Actually, that's not quite true, although our business administration has somewhat faltered. Better business techniques would be a good technology to study...
We can see the slow-down of technological growth after 1970, even though new technology kept coming. Still, a smaller percent of the total income (and of the individual's income for most individuals and families) goes toward the same goods each year, and people buy more and better things ("better" actually abstracts from "more": your car has power windows, anti-lock brakes, and air conditioning, which a 1938 Chevrolet Corvette didn't). Scarcity reduces, population increases, and more jobs come to cover population growth.
I have a current weak theory that businesses will take fewer risks in a less-stable economy. As such, one goal of my Citizen's Dividend is to drive more technological advancement by the stabilization effect. My Dividend aims, without major increases in taxes on the upper class, to:
* provide enough income to survive;
* reduce the effective taxes on most of the population or, more simply, to increase the number of take-home dollars per wage-labor dollar the employer expends on an employee;
* reduce and slow the growth of the relative cost of hiring human labor versus using new technology, largely by moving payroll taxes to income taxes, reducing income taxes on the working class (you pay them less but they take home the same), and using a Dividend instead of a minimum wage increase (instead of making the employer pay $5/hr more, we give you $5/hr more)
This gives the consumer base more spending power without implementing Piketty-style taxes (45%, 55%, or 85% income tax on income over $1M, etc.), while also reducing the employer cost of human workers in relation to e.g. machines. It does this through the mechanism of a more effective welfare system.
The increase in consumer buying power creates jobs; and the increase in human worker competition with technological redundancy doesn't simply delay, but rather *spreads* replacement. Businesses have risk appetite and risk threshold. Risk appetite is how much they *want* to invest (i.e. lose) for the possibility of a return (i.e. gain); and risk threshold is the hard limit at which they bail. Different businesses will either jump in early (reduce costs now) or jump in late (keep paying workers $1/hr more than machines because in 4 years the machine will be $5/hr cheaper and will net us an extra $650,000 in savings over its life); and they'll finance differently (without so much pressure to compete and with so little advantage, they'll be less-apt to take loans for an early transition) and transition differently (location-by-location roll-out, instead of all-at-once). That protects us from sudden mass technological unemployment that comes with having $9/hr, $11/hr, and $14/hr machines and suddenly making human labor cost $15/hr instead of $8/hr.
As technology rolls in, we see lay-offs. These people become unemployed, and then prices come down over time--not immediately. Often, prices of technologically-improved goods simply grow more slowly than inflation, and so it takes years to recover the buying power in the consumer market. When we finally do, we buy new goods, creating new demand for labor, thus getting the unemployed back into those new jobs.
So what's all this mean?
It means my Dividend aims to make human labor cheaper so it doesn't get replaced as rapidly by technology, and so it gets returned to the labor force more rapidly. People become unemployed more slowly and become re-employed more quickly. That's a stabilizing effect.
That brings me to one of my big, secondary goals: In such a more stable environment, businesses can more readily project th
Facebook makes mass communication in your social circle more rapid. It reduces the amount of time required to share social ideas (e.g. pictures) and to make social plans. That's technology.
The application of technology *is* technology. So are a lot of things nobody thinks about. In education, I often talk about mnemonics, mental mathematics, and theories such as deliberate practice; these things build on more basic structures of psychology applied to education ("educational psychology"), and can give us new ways to teach and learn and improve academic and real-life performance. That's technology: the study (-ology) of improved techniques.
Even then, you get these ranges of what is and isn't worse, and these areas where people think X is worse than Y and others think Y is worse than X. You can modulate how people interpret events. You can change things around by changing perception, as I've stated, using public campaigns to get more people to think Y is worse than X and so X is okay.
I prefer diplomacy because it's more efficient. I like beating people, but only people who need to be beaten--like when some dude is trying to rape some girl at a party, you hit him with a wrench, and that's cool. We can come up with all kinds of arguments about torture, ranging from whether we're dealing with an insurgent who's a child-murder-rapist and thus deserves it to the need to extract information to save lives; and we still have to ask all kinds of questions. Diplomacy answers those questions more effectively than torture.
Diplomacy makes you ask questions. You realize a lot of terrorists and insurgents feel they're justified, they feel they're under attack, they feel they've got a moral requirement to do what they did. For many, this becomes irreconcilable, and they must believe firmly that their opponents are pure evil, else they have to question themselves--which only makes the world too threatening to survive. Often, these views don't hold up when someone has to deal with a compassionate and sympathetic human being who wants to understand them. People love to talk about themselves and they love when you're interested in them, and they will start to question their preset views when you support their sense of self-worth.
Occasionally you find the guy who just wants power and doesn't care who he hurts, or who enjoys watching people scream as he peels their skin away from their flesh, or who gets a rush from the power over others as he rapes and murders their children in front of them. Those people you cannot effectively interrogate by any means; you simply hit them in the face with a brick until you feel sufficiently zen, and then send them to be burned. Get a dog to replace them, because animals are much more sophisticated and civilized.
(4a) No position: Does not address or mention the cause of global warming
(4b) Uncertain: Expresses position that human’s role on recent global warming is uncertain/undefined
To simplify the analysis, ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).
Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus
More than half of the abstracts that we rated as ‘No Position’ or ‘Undecided’ were rated ‘Endorse AGW’ by the paper’s authors
"Undecided self-rated papers have an average rating equal to 4"
They're apparently lumped together for a reason.
So we've established that Cooke considers a scientist to have no view on AGW if they don't either Support or Oppose it; and that Cooke has rejected anyone whose response to "is human activity causing global warming?" is "I'm not certain", "I don't know," "The data doesn't provide strong evidence for or against," or "I'm a pastry chef; why are you asking me?", and has labeled these all as equivalent positions.
So, in answer to your question,
What is it about "no position" that you people don't understand?
I would have to say it's the same thing Cooke didn't understand when he wrote his paper; but that would be a lie. Examine Cooke's paper very, very carefully. You see lots of passages like this:
Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus
No mention of how many rejected, how many expressed uncertainty, and how many expressed that their paper was not about AGW. There's also the fact that 34.9% of RESPONDENTS claimed no position themselves on AGW, which is really hard to do if you're a climate scientist unless you're uncertain. Cooke ran away from both of these bits of data, scrubbing any mention of how many non-support self-rated abstracts were rejections, how many were papers not about the cause of global warming, and how many were self-rated as uncertain.
In other words: Cooke named the no-position/uncertain separately (to create credibility arguments like yours), made them numerically equivalent (4), then proceeded to roll them up into a single topic when the deeper data analysis started coming along. Instead of saying, "There are some no-positions, and we found that X% support AGW and Y% are uncertain," he said, "We have a few definitely-uncertain and some who are ambiguous; we rolled them up into a big pile we'll just call 'no-position', and X% of them are in support; ignore the rest, they don't count."
That's subtle. It's not only a good way to hide data and trick people into accepting your conclusion, but also a good way to set up for debates (e.g. peer review) by making it difficult to follow the trail of data manipulation. Real data is lost (how many of the respondents labeled their papers as AGW uncertain?), but you can recover some data by meta-analysis.
