The earliest example (other than F&P's own work on calorimetry which was not, despite loud protestations about their admittedly flawed work on other nuclear products, ever "discredited" -- although it was erroneously criticized to high heaven) was Richard Oriani's replication "CALORIMETRIC MEASUREMENTS OF EXCESS POWER OUTPUT DURING THE CATHODIC CHARGING OF DEUTERIUM INTO PALLADIUM"" which was approved by Nature's own peer reviewers for publication in late 1989. Nature didn't publish it because -- and you'll have to forgive my invocation of Popper's notion of falsifiability here -- the American editor of Nature (the British editor considered it too hot to handle so he passed the buck to the US editor) the experimental results violated physical theory -- and yes, he actually told Oriani that. Theocracy rules.
Once Nature had violated the most basic principles of science in its editorial posture toward so-called "cold fusion" it could never again accept such a paper for review as it would risk, once again, approval from their own peer reviewers.
Its really too bad that APS et al are doubling down on their crime even after decades of experiments that meet Ramsey's criterion. Indeed, I'm virtually certain that when -- I said when not if some sort of new form of heat production is demonstrated in D-Pd systems to the satisfaction of even the Secretary of Energy and President of the APS, that they will still claim, as do you, that "Koonin is on the right side of history" by pointing to some error that F&P made somewhere.
They will then be so dismayed and puzzled at why a Western version of Pol Pot starts hauling them off to reeducation in the Western version of the rice paddies.
As you watch Steven E. Koonin in that video and listen to the obscene applause of is "colleagues" with the APS, keep in mind that the original announcement had been at the end of March -- a mere 5 weeks earlier -- and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.
The sole act of scientific integrity among the establishment figures was as follows:
"Ordinarily, new scientific discoveries are claimed to be consistent and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are not complicated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few months. The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the present time. However, even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary." --Norman Ramsey
Dr. Norman Ramsey Jr., Nobel laureate and professor of physics at Harvard University was the only person on the the 1989 Department of Energy cold fusion review panel to voice a dissenting opinion. Ramsey insisted on the inclusion of this preamble as an alternative to his resignation from the panel. The committee acquiesed because he was its co-chair and the only Nobel laureate on the committee.
Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.
Killing healthcare workers prevents Ebola and I'll just betcha that injecting hemorrhaged blood from an Ebola victim in his family will vaccinate against Ebola.
In fact, let's get rid of public sanitation. What a regressive idea.
While plausibly ameliorating the absurdity, your argument is exaggerated. He not only was symptomatic hence shedding virus while at home with his family for days with them totally unprotected and untrained, he was vomiting and probably hemorrhaging when they finally called the ambulance.
What's all this about protective gear? Duncan's family wasn't wearing protective gear for crying out loud and they didn't come down with the disease. Something doesn't add up here.
So imagine you're an ISIS terrorist train to be a suicide bomber and somehow, I can't imagine how but bear with me, somehow you manage to get to Washington D.C.
Now imagine that you see all this brouhaha about Ebola on the tube -- you know, people panicking for no reason and all that -- and you get this crazy idea that maybe rather than splattering your body all over one Metro subway station you'd kill a lot more infidels by catching Ebola, waiting for the first symptoms to show up which look like the flu, and then spend the day making like Divine in Pink Flamingos and leaving your bodily fluids on surfaces in all of the subway cars.
Early symptoms of Ebola are "flu-like" and it is contagious during these "flu-like" symptoms. Now... consider the fact that flu season is upon us. But you know what's _really_ frightening about this? Not one of the goddamn idiot "authorities" has even mentioned, let alone assessed, this confounding situation's impact on public health containment measures.
While reading this wisdom from on high, imagine there is, in this multi-"culture"al heaven that is the US nowadays, a "community" somewhere with strong identity, Hollywood-fired resentment of the US's white-supremacist history of slavery and colonial exploitation with corresponding suspicion of its public health measures (just look at the murders of public health workers in West Africa -- and many of those health workers weren't even "white-devils"), strong relations in West Africa and -- to top it all off -- a flu season that has a good percentage of its community exhibiting the early stage symptoms of Ebola...
The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.
A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his "I am human" line, but it is equally suggestive: "If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight."
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, teaches at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers," to be published later this month by W.W. Norton.
Correct. Furthermore when you have gutted the demand side of the economy what emerges are phenomena like Walmart where lower consumer prices are achieved through a monopsony (the private sector form of the "single payer" holy grail socialized medicine seeks for the same reason) that not only pays its suppliers less, but also its employees less because as the jobs market contracts, there is nowhere else to work ultimately. Walmart also knows EXACTLY what it is doing when it trains its employees in the art of extracting government benefits from a decreasing government revenue stream.
