expect to consume during the lifespan of a typical book?
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It is also intended to be a VTOL aircraft for the Marines, a carrier fighter for the Navy, and an export fighter for the RAF. It is expected to act as a fighter when it is not playing bomb truck. (A job the F/A-18 does very well already)
The last time we tried to build a plane that versatile (that is, a design by committee), we ended up with the F-111, a disappointing aircraft about whom a USAF general once said "The only good thing about the F-111 was that the damn fool Russians went and copied it." (He was referring to the Su-24, an even more disappointing aircraft)
The best planes are first and foremost good flying machines. If you have a good airframe and engine combination, you can get a plane to do a lot of different jobs by simply cramming different avionics and weapons in it. Witness the F-15E Strike Eagle. The F-4 Phantom. The Corsair. We had a really good flying machine in the Raptor. Economies of scale would have driven the price down if we hadn't abandoned the program in favor of the empty promises of the F-35. The JSF is NOT a good airframe. It has only one engine, which is normally slower but cheaper...but we contracted to two different suppliers to build two different versions, so it wasn't cheaper, and it is still slower. It uses a horrendously complex system to achieve VTOL flight, which should insure the mechanics are kept unhappy and cancel out any sortie rate benefits it should enjoy from being VTOL. It will not be able to remain stealthy while carrying a bomb load any larger than the Raptor. Since its primary role is bomb truck, and the greatest need for stealth is when approaching a target, there seems little point in suffering the expense of a stealth design on an aircraft that was supposed to be cheap. We are going to end up with a plane with one less engine and shorter range than the Navy likes, a VTOL hangar queen for the Marines, and a fighter-bomber for the USAF with the price tag of a Raptor and performance little better than the F-16.
Having flown an out-of-trim aircraft, I would dispute that. Control pressures can rapidly build to an unmanageable level at high speeds without proper trim.
The development of a foolproof lie detector that REALLY worked would alter civilization in ways so profound and far-reaching that the technology would probably face overwhelming resistance to its adoption. Its widespread acceptance would shake the modern legal system to its foundation, revolutionize diplomacy, destroy countless careers and reputations overnight and make the media the single most powerful political force on the planet. Religion would be rendered impotent as a source of both political authority and spiritual comfort.
The control of the flow of information, and of the machines that verify its validity, would become paramount to those who wished to rule.
This idea overlooks the inherent plasticity of the brain, also a scientifically proven fact. People's brains can change, and so can their propensity for anti-social behavior.
It would likely be one rag tag group of mercenaries against another, neither possessing the training, discipline or organization to accomplish much more than bankrupting each other.
Well, let me bust your bubble: I lived in Carmel, IN long before the roundabouts (and other symptoms of the yuppie influx) arrived, and I still visit the town periodically. My last visit, I had the misfortune to encounter several of the new roundabouts. I can only conclude from the angry gesticulations of the other motorists that I was doing it wrong. I'm not an inept motorist: Northern Indiana roads are generally child's play compared to the tangled mess that is Cincinnati. But the roundabouts humbled me pretty quickly. (The posted sign was little help, and seemed to suggest that I should simply swerve violently from side to side to avoid being hit)
They strike me as a solution to a problem that would've been adequately solved by a stop sign. Odds are, if there is too much traffic for a stop sign, there is too much traffic for a roundabout. I hear residents complain about them during rush hour a lot. One direction of traffic invariably ends up being shut out.
You are joking, right?
See "Zen".
You have clearly never known true poverty.
Answer unclear. Ask again later.
It is worth considering just WHY the blighted area they locate the company into will begin to prosper. Employees of the company itself will, by and large, still prefer to commute, at least until the slum their company is located in gets rehabbed. The rehabbing will start when the taxes the company pays begin to filter into the surrounding area's infrastructure: after all, the drug lords and gangbangers aren't going away until that part of the town begins fielding policemen. The yuppies won't come until they start building decent schools nearby.