Some people talk about studying statistics so they can understand why some numbers aren't as important as they think. They're too blunt: they're thinking about stuff like cherry picking, implying causation from correlation, or overstating the significance of a small sample. Few people think about things like changing the dynamic of a measurement (e.g. mnemonics can be proven more or less effective by the same data if you measure percent of objects remembered vs forgot, or number remembered vs forgot in a given time), much less about how to structure a thesis to lead the mind through a series of careful manipulations to accept a conclusion by decreasing the significance of some subset of the data and quietly sweeping it away. Lying with statistics is a highly complex art developed over years and decades of practice, not something you get by sitting through a three week math course at your local community college.
When they emailed the authors, more of the authors said their paper as a whole endorsed the consensus than the abstract ratings alone did. That doesn't show that the self-rating system is somehow biased *toward* AGW. It probably shows that an abstract contains less information than the paper as a whole. Surprise!
It probably shows that, yes; and it *also* shows that the plan here isn't, "Uh, oh, hmm, using Cooke's analysis produces a high number of AGW supporters; using this *other* process produces a lower number, so let's use that as a supporting argument!" What I showed is that Cooke's follow-up analysis of the stance of those *excluded* from his AGW numbers leans toward higher support for AGW than Cooke's initial analysis, and so I have a stronger position and can show a lower amount of support for AGW by *hiding* the numbers I've cited.
In other words: I picked the numbers that most strongly weaken my argument, and still came out with a strong argument.
You're trying to use a fallacy of equivocation: I said "bias" to indicate that one method of analysis favors a position more than another, and you're repeating "bias" to say "lies and damned lies to support a pre-conceived outcome." Maybe learn not to be a deceptive, dishonest asshole?
You completely ignored my rebuttal, and simply flung a new set of accusations.
Your rebuttle was to claim those papers weren't relevant. I responded by pointing out that Cooke excluded them because they didn't take a direct position, even though they were relevant. In other words: you said, "They weren't about that!", and I said, "Yes they were; they just didn't have a yes/no conclusion." Again: you're lying to try to dodge the argument, and you're trying to poison the well by making false claims about the context of the debate.
I'll point out that someone is much more likely to claim something unpleasant and--especially--frightening is torture if someone else has suggested that, just like people claim every little thing anyone does now is terrorism. That's a stabilizing argument, not a counter-argument: I'm pointing out a weakness in your argument based on the specific situation in which it most frequently applies, which is not the same as defining a reason your conclusion is wrong.
My point is that, yes, we have fuzzy lines, and we haven't sat down and decided where we want to actually draw them or how we want to redraw them when the lines are questioned. What we have, instead, is a popularity contest: if we were to set up stands and subject people to waterboarding in a controlled environment, most people would discover that cold water to the face is unpleasant and that the experience is kind of disturbing, but that they're not that terribly upset about it; do this enough and publicize their testimonials and you can change the media dialogue, and the public will re-define waterboarding as not torture.
The politicians can and do respond to this. If the public never made a huge deal out of waterboarding, it's likely the current CIA manuals would include a small section detailing the concern, the evidence (media circus), and the conclusion that waterboarding is not torture and is simply an effective interrogation technique. As I've shown, we can produce such a situation simply by modifying the media dialogue.
A few zaps to the arm and you'll probably laugh it off, but the same stimulation in an interrogation setting is an infliction of pain and fear which produces acute and, possibly, long-term psychiatric trauma and thus is torture... or, well, it's not torture, because we've gone around with the CIA PR booth zapping people and making funny YouTube videos and explained that this is merely an "annoyance" that will "encourage" POWs to cooperate.
An ‘Uncertain’ abstract explicitly states that the cause of global warming is not yet determined (e.g., ‘. . . the extent of human-induced global warming is inconclusive. . . ’) while a ‘No Position’ abstract makes no statement on AGW
We emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate). After excluding papers that were not peer-reviewed, not climate-related or had no abstract, 2142 papers received self-ratings from 1189 authors. The self-rated levels of endorsement are shown in table 4. Among self-rated papers that stated a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus
Okay, so we excluded "No Position", of which 53.8% (plus or minus) appear to endorse a consensus. How many was that?
Endorse AGW 32.6% (3896); No AGW position 66.4% (7930); Reject AGW 0.7% (78); Uncertain on AGW 0.3% (40)
66.4%! We reject 66.4% of papers from our analysis, of which around 53.8% appear to endorse. If we included them, we'd get a number like 8162 for, 3782 not-for (almost all of which are undecided--very few against), about 68.3% in consensus.
"68.3% of climate papers authored by climate scientists in consensus with global warming" doesn't sound strong enough. "97% of climate scientists" comes out of that somehow. When they compare actual paper authors instead of papers, they got 62.7% in consensus, 2.4% against, and 34.9% expressing an undecided position.
It gets better!
Of the papers which received self-rating, 36.9% had abstracts expressing a position of consensus for AGW. When they phoned up the authors and asked them, 62.7% of those authors self-rated their position and the position of their paper as in consensus. In other words: the self-rating system is biased *toward* AGW.
To simplify the analysis, ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).
The whole thing also takes implicit endorsements of AGW as endorsements--which is fair, and notable. If you write a paper that strongly supports AGW and you try to conclude AGW is not a thing, you're just delusional. There's a large difference between being wrong and being delusional: wrong just means your facts are incorrect; delusional means the facts are right in front of you and you refuse to believe them. Evidence for the fairness of this methodology includes that more papers self-rate in support for AGW than do papers whose abstracts declare support: scientists who produce evidence for AGW and don't come out to declare it as such likely expect you to recognize the obvious.
Yes, there are major flaws in methodology for the Cooke number of 97% consensus. I take Computer Statistics III, I know what I'm talking about.
He gave out a password, one article got defaced, and he faced a potential 25 years in prison. Seriously. The judge could have fired that one off and it would have counted, no cruel-and-unusual-punishment defense.
"What if he had..." a small harem of 12-year-old girls? He could have gotten fewer than 20 years in prison.
We have a legal system that gives murderers, rapists, and pederasts a very real chance of getting a shorter sentence than a rowdy kid who defaces a Web site--and that's accounting for the fact that this same system routinely tries to put pederasts in prison for twice as long as murderers (i.e. why not just murder the child and dump the body in the woods? It's a *smaller* crime, not a bigger risk!).
TIL you should rape and murder everyone who might be a witness to your computer hacking shenanigans.
That will happen when the human labor involved is lower.
It's a difficult problem: when you have a more expensive technology, that technology requires more human labor. This holds true at higher demands; low-demand economics are strange, and require understanding of business economics of risk. Energy is *the* high-demand product, so we can assume any energy technology is necessarily high-demand: if it's cheaper than modern methods, everybody wants it.
In short: Nuclear competes with Coal; Nuclear will replace Coal practically overnight when the combined cost of transitioning to Nuclear is cheaper than the un-sunk costs of maintaining a coal plant. (The resulting slow transition is a good thing, generally, unless you want to see the Great Depression first-hand.)
If we move early by brute force, two things happen. First, the more labor-intensive technology requires a bigger chunk of the population, thus more wages (and taxes and shit) for the product (electricity), thus depriving that labor from producing other things. Second, the cost of paying all those wages raises the price of the product, and the consumer finds themselves with less remaining buying power, thus cannot buy other products and support the labor required to make those products.
In short: we expend the same amount of time and money, but make fewer things. Your paycheck can buy less, and you become poorer. This isn't a matter of inflation or deflation; it's a matter of the sum total of all money buys a sum total of less stuff.
The long and short of that is it creates more poverty and leads to starvation and homelessness, and thus incurs some deaths.
