What is the "national security of the United States" anyway? Because last I checked, it amounts to military power. If I can put a boot in your ass, your intelligence telling you I'm coming to put a boot in your ass doesn't help.
Diesel generators run at either 200RPM or 1800RPM in most applications. I know 200RPM is common for aviation with electrical drive train, didn't know it was tied to the AC frequency.
Gasoline engines provide 25%-30% of the energy released by burning the fuel as useful work.
Diesel engines provide 40% of the energy released by burning the fuel as useful work. Turbocharged diesel engines can improve this to around 50%.
That means a diesel engine with, say, a therm of diesel fuel (100,000 BTU) will produce nearly twice as much useful output power as a petrol engine with a therm of gasoline. There will be less diesel fuel (by both mass and volume) than gasoline to provide that 1 therm of input fuel, so storage density is also higher. You're going to get more than twice as much work out of the same volume and weight of diesel.
Sub-optimal is not subjective. Using an excessive amount of salt in food is sub-optimal: more salt than is healthy may taste better (note: salt has no impact on health at intake levels between 1500mg and 6000mg), but an excessively high amount of salt tastes bad, can cause the skin inside the mouth to peel and bleed, and can induce vomiting.
The Child of Omelas represented a fully optimized state: one person experienced high suffering, but eliminating that suffering would destroy the lives of thousands each generation. In the hypothetical system, there was no way to decouple these things, and so we could show that taking any action to reduce the suffering of this person would bring about greater suffering to society.
In real life, the easiest example is healthcare. Full public healthcare is inherently broken: it's expensive, causing a high degree of economic damage. Stronger states like Norway and Germany have full public healthcare, Norway by extreme prosperity (fourth largest oil supplier in the world--incredible amount of wealth, modest taxes support the system) and Germany by taxes (above 50% for the middle class). Canada has a hybrid system in which any employed Canadian has employer-supplied private health insurance--73% of Canadians are using private insurance, easing the pressure off the public system. Poorer countries like the United States simply can't do it.
Even a poor nation with functional healthcare would benefit by supplying all clinical services (e.g. health checkups, immunizations, minor injury treatment, STD tests) by either public funds or regulation by which hospitals must supply clinical coverage at their own expense. While full public funding of cancer treatment and the like may bankrupt the country, supply of basic health needs reduces the burden of healthcare and strengthens the country's economy. As you extend this, the returns diminish: you gain $1000 for every $1 invested, the $100 per $1, then $10, then you hit $1 per $1. After that, the system costs more than it's worth.
That final point, where you neither gain nor lose for your additional investment, is the optimal point. The system is fully optimized when taken out to unity, as every dollar invested has provided a return. In the case of healthcare, this return stems from fitness of the labor force and reduction of healthcare costs by better general public health. After this point, investing additional money in other social welfare efforts improves the economy further, typically decreasing factors which lead to lower public health: investing money somewhere other than public health can actually improve public health.
That's what optimal means. It means you take action X because action X provides the best return overall. Action X may solve some other problem which you could address directly, but chose not to. For example: Police, prisons, and ubiquitous wiretapping would address crime; but so would better welfare and mental health services. An investment in welfare and mental health services strengthens the labor force, improving the economy; an investment in enforcement culls the labor force and costs money. Which is more optimal?
A lot of complexity and weight? It's an alternator, a 200 pound single-piston diesel, and a fuel tank and pump. The car already has batteries and a computer; you would make the batteries smaller, since diesel and kerosene have higher energy density. The battery powers the electrical system with or without the engine; the engine could run only under 25% battery capacity or so, mainly running on plug-in.
It's actually a simple design. It's not a Prius; the engine doesn't drive the wheels. The engine supplies electricity, charging the battery and powering the electrical system directly. In effect, you're plugging the charge port into an on-board generator, and running that when battery gets low.
Well Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago all function about the same way, despite hosting the major auto manufacturing industry, an international trading port and the water supply for the entire state of Maryland, and the futures exchange for the entire United States.