All of this wouldn't be so bad if the tax base were on net assets rather than economic activity as at least then the companies engaging in corrupt hiring practices --such as I witnessed during the huge ramp up in H-1b circa 2000 when I was told I could hire all the programmers from India for HP but not the single US-citizen specialist in the field that I needed -- will be dumped because the companies doing them will be put out of business by a more level playing field in the free market.
silfen confesses "Yes, H-1B workers are at the bottom of the pay scale for the simple reason that H-1B visas are for people just starting out."
Ah I see. So the violation of the H-1B statute is so pervasive now that people are under the impression that it is for people who are just starting out.
My mistake.
Mark et al should simply be thrown in jail for fraud and since this has gotten so far out of hand as to permit responses like silfen's to have the remotest credibility, the jail time should be mandatory without parole.
In fact, Mark et al should either pay back salaries to all of the H-1b workers they've ever employed or Mark et al should be thrown in prison for fraudulent abuse of the H-1B guest worker provision.
Submitted by Baldrson on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:58AM Baldrson (78598) writes "The WSJ reports that: "The long-secretive space ambitions of Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., suddenly are about to get a lot more public. Blue Origin LLC, the space-exploration startup Mr. Bezos has been quietly toiling over for years, is part of a team led by Boeing Co. that is expected to soon garner a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the international space station, according to people familiar with the matter.""
The sooner SpaceX gets away from reliance on government-as-customer the better. They are within a hairs-breadth of a dramatic drop in launch cost and if the effect of this is what I expect it to be, there will be an explosion of business in space as new regimes of space activity open up with SpaceX the primary transport.
Prize awards have high leverage on private investment. Moreover, prize awards aren't spent only for the desired returns -- thereby relegating risk management to the private sector where it belongs.
Oh, I forgot, NASA's money comes largely from political considerations about which districts get how much government pork.
Anon writes: "Your tax scheme will destroy every company that thinks long-term enough to be able to survive a hiccup."
Argument by assertion.
"I'll just transfer all of my capital assets to the city of Detroit"
It doesn't matter to whom you transfer the assets for lease-back. They'll be assessed on the market value of the assets and you'll be assessed on the market value of the lease. Any attempt to void the requirement of liquidation through, say, an asset that self-destructs if it isn't biometrically linked to your "shrewd" butt will be seen for what it is: Interference in the liquidation of the asset, which will result in criminal and civil damages exactly equivalent to doing damages, with criminal intent, to any public good.
, whos politicians I own, and lease it back with a poisoned contract. Poof, now I'm paying no taxes, and I've got the city by the nuts, because this also means that they've screwed if they piss me off.
I'm taking Musk at his word that he wants to see fair and open competition as his self-interest is based on a belief in his own superiority in a "may the best man win" spirit. I see no indication from Musk, as yet, that he is engaged in public sector rent seeking, so I tend to take him at his word here.
As a person credited with launch service privatizing legislation by Congressman (Ron Packard, R-Ca), in his introduction of my congressional testimony on private space development, the Congressman who sponsored that legislation, let me weigh in:
If your own money is at stake, you approach risk management in a very different way than when someone else's money is at stake.
Public funds for development results in a very different sort of risk management than private funds for risk management.
The typical argument for public funding of development is that the risk management under private funding is to, basically, not bother taking the risk at all -- and that therefore the public must.
Well... this has as its unspoken assumption that the downstream benefit is so great that it is clearly justifiable to take the risk. OK, let's go with that assumption and then let us further ask: Why is it that the capital markets are failing in their primary reason for existence: To manage investment risk?
The folks arguing for public funding of development need to provide answers for that question taking the form either of, a renunciation of the primary principle of capitalism -- since the public becomes more competent at investment the less risk there is -- or, proposals to correct the statutory regime under which investment is made so that the capital markets function properly.
In my role promoting private over public investment in launch services development, I was aware that there was, indeed, a capital market failure that needed to be fixed through statutory changes in the tax system. Yet I proceeded to promote private over public investment. Why? Because in the foregoing discussion of trade offs between private vs public risk management there goes unspoken the risk that a positive feedback system can easily develop where political action is funded by tax dollars, however indirect. This positive feedback system results in a body politic that excludes from political influence those who are not receiving tax dollars -- such as inventors in the garages who are trying to bring even incremental improvements to the market. Moreover, this lack of political influence is compounded by the fact that such inventors are seen as business risks by those whose political action is predicated on the technical ignorance of politicians -- hence government funds not only fund political action, but actively suppress improvement.