On the other hand, some pundits argue other costs in environmental damage. As well, nobody really talks about the technological and economic debt: we could just keep chugging along as-is, let the tech evolve, then use the cheaper energy tech to put the genie back into the bottle. We could go atmospheric gas to liquid hydrocarbon fertilizer to grow wood to make structures. We could accept a government tax (a cost that has the same poverty-creating impact I cited above) to create a strategic energy reserve by siphoning a small amount of atmospheric carbon into liquid hydrocarbon and pumping it back into the same oil wells we initially emptied.
Long, complex problems. You'll notice a few finance analogies in there if you look hard.
I'm amazed they can blatantly state their lies and get away with it. Look at the summary:
Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming. A survey of authors of those papers also supported a 97% consensus.
The claim: 97% of CLIMATE SCIENTISTS have definitively decided global warming is caused primarily by human activity.
Problem #1: 11,944 research papers which were all specifically about climate change and human influence; they removed the 7,930 "We don't know" from the numbers, took count of the papers which were *definitely* certain, determined that 97% of *those* support human-caused global warming, and labeled that as 97% of *all*. (Often, deluded opponents will claim the rejected papers had "climate" as a keyword but were not about climatology; that is false: all 11,944 papers were selected from a larger such set, and were selected because they explored human-caused climate change.)
Problem #2: False equivocation. They took count of the number of published papers, and claimed the ratio of published papers agreeing with a position as the ratio of *scientists*. This doesn't adjust for one scientist on many papers, or a large set of papers being entirely produced by a smaller set of scientists. For example: K. Anders Ericsson is co-author on literally thousands of human behavioral psychology papers on the topic of development of expertise, frequently with the same 2-3 co-authors; if similar occurs in climatology, you'll have some climatologists producing many more papers than other climatologists and weighing in with a larger voice.
These are shoddy analysis methods meant to provide good marketing and win an argument by claiming your boy's club is bigger than someone else's and Farah Fawcett likes to visit so nya nya. We did the same things with salt, fat, eggs being bad for you, and everything else in nutrition, and wound up with a lot of "actually, fat seems healthy and salt seems harmless and LOOK GMO! (what are we going to tell them when they realize GMO and synthetic pesticides are harmless?)"
It's not enough to be popular; you have to also be right. Cite important research that shows you're right, not voting blocs of other nerds who share the same hobby. Science isn't a democracy.
You very much can. You just have to convince people that encrypted communications are a complex, high-cost investment provided by a large company, not something they can take personal responsibility for. Your Cellphone needs slipjack because you couldn't handle pre-encrypting your own e-mail; therefor you are helpless if the Government hacks Slipjack.
It's funny when you follow the links and quickly see the scientists failing economics. This is because they're not economists. "Growing world population will strain natural resources"? That happened at either 60 or 130 million humans; welcome to scarcity and technological growth.
The other big one is the space station as a good investment for the country, and a smaller consideration for biofuel. Childlike fascination and a misunderstanding of economics confuse "X is tangentially related to or was involved with Y" with "X is an effective way to reach Y".
Therein you suggest there's some imaginary, undeclared line somewhere between "treating people unpleasantly" and "torturing people." Sleep deprivation has been suggested as torture, but why would it be? People go without sleep due to shitty work schedules all the time, and we don't accuse their employers of violating the Geneva Convention by threatening to fire them if they try to shift their time around.
Does waterboarding do any harm further than imprisoning someone? They both remove control and instill feelings of fear and isolation.
somehow deny that the first Model 3s will be of lower quality than later Model 3s.
Wrong. You state that the Model 3 is a new type of thing, and buying its first production run is stupid because it will be buggy. This implies one of two things: either next year's Model S is *also* still a first-production-run product and buggy, or the Model 3 doesn't benefit from lessons learned in the creation of the Model S.
You either exclude all the organizational knowledge gained from the production of the Model S OR you imply that it's not that the Model 3 will be bad because it's new, but that it will be bad because it's a Tesla and Tesla doesn't know how to make cars, and that its first production run is no worse than the concurrent Model S.
You're trying to suggest an internally-inconsistent position: that the Model S is a mature product, but the Model 3 is brand-new and doesn't have the benefit of prior experience that makes the Model S a mature product.
That happens less on tried-and-true platforms, like GM's D platform with the EcoTec engine, than it does with new and experimental platforms. This is why the Chevrolet Cobalt is a solid car, why so many GMCs are solid cars, why the Mazda 3 is such a fantastic car, why many Fords are great, and so forth; and yet a new model of Audi will come out sometimes and have ridiculous problems like the brakes decide to up and fail, or the Prius of all things would accelerate out-of-control in its first production run but never had that problem again in subsequent model-years.
Do you see Toyota's tried-and-true platforms experiencing problems along side the brand-new Prius? Do you see the modern Prius experiencing the problems of its predecessor?
The Model X is not new like the Tesla Roadster; it's new like the Model S. The Model S had inadequate battery protection, poorly-designed seat locks, standby programming errors that ate battery power, problems with the recessing door handles, and a whole slew of other issues; and it also had a solid production and sale process (despite industry resistance), something the Roadster staggered a bit on. The Model X, without willful and malicious intent, will not experience inadequate battery protection, poorly-designed seat locks, standby programming errors that eat battery power, chargers that catch fire and explode, (old) problems with recessing door handles, or other Model S issues Tesla now knows how to avoid.
In other words: the Model X is basically next year's model S.
And, yes, major manufacturers with established reputations do, in fact, issue far fewer recalls for newer cars than for the earlier models in their platforms, and for earlier models in their production history. They make more mistakes early and learn from them; or are you going to tell me you're no smarter than you were when you were 4 years old because you've never learned a single thing in your life, and you make exactly the same mistakes today, and the same amount of mistakes, with just as serious consequences?
If you think organizations don't learn and develop organizational knowledge to improve efficiency and reduce risks, you're delusional, stupid, or both.
It's kind of a balance thing. Do note that the moderate middle is not necessarily the correct view in all cases; but most things don't work at extremes. In the great many cases where a moderate middle *is* correct, it's a middle of objective extremes; the golden mean of ideal A and ideal B is not necessarily the golden mean of extreme -1 and extreme +1, and the correct course may not be precisely 0.
It's correct to say that allowing businesses to evade 100% of all taxes is non-ideal.
It's also incorrect to say that taking more and more money from businesses will solve any problem, because it's incorrect to say that economy is money and more money equals more wealth.
Some people have this ideal that economies are basically driven by the movement of money, and so making money move more often makes the economy stronger. That's false: economies are driven by production, which is paid for with money. If you make money move unproductively (by taxes, administration, and fake jobs), then you take a productive resource (human labor) and put it into an unproductive role (handling money and forms related to money). In short: where a man could get paid $50,000 to make 1,000,000 tonnes of wheat, he is instead paid $50,000 to sign papers at a desk which only get signed so we can give someone a job, pay for it in taxes, and move money around. Besides taxing $50,000 more from the consumer base, you have lost productive capacity that could make 1,000,000 tonnes of wheat, several thousand chairs, computer software, or anything other than essentially *nothing*.