Plug-in diesel hybrids would probably be better, especially with an all-electric drive train.
An all-electric drive train allows a light diesel engine to run in its most efficient operating range continuously, under variable load. The engine could be a single-piston diesel pegged to 200RPM, getting more fuel when the battery charge is below 85% and when there is current draw by the motor.. The increased load (by charging or supplying power) would require more torque output for the engine to maintain 200RPM, hence more fuel. When the motor is drawing power, the engine supplements the battery; when the motor draws less power (or none), the engine charges the battery.
This setup allows for plug-in charging, as well as high density fuel usage. We can use excess capacity at hydroelectric dams, solar plants, and wind farms to generate diesel fuel, both direct from air and by fermented waste, e.g, grease fryer oil, corn stalks, or wood pulp. This provides a zero-emission hydrocarbon fuel source which we can pipeline across the country. Combustible waste can go straight into a Fischer-Tropsch process used for gas-to-liquid or coal-to-liquid in modern applications.
These conversions have high amounts of loss, but are suitable for reclamation. Hydro plants dump millions of gallons of water without power generation when under-utilized; wind farms and solar plants ground their production. Even at 50% efficiency, conversion into fuel provides a valuable commodity.
That happens a lot with whitehouse.gov petitions. They were originally designed to be reachable; now they're designed to be reachable if national media attention highlights them.
Where are you people coming from? "Oh, if I get rich, but the other guy starves in the street, his suffering is a consequence.." No, his suffering is something you don't necessarily care about. It's only consequential if you care about it. I make more than the average ($55,000 is the mean income of Americans), and that means that someone, somewhere, is experiencing poverty because I'm not. That's inconsequential: I'm definitely getting a raise or a higher paying salary when I see the opportunity.
If you could murder someone you didn't like, and nobody you cared about or relied on cared, and you felt no remorse, then there would be no consequences.
Thousands? There are tens of thousands of burglars in my city, and more than one murder per day. More than 10% of the general population here has committed minor aggravated assault.
Kryptonite Inc. will pay for your bicycle, up to $5000, if it's stolen when properly locked with one of their locks. Except in New York City, because there are projected to be over a hundred thousand bike thieves there (New York's population is about 15 times the population of my city) and bikes theft is hardcore.
With millions of people already committing these crimes, how do you think only thousands are actually willing to engage in this behavior? A study of 5000 college students (half men, half women) claimed 8% of men reported behaviors that are legally rape, but 85% of that 8% didn't consider it rape; 35% of the whole of men surveyed claimed they would consider committing rape if they were 100% certain of no consequences (i.e. only 65% said they absolutely would not commit an act of rape, even if they would get away with it).
Face it: the number is more like hundreds of millions than tens of millions. Roll together rape, murder, assault, theft.
Changing some of your actions to reduce suffering of others is often also sub-optimal. We could solve a lot of crime with telescreens, party propaganda, and laws against thought crime.
Yes, you're talking about Promise Theory. Attempting to enforce a policy which a population hasn't promised to conform to is an attack. In group dynamics, the promise of the group is complex: it's not a straight 50-50 majority, and it's often affected by social structures (e.g., special interests, minority groups, and their impact on rights of the majority and other minorities). Regardless, the concept holds: if your group hasn't agreed, as a group, to the rules, then your group is under attack.
including the 30% bar (because the human has three options - human, machine, don't know).
Hey dude, I have a lottery ticket for you. You should pay me like 50 bucks for it. You have a 50% chance of being a billionaire: either you'll win or you won't.
Actually, they're all wrong because any set of individuals with no cultural background (i.e. no existing morals, ethics, etc.) living in a world where these things may happen to them would feel threatened. Societies always provide protections against these threats: as they form, they group together to protect their members, which quickly becomes the unstructured hunting and killing of threat sources (i.e. kill people or other tribes who kill your clansmen), and eventually laws and police forces and governments.