There is simply no way out of this mess but to, first, turn off the funding sources if at all possible, so that it is possible to then address the real underlying capital market failure that results in lack of investment in viable technologies of great value.
The role guys like Musk should be taking on here is to point out the capital market failure and recommend appropriate fixes in the statutory environment so that there is no place for the public sector rent-seeking of government funded political agencies, posing as technology companies, to hide.
One year after I gave my testimony before Congress, I did make a proposal for just such a reform in the tax and regulatory code in the form of a white paper which I sent to various think-tanks in the beltway. The problem is those think-tanks are, themselves, now funded by the same positive feedback loop that actively supports existing cash flows and their expansion -- which includes avoiding any reforms that would correct the capital market failures to which technosocialist political agencies point to justify their receipt of taxpayer money.
Here's what Musk needs to promote:
Replace all taxes on economic activity with a single tax on net liquidation value of assets. This is rational in that those assets enjoy government protection in a manner similar to the protection provided by property insurance corporations. In other words, taxes become a service fee equivalent to the i
Slashdot Mirror
The earliest example (other than F&P's own work on calorimetry which was not, despite loud protestations about their admittedly flawed work on other nuclear products, ever "discredited" -- although it was erroneously criticized to high heaven) was Richard Oriani's replication "CALORIMETRIC MEASUREMENTS OF EXCESS POWER OUTPUT DURING THE CATHODIC CHARGING OF DEUTERIUM INTO PALLADIUM"" which was approved by Nature's own peer reviewers for publication in late 1989. Nature didn't publish it because -- and you'll have to forgive my invocation of Popper's notion of falsifiability here -- the American editor of Nature (the British editor considered it too hot to handle so he passed the buck to the US editor) the experimental results violated physical theory -- and yes, he actually told Oriani that. Theocracy rules.
Once Nature had violated the most basic principles of science in its editorial posture toward so-called "cold fusion" it could never again accept such a paper for review as it would risk, once again, approval from their own peer reviewers.
Its really too bad that APS et al are doubling down on their crime even after decades of experiments that meet Ramsey's criterion. Indeed, I'm virtually certain that when -- I said when not if some sort of new form of heat production is demonstrated in D-Pd systems to the satisfaction of even the Secretary of Energy and President of the APS, that they will still claim, as do you, that "Koonin is on the right side of history" by pointing to some error that F&P made somewhere.
They will then be so dismayed and puzzled at why a Western version of Pol Pot starts hauling them off to reeducation in the Western version of the rice paddies.
The controversy over Rossi is a tempest in a teapot. If you want to know when the real crime was committed, it was by the American Physical Society at this moment in its Baltimore, MD meeting of May 1, 1989. Agreed, it was more like a riot with looting than any kind of criminal conspiracy to commit fraud, but it was vastly more damaging.
As you watch Steven E. Koonin in that video and listen to the obscene applause of is "colleagues" with the APS, keep in mind that the original announcement had been at the end of March -- a mere 5 weeks earlier -- and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.
The sole act of scientific integrity among the establishment figures was as follows:
"Ordinarily, new scientific discoveries are claimed to be consistent and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are not complicated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few months. The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the present time. However, even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary." --Norman Ramsey
Dr. Norman Ramsey Jr., Nobel laureate and professor of physics at Harvard University was the only person on the the 1989 Department of Energy cold fusion review panel to voice a dissenting opinion. Ramsey insisted on the inclusion of this preamble as an alternative to his resignation from the panel. The committee acquiesed because he was its co-chair and the only Nobel laureate on the committee.
Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.
Killing healthcare workers prevents Ebola and I'll just betcha that injecting hemorrhaged blood from an Ebola victim in his family will vaccinate against Ebola.
In fact, let's get rid of public sanitation. What a regressive idea.
While plausibly ameliorating the absurdity, your argument is exaggerated. He not only was symptomatic hence shedding virus while at home with his family for days with them totally unprotected and untrained, he was vomiting and probably hemorrhaging when they finally called the ambulance.
What's all this about protective gear? Duncan's family wasn't wearing protective gear for crying out loud and they didn't come down with the disease. Something doesn't add up here.
So imagine you're an ISIS terrorist train to be a suicide bomber and somehow, I can't imagine how but bear with me, somehow you manage to get to Washington D.C.