So the long and short of it is you get people who say, "Well, we should tax the businesses a lot, and stop them from hiding their money, because money makes the world go around!" and this is wrong because economies run on productivity, businesses do strain under high taxes, and typically over 90% of a business's income is expenses which eventually flow down to wages (including high-dollar executive wages) (Farms theoretically aim for a 20% profit, but in practice make 10% or less). On the other side, you get people who say, "Well, we should *cut* income taxes on businesses to stimulate growth!", and this is wrong because growth comes from job (labor) growth, which comes from demand, which comes from consumer buying power, which is tied to wage-labor cost (wages, payroll tax, benefits, etc.) and wage-labor cost-income efficiency (the percentage of wage-labor cost which actually reaches the worker's bank account).
The rough conclusion is that maybe taxing the businesses *a lot* isn't a great plan; cutting the taxes back on businesses has minimal effect; and somehow squeezing more money out of the businesses probably won't do much to actually make the world wealthier (although it might pull more money from another country to your country, allowing you to buy more of their productivity and enrich yourself while leaving them poorer).
I usually favor plans which increase wage-labor efficiency, which leads to more jobs and a more stable economy, allowing riskier investments in new technology, leading to faster technological growth and, ultimately, more wealth. Technological growth is why the average working-class family spent 60% of their hard-earned income on basic needs in 1950, but only 30% on the same basic needs in 2010--meanwhile eating out more and buying THREE TIMES as much housing space, and somehow still managing to buy more non-essential goods (because they spent 6% more on all that extra housing, 20% less on food, and 10% less on clothing). Essentially, I want to live in the world of 1960-1980, where the cost of living relative to wages kept falling and all this new magic kept hitting the shelves. All those high-tech gizmos that we thought would come out 15 years ago but which have started trickling in now and will probably arrive in 15 more years should have all come out 10 years ago.
Such plans include a Citizen's Dividend (a type of UBI), which increases consumer income while not adding wage-labor costs to
Dude, are you immortal? Do your family affairs go on hold when you're in prison? Is freedom valuable to you? Is it distressing to know someone else is in control of your basic life decisions, your movements, your growth, your development?
You're going to get older, you're going to stay isolated from your friends and family, you're going to stale knowledge, you're going to lose time to build your finances. Long-term, you *will* end up poor, because a chunk of financial growth is lost, and you move closer to the end of your time period for financial growth; never mind that you don't just get released back into a fully-functional life, but instead get dumped off into a world where rent and mortgage went unpaid, your stuff was repossessed or destroyed (dumped on the street in eviction), and you start with nothing, homeless, alone, with few places to turn.
You get to think about that every day as you rot away in a prison cell.
Maybe freedom isn't important for mental health. Maybe the U.S. government should arrest every child at birth, put them into education camps, and then stick them in labor camps to perform necessary work. Maybe the solution to poverty is to arrest anyone who's poor.
Wow, you managed to type all that without addressing the problem that Tesla is now on their 3rd car and is still having birthing problems with it.
I never said there would be zero problems. How many of these new Model X cars have suffered the same problems that plagued the Roadster? How many of the problems that plagued the Model X do you expect to appear in the Model 3? Do you expect them to perform better or worse than their first and second generation?
You talk like Tesla fucked up car 1, fucked up car 2 the same way, and will fuck up car 3 the same way; and they'll have to discover those same fuck-ups and fix them, again. The fact of the matter is Tesla is learning, in the same way GM and Chrysler are learning. The Tesla Model 3 isn't a brand-new product in the same way the Tesla Roadster was a brand-new product; it's a new type of Tesla Roadster and Tesla Model X, with different design goals, with the same technology.
In other words: the Model 3 is the Model X with a few pieces tinkered with.
As I said:
The Model 3 won't have this kind of problem because the Model X provides a source of lessons learned. The locking mechanism for the seats won't be flawed in the same way, and will be just as good (or better than) the Model X new seat locking mechanism. Similarly, all comparable and analogous design considerations in the Model 3 will have lessons learned from mistakes and troubles and initial prototypes from the Model X, so that knowledge rolls into the Model 3.
Your response is, "No, they built a poorly-designed locking mechanism once, and had to design a working one; they'll scrap ALL THAT EXPERIENCE and build ANOTHER poorly-designed locking mechanism, probably just like this one being recalled!" You live in a distorted reality where new products are designed in a bubble, without using the knowledge gained from designing previous, similar products. In the real world, we learn.
If you're seriously going to take that line of argument, one can only assume you're not familiar with the concept of learning. That would be the figurative definition of retarded.
Actually, I got a book from Amazon--a lot of them, in fact, mostly out of obsession--and went through certification exams, which I passed on the first try. This is the kind of stuff I'm into: administration, economics, finance, learning, things that form complex systems and allow for continuous improvement through the application of skill technology. I like learning *how* to do things better.
He's a genius.
I can also manufacture geniuses. It's surprisingly simple. People are, again, focused on hard tech: the right classroom skills, the right iPads, the right classroom design; but they're ignoring the simple fact that the human brain is a tool with a set of operational facilities, and that every human can apply those facilities in the same manner as every other human. Asian super-math kids? There's an app for that. Memory world-champions? They learned that. Critical and analytical thinking? A firm understanding of the creative processes and of the strengths and pitfalls of human analogical thinking will improve general reliability.
The human mind is a tool, and using it is a skill.
No, I am actually generalizing from a field I fucking studied.
Have you ever seen the Red Cross work? When the Red Cross enters an area, it's a disaster. No shit. That's what the Red Cross does. In the course of fixing a disaster, a lot more shit goes wrong; this is pretty much the nature of entering a disaster. That includes logistics failures, procedural failures, and political failures. Along the way, the Red Cross documents everything that goes wrong; they review these documents and work out ways to prevent or respond to similar problems should they ever occur in any future disaster. In this way, the Red Cross reduces the amount of time and money wasted in responding to all future disasters.
That documentation is called Lessons Learned. It's part of archived historical project documentation. It's how large organizations emulate the human facility of executive function in which we use past information and future goals to make decisions about current activities by planning. We evaluate our plans through the lens of experience (essentially acquired knowledge) and determine risks and reliable strategies. We use what we know from mistakes we've made in the past to avoid similar mistakes in the future. In individuals, we often call this process "learning".
Maybe it's not that you're not having conversations with people who have a distorted sense of reality; maybe you're just stupid.
The Model 3 won't run the same risks because they have all the organizational knowledge gained by all the mistakes and prototypes of the Model X to work from. Even the things that work in the Model X but that they've seen are sub-optimal in practice tell them how to do better in the Model 3.
This Model X recall is pretty standard: found a flaw, bring car to dealer to have flawed component replaced at manufacturer's expense. It's a simple swap of one mechanical locking mechanism for another, non-shitty one.
The Model 3 won't have this kind of problem because the Model X provides a source of lessons learned. The locking mechanism for the seats won't be flawed in the same way, and will be just as good (or better than) the Model X new seat locking mechanism. Similarly, all comparable and analogous design considerations in the Model 3 will have lessons learned from mistakes and troubles and initial prototypes from the Model X, so that knowledge rolls into the Model 3.
The Model 3 will be a better-designed car than the Model X because they have all the knowledge generated in creating the model X.
All these nerds fantasizing about banging the hot blonde MILF next door, and nobody points out that DNA sequencing was a labor-intensive, manual, thus *extremely* expensive process in 1970, and that technological growth reduced the human labor required per sequencing, thus making DNA paternity testing a viable option after 1990 by reducing the number of wage-labor hours paid out per sequencing (cost, thus price)?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's not quite true, although our business administration has somewhat faltered. Better business techniques would be a good technology to study...