Other morals and ethics--for example, sexual laws about adultery (we used to stone people to death...) or sex with 14 year olds (this used to be marriage age, and 20-25 year old men would marry 13-14 year old girls and get them pregnant)--evolve culturally. They are not inherent, but not completely baseless: the evolution of our economy has made it harmful for girls to get married or have children at that age, hence the sex thing (as we've considered sex and contraception immoral for cultural reasons, i.e. religion, and so have long associated sex with children).
Consequences are relative. Another person dying is not a consequence unless it particularly affects you: people in California die all the time due to earthquakes, and I don't go offering to let Californians stay in my basement so they won't be crushed by collapsing highways. Killing a person with your bare hands has zero consequences if it doesn't bother you, doesn't affect your future prospects, and doesn't garner retaliation from society.
Most people don't think globally; those of us who do are working by numbers, not by individuals. Nobody has a fully-resolved cause-and-effect engine in his head.
A democracy *can't* function that way. The laws aren't supported by the people; they're put there when 98% of the population has no idea what they are, what they mean, what they do, or that those things are actually wrong in some way.
Let's put this into perspective: people are afraid of speeding. I've seen advertisements showing skulls and children, talking about how you have a 70% chance of survival after being hit by a car at 25mph, or a 40% chance of death at 40mph (misleading: the statistics are wrong--you actually have a high chance of death or severe injury around 40mph--and the asymptote inflects around 35mph). States raising speed limits always get a huge political battle over all the dangers of driving 75mph on the Interstate, since 60mph is so very safe. We have signs on buses advertising the crackdown on speeding.
Meanwhile, people are getting licensed with as little as 10 hours behind the wheel of a vehicle. The license test here? As prompted, use your signal and turn left. Then parallel park. Then drive to a stop sign, stop, signal, turn right. Two more stop signs, 30 feet to each. Congratulations kid, ya pass.
Most racing schools also have advanced driving classes. These classes usually start with a discussion about vehicle dynamics, then move on to practical experience driving on closed course. Serpentine course to feel how your suspension loads, handles, and fails. Skid pads to practice skid recovery. Minor obstacle courses where you practice searching for, recognizing, predicting, and reacting to hazards. These courses teach you to handle your car in hazard situations, to recognize potential hazards before the situation becomes hazardous, and to react to hazards that come out of nowhere (idiot drivers, kids appearing from behind parked cars, etc.).
These are all things you will encounter repeatedly while driving, but we teach none of this in driver's ed. We don't require it for licensing. We don't even put you on the road to see how you drive in traffic. Can he stop at a stop sign? Then he gets a license. Put anti-lock brakes in the car, he'll be fine. No need to prepare for rain, ice, blown-out tires, pedestrians, children, other bad drivers, or the simple consequence of encountering the limits of your car when actively reacting to any of these things.
74 people in over a decade isn't a lot. That's 7.4 each year. Training these people for to unpredicted hazardous situations would have increased their chances of recovering or minimizing the damage, even as the brakes and steering became stiff. I've shut my engine off and back on due to a stall, in dense traffic, at 40mph; I never considered an engine restart a dangerous situation, but that's just because I've always handed it properly. I see not everyone can.
Of course we should fix these issues. We should prevent unnecessary life-threatening hazards. I simply don't see this particular engineering issue as worthy of so much attention. It's minor, it had very low incidence of harm, and it's readily fixed. We've learned lessons from it. There are much worse things going on right in front of our faces that we're not getting outraged over, and those things are cheap to fix and causing thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.
13 people died in incidents somehow related to the ignition switch turning off the engine.
This is across how many GM cars sold? Tens of millions? It looks like a non-issue to me. I mean seriously, your keyring is too heavy and so shuts off your car's engine?
People occasionally choke on hotdogs. More people have died because of faulty hotdog design in the past year than GM has claimed in the past 20 years.
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The 50% number comes specifically from automobiles using turbodiesels, like the Volkswagen Jetta TDi.
What is the "national security of the United States" anyway? Because last I checked, it amounts to military power. If I can put a boot in your ass, your intelligence telling you I'm coming to put a boot in your ass doesn't help.