Now imagine that you see all this brouhaha about Ebola on the tube -- you know, people panicking for no reason and all that -- and you get this crazy idea that maybe rather than splattering your body all over one Metro subway station you'd kill a lot more infidels by catching Ebola, waiting for the first symptoms to show up which look like the flu, and then spend the day making like Divine in Pink Flamingos and leaving your bodily fluids on surfaces in all of the subway cars.
And so it starts exactly as I predicted here: He went to the emergency room with flu like symptoms and they ... wait for it .... SENT HIM HOME.
Early symptoms of Ebola are "flu-like" and it is contagious during these "flu-like" symptoms. Now ... consider the fact that flu season is upon us. But you know what's _really_ frightening about this? Not one of the goddamn idiot "authorities" has even mentioned, let alone assessed, this confounding situation's impact on public health containment measures.
Now THAT'S frightening!
Read the CDC's guidelines on monitoring and movement of persons with "exposure" and tell me their guidelines work for a country in the throes of massive incidence of "flu-like symptoms".
While reading this wisdom from on high, imagine there is, in this multi-"culture"al heaven that is the US nowadays, a "community" somewhere with strong identity, Hollywood-fired resentment of the US's white-supremacist history of slavery and colonial exploitation with corresponding suspicion of its public health measures (just look at the murders of public health workers in West Africa -- and many of those health workers weren't even "white-devils"), strong relations in West Africa and -- to top it all off -- a flu season that has a good percentage of its community exhibiting the early stage symptoms of Ebola...
The New York Times Opines:
Correct. Furthermore when you have gutted the demand side of the economy what emerges are phenomena like Walmart where lower consumer prices are achieved through a monopsony (the private sector form of the "single payer" holy grail socialized medicine seeks for the same reason) that not only pays its suppliers less, but also its employees less because as the jobs market contracts, there is nowhere else to work ultimately. Walmart also knows EXACTLY what it is doing when it trains its employees in the art of extracting government benefits from a decreasing government revenue stream.
All of this wouldn't be so bad if the tax base were on net assets rather than economic activity as at least then the companies engaging in corrupt hiring practices --such as I witnessed during the huge ramp up in H-1b circa 2000 when I was told I could hire all the programmers from India for HP but not the single US-citizen specialist in the field that I needed -- will be dumped because the companies doing them will be put out of business by a more level playing field in the free market.
silfen confesses "Yes, H-1B workers are at the bottom of the pay scale for the simple reason that H-1B visas are for people just starting out."
Ah I see. So the violation of the H-1B statute is so pervasive now that people are under the impression that it is for people who are just starting out.
My mistake.
Mark et al should simply be thrown in jail for fraud and since this has gotten so far out of hand as to permit responses like silfen's to have the remotest credibility, the jail time should be mandatory without parole.
Its tragic that Mark et al are being forced to put up with just sort of OK US workers.
You know one step that Mark et al could take that would grease the skids on their immigration reforms?
Pay the geniuses they want to import what they're worth. See The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers.
In fact, Mark et al should either pay back salaries to all of the H-1b workers they've ever employed or Mark et al should be thrown in prison for fraudulent abuse of the H-1B guest worker provision.
Interesting. Is the geometry of that so-called "development vehicle" representative of the production vehicle's?
Back in 1981-1983 when I was local support team leader for Space Studies Institute in Miami, FL promoting the idea of space colonies among the locals, one of the slides we showed was of this artist's conception of a Single Stage to Orbit Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing system proposed by Boeing to loft solar power satellites into LEO. This vehicle also appeared in Gerard O'Neill's original edition of "The High Frontier" that Jeff Bezos probably read while he was becoming the valedictorian of his high school class.
Looking at Bezos's New Shepherd Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing vehicle you might think that somewhere along the line Jeff caught a glimpse of Boeing's old design.
James Clerk Maxwell
Bezos's Blue Origin Part of Boeing Team Bidding for Taxi to ISS
http://slashdot.org/submission...
Submitted by Baldrson on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:58AM
Baldrson (78598) writes
"The WSJ reports that: "The long-secretive space ambitions of Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., suddenly are about to get a lot more public. Blue Origin LLC, the space-exploration startup Mr. Bezos has been quietly toiling over for years, is part of a team led by Boeing Co. that is expected to soon garner a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the international space station, according to people familiar with the matter.""
The sooner SpaceX gets away from reliance on government-as-customer the better. They are within a hairs-breadth of a dramatic drop in launch cost and if the effect of this is what I expect it to be, there will be an explosion of business in space as new regimes of space activity open up with SpaceX the primary transport.