We can see the slow-down of technological growth after 1970, even though new technology kept coming. Still, a smaller percent of the total income (and of the individual's income for most individuals and families) goes toward the same goods each year, and people buy more and better things ("better" actually abstracts from "more": your car has power windows, anti-lock brakes, and air conditioning, which a 1938 Chevrolet Corvette didn't). Scarcity reduces, population increases, and more jobs come to cover population growth.
I have a current weak theory that businesses will take fewer risks in a less-stable economy. As such, one goal of my Citizen's Dividend is to drive more technological advancement by the stabilization effect. My Dividend aims, without major increases in taxes on the upper class, to:
This gives the consumer base more spending power without implementing Piketty-style taxes (45%, 55%, or 85% income tax on income over $1M, etc.), while also reducing the employer cost of human workers in relation to e.g. machines. It does this through the mechanism of a more effective welfare system.
The increase in consumer buying power creates jobs; and the increase in human worker competition with technological redundancy doesn't simply delay, but rather *spreads* replacement. Businesses have risk appetite and risk threshold. Risk appetite is how much they *want* to invest (i.e. lose) for the possibility of a return (i.e. gain); and risk threshold is the hard limit at which they bail. Different businesses will either jump in early (reduce costs now) or jump in late (keep paying workers $1/hr more than machines because in 4 years the machine will be $5/hr cheaper and will net us an extra $650,000 in savings over its life); and they'll finance differently (without so much pressure to compete and with so little advantage, they'll be less-apt to take loans for an early transition) and transition differently (location-by-location roll-out, instead of all-at-once). That protects us from sudden mass technological unemployment that comes with having $9/hr, $11/hr, and $14/hr machines and suddenly making human labor cost $15/hr instead of $8/hr.
As technology rolls in, we see lay-offs. These people become unemployed, and then prices come down over time--not immediately. Often, prices of technologically-improved goods simply grow more slowly than inflation, and so it takes years to recover the buying power in the consumer market. When we finally do, we buy new goods, creating new demand for labor, thus getting the unemployed back into those new jobs.
So what's all this mean?
It means my Dividend aims to make human labor cheaper so it doesn't get replaced as rapidly by technology, and so it gets returned to the labor force more rapidly. People become unemployed more slowly and become re-employed more quickly. That's a stabilizing effect.
That brings me to one of my big, secondary goals: In such a more stable environment, businesses can more readily project th
Facebook makes mass communication in your social circle more rapid. It reduces the amount of time required to share social ideas (e.g. pictures) and to make social plans. That's technology.
The application of technology *is* technology. So are a lot of things nobody thinks about. In education, I often talk about mnemonics, mental mathematics, and theories such as deliberate practice; these things build on more basic structures of psychology applied to education ("educational psychology"), and can give us new ways to teach and learn and improve academic and real-life performance. That's technology: the study (-ology) of improved techniques.
Even then, you get these ranges of what is and isn't worse, and these areas where people think X is worse than Y and others think Y is worse than X. You can modulate how people interpret events. You can change things around by changing perception, as I've stated, using public campaigns to get more people to think Y is worse than X and so X is okay.
I prefer diplomacy because it's more efficient. I like beating people, but only people who need to be beaten--like when some dude is trying to rape some girl at a party, you hit him with a wrench, and that's cool. We can come up with all kinds of arguments about torture, ranging from whether we're dealing with an insurgent who's a child-murder-rapist and thus deserves it to the need to extract information to save lives; and we still have to ask all kinds of questions. Diplomacy answers those questions more effectively than torture.
Diplomacy makes you ask questions. You realize a lot of terrorists and insurgents feel they're justified, they feel they're under attack, they feel they've got a moral requirement to do what they did. For many, this becomes irreconcilable, and they must believe firmly that their opponents are pure evil, else they have to question themselves--which only makes the world too threatening to survive. Often, these views don't hold up when someone has to deal with a compassionate and sympathetic human being who wants to understand them. People love to talk about themselves and they love when you're interested in them, and they will start to question their preset views when you support their sense of self-worth.
Occasionally you find the guy who just wants power and doesn't care who he hurts, or who enjoys watching people scream as he peels their skin away from their flesh, or who gets a rush from the power over others as he rapes and murders their children in front of them. Those people you cannot effectively interrogate by any means; you simply hit them in the face with a brick until you feel sufficiently zen, and then send them to be burned. Get a dog to replace them, because animals are much more sophisticated and civilized.
More considerations nobody makes
(4a) No position: Does not address or mention the cause of global warming
(4b) Uncertain: Expresses position that human’s role on recent global warming is uncertain/undefined
To simplify the analysis, ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).
Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus
More than half of the abstracts that we rated as ‘No Position’ or ‘Undecided’ were rated ‘Endorse AGW’ by the paper’s authors
"Undecided self-rated papers have an average rating equal to 4"
They're apparently lumped together for a reason.
So we've established that Cooke considers a scientist to have no view on AGW if they don't either Support or Oppose it; and that Cooke has rejected anyone whose response to "is human activity causing global warming?" is "I'm not certain", "I don't know," "The data doesn't provide strong evidence for or against," or "I'm a pastry chef; why are you asking me?", and has labeled these all as equivalent positions.
So, in answer to your question,
What is it about "no position" that you people don't understand?
I would have to say it's the same thing Cooke didn't understand when he wrote his paper; but that would be a lie. Examine Cooke's paper very, very carefully. You see lots of passages like this:
Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus
No mention of how many rejected, how many expressed uncertainty, and how many expressed that their paper was not about AGW. There's also the fact that 34.9% of RESPONDENTS claimed no position themselves on AGW, which is really hard to do if you're a climate scientist unless you're uncertain. Cooke ran away from both of these bits of data, scrubbing any mention of how many non-support self-rated abstracts were rejections, how many were papers not about the cause of global warming, and how many were self-rated as uncertain.
In other words: Cooke named the no-position/uncertain separately (to create credibility arguments like yours), made them numerically equivalent (4), then proceeded to roll them up into a single topic when the deeper data analysis started coming along. Instead of saying, "There are some no-positions, and we found that X% support AGW and Y% are uncertain," he said, "We have a few definitely-uncertain and some who are ambiguous; we rolled them up into a big pile we'll just call 'no-position', and X% of them are in support; ignore the rest, they don't count."
That's subtle. It's not only a good way to hide data and trick people into accepting your conclusion, but also a good way to set up for debates (e.g. peer review) by making it difficult to follow the trail of data manipulation. Real data is lost (how many of the respondents labeled their papers as AGW uncertain?), but you can recover some data by meta-analysis.
Some people talk about studying statistics so they can understand why some numbers aren't as important as they think. They're too blunt: they're thinking about stuff like cherry picking, implying causation from correlation, or overstating the significance of a small sample. Few people think about things like changing the dynamic of a measurement (e.g. mnemonics can be proven more or less effective by the same data if you measure percent of objects remembered vs forgot, or number remembered vs forgot in a given time), much less about how to structure a thesis to lead the mind through a series of careful manipulations to accept a conclusion by decreasing the significance of some subset of the data and quietly sweeping it away. Lying with statistics is a highly complex art developed over years and decades of practice, not something you get by sitting through a three week math course at your local community college.