Diesel generators run at either 200RPM or 1800RPM in most applications. I know 200RPM is common for aviation with electrical drive train, didn't know it was tied to the AC frequency.
Gasoline engines provide 25%-30% of the energy released by burning the fuel as useful work.
Diesel engines provide 40% of the energy released by burning the fuel as useful work. Turbocharged diesel engines can improve this to around 50%.
That means a diesel engine with, say, a therm of diesel fuel (100,000 BTU) will produce nearly twice as much useful output power as a petrol engine with a therm of gasoline. There will be less diesel fuel (by both mass and volume) than gasoline to provide that 1 therm of input fuel, so storage density is also higher. You're going to get more than twice as much work out of the same volume and weight of diesel.
Sub-optimal is not subjective. Using an excessive amount of salt in food is sub-optimal: more salt than is healthy may taste better (note: salt has no impact on health at intake levels between 1500mg and 6000mg), but an excessively high amount of salt tastes bad, can cause the skin inside the mouth to peel and bleed, and can induce vomiting.
The Child of Omelas represented a fully optimized state: one person experienced high suffering, but eliminating that suffering would destroy the lives of thousands each generation. In the hypothetical system, there was no way to decouple these things, and so we could show that taking any action to reduce the suffering of this person would bring about greater suffering to society.
In real life, the easiest example is healthcare. Full public healthcare is inherently broken: it's expensive, causing a high degree of economic damage. Stronger states like Norway and Germany have full public healthcare, Norway by extreme prosperity (fourth largest oil supplier in the world--incredible amount of wealth, modest taxes support the system) and Germany by taxes (above 50% for the middle class). Canada has a hybrid system in which any employed Canadian has employer-supplied private health insurance--73% of Canadians are using private insurance, easing the pressure off the public system. Poorer countries like the United States simply can't do it.
Even a poor nation with functional healthcare would benefit by supplying all clinical services (e.g. health checkups, immunizations, minor injury treatment, STD tests) by either public funds or regulation by which hospitals must supply clinical coverage at their own expense. While full public funding of cancer treatment and the like may bankrupt the country, supply of basic health needs reduces the burden of healthcare and strengthens the country's economy. As you extend this, the returns diminish: you gain $1000 for every $1 invested, the $100 per $1, then $10, then you hit $1 per $1. After that, the system costs more than it's worth.
That final point, where you neither gain nor lose for your additional investment, is the optimal point. The system is fully optimized when taken out to unity, as every dollar invested has provided a return. In the case of healthcare, this return stems from fitness of the labor force and reduction of healthcare costs by better general public health. After this point, investing additional money in other social welfare efforts improves the economy further, typically decreasing factors which lead to lower public health: investing money somewhere other than public health can actually improve public health.
That's what optimal means. It means you take action X because action X provides the best return overall. Action X may solve some other problem which you could address directly, but chose not to. For example: Police, prisons, and ubiquitous wiretapping would address crime; but so would better welfare and mental health services. An investment in welfare and mental health services strengthens the labor force, improving the economy; an investment in enforcement culls the labor force and costs money. Which is more optimal?
A lot of complexity and weight? It's an alternator, a 200 pound single-piston diesel, and a fuel tank and pump. The car already has batteries and a computer; you would make the batteries smaller, since diesel and kerosene have higher energy density. The battery powers the electrical system with or without the engine; the engine could run only under 25% battery capacity or so, mainly running on plug-in.
It's actually a simple design. It's not a Prius; the engine doesn't drive the wheels. The engine supplies electricity, charging the battery and powering the electrical system directly. In effect, you're plugging the charge port into an on-board generator, and running that when battery gets low.
Well Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago all function about the same way, despite hosting the major auto manufacturing industry, an international trading port and the water supply for the entire state of Maryland, and the futures exchange for the entire United States.
Plug-in diesel hybrids would probably be better, especially with an all-electric drive train.