In other words, tax money (and the occasional greased palm) makes it happen. Forcing the company to set up shop locally simply means they have to pay local property taxes. They will continue to hire qualified employees wherever they can find them, and automate or outsource their jobs when they cannot. Most of their employees will still be living in the burbs. Once the slum gets rehabbed, rents will go up, and the poor people living there will move to another old and neglected neighborhood, which will become the new slum. The company employees will get tired of commuting and move into the shiny new neighborhood and the restaurants will open and everyone will pat themselves on their backs for their civic ingenuity. The wealthy residents of the nice new neighborhood will applaud the influence of capitalism and the free market on job creation and the displaced poor people will continue to complain about rich people bleeding them dry and shoving them around.
And so it goes.
The US tax rate is NOT the highest in the world. Japan's is.
And I would argue that our effective tax rate is zero, since the multinationals are not paying it.
That's the crux of them matter, isn't it? If you believe that the economy is a zero-sum game, then socialism is the only ethical solution. If you believe it is non-zero-sum, then capitalism makes more sense.
I tend to think economics is a zero-sum game. Money is an abstraction of resources, and resources are a finite thing. Technology makes us better at extracting resources more efficiently, which is why it has resulted in economic expansion over the years...but there is always a cost. It's hard to work around the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
I think a mix of socialism and capitalism works best, because it encourages expansion while avoiding the worst deprivations of scarcity.
I think that is true. One thing I learned after getting my pilot's license was that almost all pilots have a morbid fascination for NTSB reports of air accidents. They compulsively read them in an effort to find out what caused them and how they could have been avoided. The idea that it may have simply been dumb luck is anathema to them, despite the fact that many air accidents fall into this category.
Copyright does not protect ideas. Copyright is designed to protect the tangible expression of an idea.
I used to filled with moral outrage about the stupidity of people like McCarthy, but over time I've come to accept their stupidity as both inevitable and self-limiting. After all, if they and their minions are dumb enough to let their kids die of a preventable illness, their dimwitted bloodlines come to a screeching halt, which is a good thing for the species in the long run.
I think one thing that gets overlooked in the race to "think of the children" is that the children are simply little bundles of more of the same DNA that started the mess in the first place.
Natural selection is not a gentle process, but it beats a planet overpopulated with idiots.
For a couple thousand dollars one could purchase a lathe and drill press, and crank out plenty of handguns for next to nothing. .
I know someone who makes his own guns...old fashioned flintlocks, which he creates from little more than a piece of wood and a metal rod using hand-powered tools. It is not a trivial process, but a serious craft. It takes him weeks to make one, and he charges thousands of dollars for them. I have no idea how they perform, but I imagine they are still technologically dated and largely inaccurate.
I don't think anyone is going to start banging out handguns by the truckload without a significant education on the topic and heavy personal investment. Most criminals are far too lazy to make that sort of commitment for a deferred result. That's why they steal stuff. Someone willing to take the time to learn to use a drill press and other tools necessary for metal work would be more likely to get a job in a machine shop than start their own arms factory.
So what happens when we eventually achieve this automated capitalist utopia that runs so efficiently that it only requires a handful of programmers to keep it running? It seems to me it doesn't really matter how low priced a service is if everyone who needs it is unemployed.
Free market cheerleaders make several baseless assumptions in situations like this. One is that the benevolent corporation will pass its savings on to 'the consumer'. This seems unlikely, since energy companies are monopolies in everything but name, so there is no competition to drive their prices lower. The other is that wonderful new job opportunities will open up to absorb the displaced meter readers. Even if you overlook the obvious life disruption caused by a cast-off union worker looking for a job in the high-paying food service or custodial industries, the present state of employment in this country does not suggest this is true. We've been automating everything for the past several decades, and the result? Our local grocery store used to have ten cashiers. Now they have two. I did not hire eight maids. I can only assume they went on to star in their own reality show.
It amazes me that the whole idea of labor-saving devices does not bear closer scrutiny in a society where the only viable means of economic survival for the majority of people is their labor.
Automation freed the slaves from their labors. Where are they now? All happily employed in the new jobs this created? No. Factories began automating decades ago. What replaced the high-paying factory jobs? Would you like fries with that?