When they emailed the authors, more of the authors said their paper as a whole endorsed the consensus than the abstract ratings alone did. That doesn't show that the self-rating system is somehow biased *toward* AGW. It probably shows that an abstract contains less information than the paper as a whole. Surprise!
It probably shows that, yes; and it *also* shows that the plan here isn't, "Uh, oh, hmm, using Cooke's analysis produces a high number of AGW supporters; using this *other* process produces a lower number, so let's use that as a supporting argument!" What I showed is that Cooke's follow-up analysis of the stance of those *excluded* from his AGW numbers leans toward higher support for AGW than Cooke's initial analysis, and so I have a stronger position and can show a lower amount of support for AGW by *hiding* the numbers I've cited.
In other words: I picked the numbers that most strongly weaken my argument, and still came out with a strong argument.
You're trying to use a fallacy of equivocation: I said "bias" to indicate that one method of analysis favors a position more than another, and you're repeating "bias" to say "lies and damned lies to support a pre-conceived outcome." Maybe learn not to be a deceptive, dishonest asshole?
You completely ignored my rebuttal, and simply flung a new set of accusations.
Your rebuttle was to claim those papers weren't relevant. I responded by pointing out that Cooke excluded them because they didn't take a direct position, even though they were relevant. In other words: you said, "They weren't about that!", and I said, "Yes they were; they just didn't have a yes/no conclusion." Again: you're lying to try to dodge the argument, and you're trying to poison the well by making false claims about the context of the debate.
I'll point out that someone is much more likely to claim something unpleasant and--especially--frightening is torture if someone else has suggested that, just like people claim every little thing anyone does now is terrorism. That's a stabilizing argument, not a counter-argument: I'm pointing out a weakness in your argument based on the specific situation in which it most frequently applies, which is not the same as defining a reason your conclusion is wrong.
My point is that, yes, we have fuzzy lines, and we haven't sat down and decided where we want to actually draw them or how we want to redraw them when the lines are questioned. What we have, instead, is a popularity contest: if we were to set up stands and subject people to waterboarding in a controlled environment, most people would discover that cold water to the face is unpleasant and that the experience is kind of disturbing, but that they're not that terribly upset about it; do this enough and publicize their testimonials and you can change the media dialogue, and the public will re-define waterboarding as not torture.
The politicians can and do respond to this. If the public never made a huge deal out of waterboarding, it's likely the current CIA manuals would include a small section detailing the concern, the evidence (media circus), and the conclusion that waterboarding is not torture and is simply an effective interrogation technique. As I've shown, we can produce such a situation simply by modifying the media dialogue.
A few zaps to the arm and you'll probably laugh it off, but the same stimulation in an interrogation setting is an infliction of pain and fear which produces acute and, possibly, long-term psychiatric trauma and thus is torture... or, well, it's not torture, because we've gone around with the CIA PR booth zapping people and making funny YouTube videos and explained that this is merely an "annoyance" that will "encourage" POWs to cooperate.
Do you see the problem?
"97% of climate scientists"
An ‘Uncertain’ abstract explicitly states that the cause of global warming is not yet determined (e.g., ‘. . . the extent of human-induced global warming is inconclusive. . . ’) while a ‘No Position’ abstract makes no statement on AGW
We emailed 8547 authors an invitation to rate their own papers and received 1200 responses (a 14% response rate). After excluding papers that were not peer-reviewed, not climate-related or had no abstract, 2142 papers received self-ratings from 1189 authors. The self-rated levels of endorsement are shown in table 4. Among self-rated papers that stated a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. Among self-rated papers not expressing a position on AGW in the abstract, 53.8% were self-rated as endorsing the consensus
Okay, so we excluded "No Position", of which 53.8% (plus or minus) appear to endorse a consensus. How many was that?
Endorse AGW 32.6% (3896); No AGW position 66.4% (7930); Reject AGW 0.7% (78); Uncertain on AGW 0.3% (40)
66.4%! We reject 66.4% of papers from our analysis, of which around 53.8% appear to endorse. If we included them, we'd get a number like 8162 for, 3782 not-for (almost all of which are undecided--very few against), about 68.3% in consensus.
"68.3% of climate papers authored by climate scientists in consensus with global warming" doesn't sound strong enough. "97% of climate scientists" comes out of that somehow. When they compare actual paper authors instead of papers, they got 62.7% in consensus, 2.4% against, and 34.9% expressing an undecided position.
It gets better!
Of the papers which received self-rating, 36.9% had abstracts expressing a position of consensus for AGW. When they phoned up the authors and asked them, 62.7% of those authors self-rated their position and the position of their paper as in consensus. In other words: the self-rating system is biased *toward* AGW.
To simplify the analysis, ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections (including implicit and explicit; categories 5–7).
The whole thing also takes implicit endorsements of AGW as endorsements--which is fair, and notable. If you write a paper that strongly supports AGW and you try to conclude AGW is not a thing, you're just delusional. There's a large difference between being wrong and being delusional: wrong just means your facts are incorrect; delusional means the facts are right in front of you and you refuse to believe them. Evidence for the fairness of this methodology includes that more papers self-rate in support for AGW than do papers whose abstracts declare support: scientists who produce evidence for AGW and don't come out to declare it as such likely expect you to recognize the obvious.
Yes, there are major flaws in methodology for the Cooke number of 97% consensus. I take Computer Statistics III, I know what I'm talking about.
He gave out a password, one article got defaced, and he faced a potential 25 years in prison. Seriously. The judge could have fired that one off and it would have counted, no cruel-and-unusual-punishment defense.
"What if he had..." a small harem of 12-year-old girls? He could have gotten fewer than 20 years in prison.
We have a legal system that gives murderers, rapists, and pederasts a very real chance of getting a shorter sentence than a rowdy kid who defaces a Web site--and that's accounting for the fact that this same system routinely tries to put pederasts in prison for twice as long as murderers (i.e. why not just murder the child and dump the body in the woods? It's a *smaller* crime, not a bigger risk!).
TIL you should rape and murder everyone who might be a witness to your computer hacking shenanigans.
Fiberglass is a plastic epoxy resin reinforcing a glass fiber.
That will happen when the human labor involved is lower.
It's a difficult problem: when you have a more expensive technology, that technology requires more human labor. This holds true at higher demands; low-demand economics are strange, and require understanding of business economics of risk. Energy is *the* high-demand product, so we can assume any energy technology is necessarily high-demand: if it's cheaper than modern methods, everybody wants it.
In short: Nuclear competes with Coal; Nuclear will replace Coal practically overnight when the combined cost of transitioning to Nuclear is cheaper than the un-sunk costs of maintaining a coal plant. (The resulting slow transition is a good thing, generally, unless you want to see the Great Depression first-hand.)
If we move early by brute force, two things happen. First, the more labor-intensive technology requires a bigger chunk of the population, thus more wages (and taxes and shit) for the product (electricity), thus depriving that labor from producing other things. Second, the cost of paying all those wages raises the price of the product, and the consumer finds themselves with less remaining buying power, thus cannot buy other products and support the labor required to make those products.
In short: we expend the same amount of time and money, but make fewer things. Your paycheck can buy less, and you become poorer. This isn't a matter of inflation or deflation; it's a matter of the sum total of all money buys a sum total of less stuff.
The long and short of that is it creates more poverty and leads to starvation and homelessness, and thus incurs some deaths.