A Hallmark greeting card with a heart-shaped solar flare overlaying an "X" obviously meaning "love and kisses". It reads: "To Earth, with love. -- Sun"
Prize awards have high leverage on private investment. Moreover, prize awards aren't spent only for the desired returns -- thereby relegating risk management to the private sector where it belongs.
Oh, I forgot, NASA's money comes largely from political considerations about which districts get how much government pork.
Never mind.
Java has stuck around for the same reason Cobol stuck around for so long: It's corporate.
Does that mean Java isn't cool? No. But are we going to say Cobol is cool because it stuck around for so long?
Its good to see Apple recognizes America's history of victimizing Indians requires remediation by affirmative action favoring the hiring of Indians.
Anon writes: "Your tax scheme will destroy every company that thinks long-term enough to be able to survive a hiccup."
Argument by assertion.
"I'll just transfer all of my capital assets to the city of Detroit"
It doesn't matter to whom you transfer the assets for lease-back. They'll be assessed on the market value of the assets and you'll be assessed on the market value of the lease. Any attempt to void the requirement of liquidation through, say, an asset that self-destructs if it isn't biometrically linked to your "shrewd" butt will be seen for what it is: Interference in the liquidation of the asset, which will result in criminal and civil damages exactly equivalent to doing damages, with criminal intent, to any public good.
, whos politicians I own, and lease it back with a poisoned contract. Poof, now I'm paying no taxes, and I've got the city by the nuts, because this also means that they've screwed if they piss me off.
I'm taking Musk at his word that he wants to see fair and open competition as his self-interest is based on a belief in his own superiority in a "may the best man win" spirit. I see no indication from Musk, as yet, that he is engaged in public sector rent seeking, so I tend to take him at his word here.
As a person credited with launch service privatizing legislation by Congressman (Ron Packard, R-Ca), in his introduction of my congressional testimony on private space development, the Congressman who sponsored that legislation, let me weigh in:
If your own money is at stake, you approach risk management in a very different way than when someone else's money is at stake.
Public funds for development results in a very different sort of risk management than private funds for risk management.
The typical argument for public funding of development is that the risk management under private funding is to, basically, not bother taking the risk at all -- and that therefore the public must.
Well... this has as its unspoken assumption that the downstream benefit is so great that it is clearly justifiable to take the risk. OK, let's go with that assumption and then let us further ask: Why is it that the capital markets are failing in their primary reason for existence: To manage investment risk?
The folks arguing for public funding of development need to provide answers for that question taking the form either of, a renunciation of the primary principle of capitalism -- since the public becomes more competent at investment the less risk there is -- or, proposals to correct the statutory regime under which investment is made so that the capital markets function properly.
In my role promoting private over public investment in launch services development, I was aware that there was, indeed, a capital market failure that needed to be fixed through statutory changes in the tax system. Yet I proceeded to promote private over public investment. Why? Because in the foregoing discussion of trade offs between private vs public risk management there goes unspoken the risk that a positive feedback system can easily develop where political action is funded by tax dollars, however indirect. This positive feedback system results in a body politic that excludes from political influence those who are not receiving tax dollars -- such as inventors in the garages who are trying to bring even incremental improvements to the market. Moreover, this lack of political influence is compounded by the fact that such inventors are seen as business risks by those whose political action is predicated on the technical ignorance of politicians -- hence government funds not only fund political action, but actively suppress improvement.
There is simply no way out of this mess but to, first, turn off the funding sources if at all possible, so that it is possible to then address the real underlying capital market failure that results in lack of investment in viable technologies of great value.
The role guys like Musk should be taking on here is to point out the capital market failure and recommend appropriate fixes in the statutory environment so that there is no place for the public sector rent-seeking of government funded political agencies, posing as technology companies, to hide.
One year after I gave my testimony before Congress, I did make a proposal for just such a reform in the tax and regulatory code in the form of a white paper which I sent to various think-tanks in the beltway. The problem is those think-tanks are, themselves, now funded by the same positive feedback loop that actively supports existing cash flows and their expansion -- which includes avoiding any reforms that would correct the capital market failures to which technosocialist political agencies point to justify their receipt of taxpayer money.
Here's what Musk needs to promote:
Replace all taxes on economic activity with a single tax on net liquidation value of assets. This is rational in that those assets enjoy government protection in a manner similar to the protection provided by property insurance corporations. In other words, taxes become a service fee equivalent to the i