An all-electric drive train allows a light diesel engine to run in its most efficient operating range continuously, under variable load. The engine could be a single-piston diesel pegged to 200RPM, getting more fuel when the battery charge is below 85% and when there is current draw by the motor.. The increased load (by charging or supplying power) would require more torque output for the engine to maintain 200RPM, hence more fuel. When the motor is drawing power, the engine supplements the battery; when the motor draws less power (or none), the engine charges the battery.
This setup allows for plug-in charging, as well as high density fuel usage. We can use excess capacity at hydroelectric dams, solar plants, and wind farms to generate diesel fuel, both direct from air and by fermented waste, e.g, grease fryer oil, corn stalks, or wood pulp. This provides a zero-emission hydrocarbon fuel source which we can pipeline across the country. Combustible waste can go straight into a Fischer-Tropsch process used for gas-to-liquid or coal-to-liquid in modern applications.
These conversions have high amounts of loss, but are suitable for reclamation. Hydro plants dump millions of gallons of water without power generation when under-utilized; wind farms and solar plants ground their production. Even at 50% efficiency, conversion into fuel provides a valuable commodity.
You supply voltage and heavy-gauge wire. The car decides what to do with that.
Electricity isn't a networking standard; it's part of the laws of physics.
That's called risk management. A good CRO would see this and bring it up to the board.
That happens a lot with whitehouse.gov petitions. They were originally designed to be reachable; now they're designed to be reachable if national media attention highlights them.
Where are you people coming from? "Oh, if I get rich, but the other guy starves in the street, his suffering is a consequence.." No, his suffering is something you don't necessarily care about. It's only consequential if you care about it. I make more than the average ($55,000 is the mean income of Americans), and that means that someone, somewhere, is experiencing poverty because I'm not. That's inconsequential: I'm definitely getting a raise or a higher paying salary when I see the opportunity.
If you could murder someone you didn't like, and nobody you cared about or relied on cared, and you felt no remorse, then there would be no consequences.
Thousands? There are tens of thousands of burglars in my city, and more than one murder per day. More than 10% of the general population here has committed minor aggravated assault.
Kryptonite Inc. will pay for your bicycle, up to $5000, if it's stolen when properly locked with one of their locks. Except in New York City, because there are projected to be over a hundred thousand bike thieves there (New York's population is about 15 times the population of my city) and bikes theft is hardcore.
With millions of people already committing these crimes, how do you think only thousands are actually willing to engage in this behavior? A study of 5000 college students (half men, half women) claimed 8% of men reported behaviors that are legally rape, but 85% of that 8% didn't consider it rape; 35% of the whole of men surveyed claimed they would consider committing rape if they were 100% certain of no consequences (i.e. only 65% said they absolutely would not commit an act of rape, even if they would get away with it).
Face it: the number is more like hundreds of millions than tens of millions. Roll together rape, murder, assault, theft.
Changing some of your actions to reduce suffering of others is often also sub-optimal. We could solve a lot of crime with telescreens, party propaganda, and laws against thought crime.
Yes, you're talking about Promise Theory. Attempting to enforce a policy which a population hasn't promised to conform to is an attack. In group dynamics, the promise of the group is complex: it's not a straight 50-50 majority, and it's often affected by social structures (e.g., special interests, minority groups, and their impact on rights of the majority and other minorities). Regardless, the concept holds: if your group hasn't agreed, as a group, to the rules, then your group is under attack.
By spirit, you mean intent.
including the 30% bar (because the human has three options - human, machine, don't know).
Hey dude, I have a lottery ticket for you. You should pay me like 50 bucks for it. You have a 50% chance of being a billionaire: either you'll win or you won't.
Actually, they're all wrong because any set of individuals with no cultural background (i.e. no existing morals, ethics, etc.) living in a world where these things may happen to them would feel threatened. Societies always provide protections against these threats: as they form, they group together to protect their members, which quickly becomes the unstructured hunting and killing of threat sources (i.e. kill people or other tribes who kill your clansmen), and eventually laws and police forces and governments.