On the other hand, some pundits argue other costs in environmental damage. As well, nobody really talks about the technological and economic debt: we could just keep chugging along as-is, let the tech evolve, then use the cheaper energy tech to put the genie back into the bottle. We could go atmospheric gas to liquid hydrocarbon fertilizer to grow wood to make structures. We could accept a government tax (a cost that has the same poverty-creating impact I cited above) to create a strategic energy reserve by siphoning a small amount of atmospheric carbon into liquid hydrocarbon and pumping it back into the same oil wells we initially emptied.
Long, complex problems. You'll notice a few finance analogies in there if you look hard.
I'm amazed they can blatantly state their lies and get away with it. Look at the summary:
Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming. A survey of authors of those papers also supported a 97% consensus.
The claim: 97% of CLIMATE SCIENTISTS have definitively decided global warming is caused primarily by human activity.
Problem #1: 11,944 research papers which were all specifically about climate change and human influence; they removed the 7,930 "We don't know" from the numbers, took count of the papers which were *definitely* certain, determined that 97% of *those* support human-caused global warming, and labeled that as 97% of *all*. (Often, deluded opponents will claim the rejected papers had "climate" as a keyword but were not about climatology; that is false: all 11,944 papers were selected from a larger such set, and were selected because they explored human-caused climate change.)
Problem #2: False equivocation. They took count of the number of published papers, and claimed the ratio of published papers agreeing with a position as the ratio of *scientists*. This doesn't adjust for one scientist on many papers, or a large set of papers being entirely produced by a smaller set of scientists. For example: K. Anders Ericsson is co-author on literally thousands of human behavioral psychology papers on the topic of development of expertise, frequently with the same 2-3 co-authors; if similar occurs in climatology, you'll have some climatologists producing many more papers than other climatologists and weighing in with a larger voice.
These are shoddy analysis methods meant to provide good marketing and win an argument by claiming your boy's club is bigger than someone else's and Farah Fawcett likes to visit so nya nya. We did the same things with salt, fat, eggs being bad for you, and everything else in nutrition, and wound up with a lot of "actually, fat seems healthy and salt seems harmless and LOOK GMO! (what are we going to tell them when they realize GMO and synthetic pesticides are harmless?)"
It's not enough to be popular; you have to also be right. Cite important research that shows you're right, not voting blocs of other nerds who share the same hobby. Science isn't a democracy.
You very much can. You just have to convince people that encrypted communications are a complex, high-cost investment provided by a large company, not something they can take personal responsibility for. Your Cellphone needs slipjack because you couldn't handle pre-encrypting your own e-mail; therefor you are helpless if the Government hacks Slipjack.
It's funny when you follow the links and quickly see the scientists failing economics. This is because they're not economists. "Growing world population will strain natural resources"? That happened at either 60 or 130 million humans; welcome to scarcity and technological growth.
The other big one is the space station as a good investment for the country, and a smaller consideration for biofuel. Childlike fascination and a misunderstanding of economics confuse "X is tangentially related to or was involved with Y" with "X is an effective way to reach Y".
Therein you suggest there's some imaginary, undeclared line somewhere between "treating people unpleasantly" and "torturing people." Sleep deprivation has been suggested as torture, but why would it be? People go without sleep due to shitty work schedules all the time, and we don't accuse their employers of violating the Geneva Convention by threatening to fire them if they try to shift their time around.
Does waterboarding do any harm further than imprisoning someone? They both remove control and instill feelings of fear and isolation.
Grammar Girl will never touch your wee-wee.
somehow deny that the first Model 3s will be of lower quality than later Model 3s.
Wrong. You state that the Model 3 is a new type of thing, and buying its first production run is stupid because it will be buggy. This implies one of two things: either next year's Model S is *also* still a first-production-run product and buggy, or the Model 3 doesn't benefit from lessons learned in the creation of the Model S.
You either exclude all the organizational knowledge gained from the production of the Model S OR you imply that it's not that the Model 3 will be bad because it's new, but that it will be bad because it's a Tesla and Tesla doesn't know how to make cars, and that its first production run is no worse than the concurrent Model S.
You're trying to suggest an internally-inconsistent position: that the Model S is a mature product, but the Model 3 is brand-new and doesn't have the benefit of prior experience that makes the Model S a mature product.
That happens less on tried-and-true platforms, like GM's D platform with the EcoTec engine, than it does with new and experimental platforms. This is why the Chevrolet Cobalt is a solid car, why so many GMCs are solid cars, why the Mazda 3 is such a fantastic car, why many Fords are great, and so forth; and yet a new model of Audi will come out sometimes and have ridiculous problems like the brakes decide to up and fail, or the Prius of all things would accelerate out-of-control in its first production run but never had that problem again in subsequent model-years.
Do you see Toyota's tried-and-true platforms experiencing problems along side the brand-new Prius? Do you see the modern Prius experiencing the problems of its predecessor?
The Model X is not new like the Tesla Roadster; it's new like the Model S. The Model S had inadequate battery protection, poorly-designed seat locks, standby programming errors that ate battery power, problems with the recessing door handles, and a whole slew of other issues; and it also had a solid production and sale process (despite industry resistance), something the Roadster staggered a bit on. The Model X, without willful and malicious intent, will not experience inadequate battery protection, poorly-designed seat locks, standby programming errors that eat battery power, chargers that catch fire and explode, (old) problems with recessing door handles, or other Model S issues Tesla now knows how to avoid.
In other words: the Model X is basically next year's model S.
And, yes, major manufacturers with established reputations do, in fact, issue far fewer recalls for newer cars than for the earlier models in their platforms, and for earlier models in their production history. They make more mistakes early and learn from them; or are you going to tell me you're no smarter than you were when you were 4 years old because you've never learned a single thing in your life, and you make exactly the same mistakes today, and the same amount of mistakes, with just as serious consequences?
If you think organizations don't learn and develop organizational knowledge to improve efficiency and reduce risks, you're delusional, stupid, or both.
It's kind of a balance thing. Do note that the moderate middle is not necessarily the correct view in all cases; but most things don't work at extremes. In the great many cases where a moderate middle *is* correct, it's a middle of objective extremes; the golden mean of ideal A and ideal B is not necessarily the golden mean of extreme -1 and extreme +1, and the correct course may not be precisely 0.
It's correct to say that allowing businesses to evade 100% of all taxes is non-ideal.
It's also incorrect to say that taking more and more money from businesses will solve any problem, because it's incorrect to say that economy is money and more money equals more wealth.
Some people have this ideal that economies are basically driven by the movement of money, and so making money move more often makes the economy stronger. That's false: economies are driven by production, which is paid for with money. If you make money move unproductively (by taxes, administration, and fake jobs), then you take a productive resource (human labor) and put it into an unproductive role (handling money and forms related to money). In short: where a man could get paid $50,000 to make 1,000,000 tonnes of wheat, he is instead paid $50,000 to sign papers at a desk which only get signed so we can give someone a job, pay for it in taxes, and move money around. Besides taxing $50,000 more from the consumer base, you have lost productive capacity that could make 1,000,000 tonnes of wheat, several thousand chairs, computer software, or anything other than essentially *nothing*.