Human resources aren't being wasted doing jobs that can be automated. They are being wasted by corporate bean counters who would love nothing better than to replace every pesky union worker with an uncomplaining robot. They are being wasted by a social system that wants unemployed people to miraculously retrain for whatever the next hot job is when they cannot even meet their own survival needs, let alone pay astronomical tuitions. They are being wasted by a society that has grown to value commerce over compassion.
...about some Italian detective/cop, and suddenly the young daughter walks into the room, topless, and sits there for five minutes. Nobody reacted.
Now, I am not reacting to say that this is harmful or degrading or whatever. But seriously, that is tacky, just plain tacky. They know that that scene was not gripping, so they put in a contrived pair of tits to keep the average punters interested. Honestly, in European films I have seen, particularly Italian, gratuitous nudity does coincide with a lull in the pacing that needed something to fill it, where Michael Bay would make a helicopter explode. Nice side effect of censorship is that it forces film-makers to try something new, rather than the tried and true chestnuts of violence, sex and obscenity that always work if you just use a little more than last time. Not that a bit of violence, sex and obscenity isn't good, but it is good to create legal and social forces to encourage other, more difficult things to be tried.
Overall, I agree with your sentiment...I think screenwriting HAS suffered as censorship has relaxed. But given a choice between spending a million dollars blowing up a perfectly good helicopter or paying an aspiring actress two hundred bucks to take her top off, I think the European film industry made the right call. And we can all breathe easier knowing that obsessive fans seeking to emulate their favorite movie scene will be flashing their boobs instead of showering unsuspecting people with helicopter parts.
This is the sort of statement that makes me feel old. While ID4 is an undeniably silly movie, it is still eye-popping popcorn fare, if you are willing to turn your brain off for two hours. And isn't that the whole point of movies? I feel saddened that today's audiences have become so spoiled by the sophistication of modern FX that it is nearly impossible to wow them at all. I think, perhaps, effects have become TOO good....the audience is no longer participating in the requisite suspension of disbelief, expecting the filmmaker to do all the work for them. I think many vintage films still look amazing, and I am more than happy to overlook the Zipper of the Black Lagoon or Godzilla's rubber suit, or the strings holding the Moonbase Alpha Eagles aloft because I WANT to be amazed and I'm willing to go along with whatever visual conceit is thrown at me to achieve that goal. At some point, I think, you simply have to turn off your filter and say,' OK, giant spider, I'll buy that', and see where it takes you.
Otherwise, you simply become that jaded amateur movie critic who no one enjoys watching movies with. Worse, you deny yourself the enjoyment of decades of films with less than perfect visual effects.
It's not useless. It's biomass. It will return to the earth, as food and fertilizer. Once the overpriced casket rots, anyway.
I agree with you that the military budget isn't the only villain when it comes to out of control spending.
But your assertion that the military budget has been decreasing for the past fifty years (except for post 9/11) is not a convincing argument. "Post-9/11" means the past decade, during which the budget has increased a LOT. A good portion of military spending has not even been recorded in official budget figures, because it was in the form of emergency funding rammed through congress to support the war on terror. Our intelligence budget alone has tripled in the past three years, thanks to the additional fiscal drag of new organizations like the DHS.
Prior to 9/11, the Cold War saw our military spending ramped up so high that just trying to keep up with it bankrupted the Soviet Union.
All of which is irrelevant, because your argument is based on the assumption that spending only slightly less on defense than we were during a global war is somehow acceptable.
Military spending is vital, but it is largely non-productive. The military consumes vast quantities of resources and, under ideal conditions, does very little. When it is busy, it can bankrupt whole nations, or plunge them into political chaos. Unrestrained military activity has preceded the fall of almost every government in history.
It will likely do so again.
Any ad that annoys the viewer so much that they either dismiss the website or install technical solutions to block all ads is not an effective ad. It's like a virus that kills the host before it can spread to another host. That is why diseases evolve to be less lethal over time, and not more lethal. If advertisers want to employ TRUE viral marketing, they should advertise with more restraint.
Just a little reminder that those annoying artists are one reason the entire internet doesn't still look like it did in 1990, when the most expressive visual statement programmers could muster was the BLINK tag.
Did you include the energy cost of the manufacturing and disposal of the batteries that will power your e-reader? How many batteries and e-readers do you expect to consume during the lifespan of a typical book?