Other morals and ethics--for example, sexual laws about adultery (we used to stone people to death...) or sex with 14 year olds (this used to be marriage age, and 20-25 year old men would marry 13-14 year old girls and get them pregnant)--evolve culturally. They are not inherent, but not completely baseless: the evolution of our economy has made it harmful for girls to get married or have children at that age, hence the sex thing (as we've considered sex and contraception immoral for cultural reasons, i.e. religion, and so have long associated sex with children).
Consequences are relative. Another person dying is not a consequence unless it particularly affects you: people in California die all the time due to earthquakes, and I don't go offering to let Californians stay in my basement so they won't be crushed by collapsing highways. Killing a person with your bare hands has zero consequences if it doesn't bother you, doesn't affect your future prospects, and doesn't garner retaliation from society.
Most people don't think globally; those of us who do are working by numbers, not by individuals. Nobody has a fully-resolved cause-and-effect engine in his head.
A democracy *can't* function that way. The laws aren't supported by the people; they're put there when 98% of the population has no idea what they are, what they mean, what they do, or that those things are actually wrong in some way.
Millions of people would be happy to commit murder, rape, theft, and other crimes if there were no consequences.
It's still an incredibly small statistic.
Let's put this into perspective: people are afraid of speeding. I've seen advertisements showing skulls and children, talking about how you have a 70% chance of survival after being hit by a car at 25mph, or a 40% chance of death at 40mph (misleading: the statistics are wrong--you actually have a high chance of death or severe injury around 40mph--and the asymptote inflects around 35mph). States raising speed limits always get a huge political battle over all the dangers of driving 75mph on the Interstate, since 60mph is so very safe. We have signs on buses advertising the crackdown on speeding.
Meanwhile, people are getting licensed with as little as 10 hours behind the wheel of a vehicle. The license test here? As prompted, use your signal and turn left. Then parallel park. Then drive to a stop sign, stop, signal, turn right. Two more stop signs, 30 feet to each. Congratulations kid, ya pass.
Most racing schools also have advanced driving classes. These classes usually start with a discussion about vehicle dynamics, then move on to practical experience driving on closed course. Serpentine course to feel how your suspension loads, handles, and fails. Skid pads to practice skid recovery. Minor obstacle courses where you practice searching for, recognizing, predicting, and reacting to hazards. These courses teach you to handle your car in hazard situations, to recognize potential hazards before the situation becomes hazardous, and to react to hazards that come out of nowhere (idiot drivers, kids appearing from behind parked cars, etc.).
These are all things you will encounter repeatedly while driving, but we teach none of this in driver's ed. We don't require it for licensing. We don't even put you on the road to see how you drive in traffic. Can he stop at a stop sign? Then he gets a license. Put anti-lock brakes in the car, he'll be fine. No need to prepare for rain, ice, blown-out tires, pedestrians, children, other bad drivers, or the simple consequence of encountering the limits of your car when actively reacting to any of these things.
74 people in over a decade isn't a lot. That's 7.4 each year. Training these people for to unpredicted hazardous situations would have increased their chances of recovering or minimizing the damage, even as the brakes and steering became stiff. I've shut my engine off and back on due to a stall, in dense traffic, at 40mph; I never considered an engine restart a dangerous situation, but that's just because I've always handed it properly. I see not everyone can.
Of course we should fix these issues. We should prevent unnecessary life-threatening hazards. I simply don't see this particular engineering issue as worthy of so much attention. It's minor, it had very low incidence of harm, and it's readily fixed. We've learned lessons from it. There are much worse things going on right in front of our faces that we're not getting outraged over, and those things are cheap to fix and causing thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.
The predicate comes first in this sentence?
If your knee bumps the key fob, something is wrong. Scoot your seat back.
13 people died in incidents somehow related to the ignition switch turning off the engine.
This is across how many GM cars sold? Tens of millions? It looks like a non-issue to me. I mean seriously, your keyring is too heavy and so shuts off your car's engine?
People occasionally choke on hotdogs. More people have died because of faulty hotdog design in the past year than GM has claimed in the past 20 years.
XScale and StrongARM.