So the long and short of it is you get people who say, "Well, we should tax the businesses a lot, and stop them from hiding their money, because money makes the world go around!" and this is wrong because economies run on productivity, businesses do strain under high taxes, and typically over 90% of a business's income is expenses which eventually flow down to wages (including high-dollar executive wages) (Farms theoretically aim for a 20% profit, but in practice make 10% or less). On the other side, you get people who say, "Well, we should *cut* income taxes on businesses to stimulate growth!", and this is wrong because growth comes from job (labor) growth, which comes from demand, which comes from consumer buying power, which is tied to wage-labor cost (wages, payroll tax, benefits, etc.) and wage-labor cost-income efficiency (the percentage of wage-labor cost which actually reaches the worker's bank account).
The rough conclusion is that maybe taxing the businesses *a lot* isn't a great plan; cutting the taxes back on businesses has minimal effect; and somehow squeezing more money out of the businesses probably won't do much to actually make the world wealthier (although it might pull more money from another country to your country, allowing you to buy more of their productivity and enrich yourself while leaving them poorer).
I usually favor plans which increase wage-labor efficiency, which leads to more jobs and a more stable economy, allowing riskier investments in new technology, leading to faster technological growth and, ultimately, more wealth. Technological growth is why the average working-class family spent 60% of their hard-earned income on basic needs in 1950, but only 30% on the same basic needs in 2010--meanwhile eating out more and buying THREE TIMES as much housing space, and somehow still managing to buy more non-essential goods (because they spent 6% more on all that extra housing, 20% less on food, and 10% less on clothing). Essentially, I want to live in the world of 1960-1980, where the cost of living relative to wages kept falling and all this new magic kept hitting the shelves. All those high-tech gizmos that we thought would come out 15 years ago but which have started trickling in now and will probably arrive in 15 more years should have all come out 10 years ago.
Such plans include a Citizen's Dividend (a type of UBI), which increases consumer income while not adding wage-labor costs to
Dude, are you immortal? Do your family affairs go on hold when you're in prison? Is freedom valuable to you? Is it distressing to know someone else is in control of your basic life decisions, your movements, your growth, your development?
You're going to get older, you're going to stay isolated from your friends and family, you're going to stale knowledge, you're going to lose time to build your finances. Long-term, you *will* end up poor, because a chunk of financial growth is lost, and you move closer to the end of your time period for financial growth; never mind that you don't just get released back into a fully-functional life, but instead get dumped off into a world where rent and mortgage went unpaid, your stuff was repossessed or destroyed (dumped on the street in eviction), and you start with nothing, homeless, alone, with few places to turn.
You get to think about that every day as you rot away in a prison cell.
Maybe freedom isn't important for mental health. Maybe the U.S. government should arrest every child at birth, put them into education camps, and then stick them in labor camps to perform necessary work. Maybe the solution to poverty is to arrest anyone who's poor.
Maybe you're just insane, stupid, or retarded.
Wow, you managed to type all that without addressing the problem that Tesla is now on their 3rd car and is still having birthing problems with it.
I never said there would be zero problems. How many of these new Model X cars have suffered the same problems that plagued the Roadster? How many of the problems that plagued the Model X do you expect to appear in the Model 3? Do you expect them to perform better or worse than their first and second generation?
You talk like Tesla fucked up car 1, fucked up car 2 the same way, and will fuck up car 3 the same way; and they'll have to discover those same fuck-ups and fix them, again. The fact of the matter is Tesla is learning, in the same way GM and Chrysler are learning. The Tesla Model 3 isn't a brand-new product in the same way the Tesla Roadster was a brand-new product; it's a new type of Tesla Roadster and Tesla Model X, with different design goals, with the same technology.
In other words: the Model 3 is the Model X with a few pieces tinkered with.
As I said:
The Model 3 won't have this kind of problem because the Model X provides a source of lessons learned. The locking mechanism for the seats won't be flawed in the same way, and will be just as good (or better than) the Model X new seat locking mechanism. Similarly, all comparable and analogous design considerations in the Model 3 will have lessons learned from mistakes and troubles and initial prototypes from the Model X, so that knowledge rolls into the Model 3.
Your response is, "No, they built a poorly-designed locking mechanism once, and had to design a working one; they'll scrap ALL THAT EXPERIENCE and build ANOTHER poorly-designed locking mechanism, probably just like this one being recalled!" You live in a distorted reality where new products are designed in a bubble, without using the knowledge gained from designing previous, similar products. In the real world, we learn.
If you're seriously going to take that line of argument, one can only assume you're not familiar with the concept of learning. That would be the figurative definition of retarded.
Actually, I got a book from Amazon--a lot of them, in fact, mostly out of obsession--and went through certification exams, which I passed on the first try. This is the kind of stuff I'm into: administration, economics, finance, learning, things that form complex systems and allow for continuous improvement through the application of skill technology. I like learning *how* to do things better.
He's a genius.
I can also manufacture geniuses. It's surprisingly simple. People are, again, focused on hard tech: the right classroom skills, the right iPads, the right classroom design; but they're ignoring the simple fact that the human brain is a tool with a set of operational facilities, and that every human can apply those facilities in the same manner as every other human. Asian super-math kids? There's an app for that. Memory world-champions? They learned that. Critical and analytical thinking? A firm understanding of the creative processes and of the strengths and pitfalls of human analogical thinking will improve general reliability.
The human mind is a tool, and using it is a skill.
No, I am actually generalizing from a field I fucking studied.
Have you ever seen the Red Cross work? When the Red Cross enters an area, it's a disaster. No shit. That's what the Red Cross does. In the course of fixing a disaster, a lot more shit goes wrong; this is pretty much the nature of entering a disaster. That includes logistics failures, procedural failures, and political failures. Along the way, the Red Cross documents everything that goes wrong; they review these documents and work out ways to prevent or respond to similar problems should they ever occur in any future disaster. In this way, the Red Cross reduces the amount of time and money wasted in responding to all future disasters.
That documentation is called Lessons Learned. It's part of archived historical project documentation. It's how large organizations emulate the human facility of executive function in which we use past information and future goals to make decisions about current activities by planning. We evaluate our plans through the lens of experience (essentially acquired knowledge) and determine risks and reliable strategies. We use what we know from mistakes we've made in the past to avoid similar mistakes in the future. In individuals, we often call this process "learning".
Maybe it's not that you're not having conversations with people who have a distorted sense of reality; maybe you're just stupid.
The Model 3 won't run the same risks because they have all the organizational knowledge gained by all the mistakes and prototypes of the Model X to work from. Even the things that work in the Model X but that they've seen are sub-optimal in practice tell them how to do better in the Model 3.
Not really.
This Model X recall is pretty standard: found a flaw, bring car to dealer to have flawed component replaced at manufacturer's expense. It's a simple swap of one mechanical locking mechanism for another, non-shitty one.
The Model 3 won't have this kind of problem because the Model X provides a source of lessons learned. The locking mechanism for the seats won't be flawed in the same way, and will be just as good (or better than) the Model X new seat locking mechanism. Similarly, all comparable and analogous design considerations in the Model 3 will have lessons learned from mistakes and troubles and initial prototypes from the Model X, so that knowledge rolls into the Model 3.
The Model 3 will be a better-designed car than the Model X because they have all the knowledge generated in creating the model X.
All these nerds fantasizing about banging the hot blonde MILF next door, and nobody points out that DNA sequencing was a labor-intensive, manual, thus *extremely* expensive process in 1970, and that technological growth reduced the human labor required per sequencing, thus making DNA paternity testing a viable option after 1990 by reducing the number of wage-labor hours paid out per sequencing (cost, thus price)?