And you think that with other systems, all kinds of split-second decisions are being made from ground control? Space-X is not fundamentally doing anything differently than anyone else. They've just been able to do it cheaper by starting with off-the-shelf components and decades-newer technology.
The senate declared him "dictator in perpetuity", but that's not quite the same thing. Augustus is considered the first emperor, having real imperial power as we'd mean it today, even though he eschewed any title which would seem to give him monarchical status. He did use the title Imperator, from which the English word Emperor derives, but it did not really have the same meaning at the time. He also used the title Princeps, meaning first citizen, but that also was not a title similar to Emperor. Effectively, Augustus had absolute power, but did not have a title recognizing that power.
Later Roman Emperors held various titles, but even those varied over time.
I find it interesting, furthermore, that the term "Caesar" became associated with the imperial position in Rome. It did not start out as anything more than the cognomen for Gaius Julius. Roman Emperors started adding it to their names to try to link themselves to the famous (and popular) Gaius Julius Caesar. Eventually, it became such a standard part of the title that it eventually came to mean "emperor" or "king" for various European cultures.
(Your comment was not really wrong, btw, considering the context. I just thought you or orther readers might be interested in additional detail about the term Emperor of Rome.)
They're not lasers. They're blasters. The Star Wars geek community has done an admirable job coming up with the explanation that blasters fire packets of plasma. I believe the popular explanation is that blaster bolts and light saber blades are made of the same type of plasma, where the blaster bolt has been separated from it's source and accelerated to what seems to me to be approximately bow-and-arrow speeds.;-)
Yes. We have an Electoral College system because a popular vote at the time would have dramatically favored non-slave-state voters. The Electoral College system weights the vote to include the 3/5 calculation for slaves. The Electoral College also overweights states with below-average populations (below average number, I mean). Both of those weightings helped the slave-states (as compared to the non-slave-states) in influencing who gets to be president.
Yes. But 1:100 still means that it is probably more likely to be a systematic error. I think about it as asking the following question: "Is the probability that there is a systematic error of this magnitude in ATLAS or CMS greater or less than 1:100?" Considering the complexity of the systems, I would tend to think the probability of that kind of error being systematic is better than 1%.
In other words, in order for random error to be more likely, ATLAS and CMS both need to be accurate at measuring collision results in an energy range that we've never measured before, to an accuracy of better than 99%... and that accuracy range needs to include all of the numerical analyses and modeling assumptions that are used to build up from the experimental results to the final conclusion. That seems like a pretty high bar to me. (Neither experiment just dumps out a number that is the mass of the Higgs boson. Both require interpretation of experimental results to get to the mass. Errors in the interpretation process need to be part of that 99% number.)
Those things are not really different from an economic perspective. What really matters is that they reflect increases in productivity (some combination of labor productivity and capital productivity). When productivity increases in an industry, a market economy will find other ways to utilize the labor and capital that was saved. The problem I was pointing out was that a market economy may not be able to utilize that labor and capital in the same location. Small towns are much less likely to develop new businesses to utilize those surpluses, compared to more diversified cities -- where new industries and businesses are much more likely to be developed.
So any analysis that tries to determine whether it is better to pay more for a book (and have the profits stay local) or pay less for a book (and have surplus buying power to spend locally), needs to take into consideration the dynamics of the local economy. Large, diversified local economies tend to be able to adjust to those types of efficiency gains. Walmart comes into a big city and puts some small mom-and-pops out of business... it's tough for those business owners, but you'd have a hard time showing that it negatively impacted that city's economy. When that happens in a small town, you can document how quickly local economic dynamics change (often deteriorate) as Walmart pushes out local businesses. There are winners in that situation -- the people who make just as much money but get cheaper goods -- but the losers also become obvious, as they have a harder time getting reintegrated into the economy than they would in a more diversified economic environment.
This is really a well-described phenomenon. The only controversy is that some people think we should do something to stop "Walmartification". Others think that such efficiency gains represent the normal course of business over time, you can't hold back progress.
I just meant that Chernobyl happened fast. No backup system that would take more than a few minutes to kick in would have helped (whether it was on-site or merely nearby). Fukishima happened slow. Lots of time to bring backup systems on-line, or even fly them in from far away.
That is the only distinction I was trying to make.
In most countries without a communist past, the reactors do not have the same likelihood of fast catastrophes like Chernobyl's. We've pretty much made it very hard for those types of accidents to happen (not impossible, but very hard). So if we're going to make further increases in safety, we should be looking at the slow things... like what happened at Fukushima.
And regardless of the cause, I do find it hard to understand the claim that Chernobyl wasn't a catastrophic failure. It was a catastrophe. And it was a failure. The fact that there was serious levels of human error involved doesn't really change that. What am I missing?
Nothing in the article violates the laws of physics. It's merely a question of who did the math more accurately for the specific case of the given arrangement of electrons.
Cherenkov radiation is a well understood phenomenon. What you are missing is that the cosmic speed limit is the speed of light in a vacuum. Where the speed of light is slower (i.e. glass), it does not violate the laws of physics for a particle to move faster than that speed. In the given example: the electrons move faster in glass than light moves in glass, but still slower than light moves in a vacuum.
In economics people like to discuss job creators and wealth movement, trickle-up and trickle-down, the loss of businesses, poor people and rich people... but they fail to understand wealth. Take the "shop locally" thing... if you have a local bookstore versus Amazon, people tell you to shop locally because it "keeps the money in the community." Problem is the local bookstore is crap, they order from the big publishers and distributors, etc; some folks argue Walmart or B&N are as bad as Amazon and not like a local bookstore, but their stores still pay local taxes on their income, they still pay rent, hire sales people, and order from the same distributors.
Now let's say you order from Amazon because it's $10 cheaper. That money leaves the local community, but $10 stays... you're $10 wealthier. The local bookstore has terrible selection and is expensive... it goes out of business. Meanwhile you've got a local farmer's market and you shop there with the extra $10 you have. That's wealth creation: you have the same goods (a book) plus more money ($10) to buy other goods (fresh food). If this is the general trend, the Farmer's Market garners that much more business, expands, and replaces the local book shop's place in the community--the community demand for a farmer's market was higher than a local bookstore, the community is now wealthier.
This only works in communities that are big enough to absorb the job losses from the bookstore closing. In big cities, the bookstore closes, the workers all eventually get other jobs, often in new industries. The economy expands. Labor is moved to more efficient uses. Everything works great.
In small towns, when the bookstore closes, there might not be any other new industry to pick up the slack. Not only are those people out of work, but lots of other jobs in small towns become obsolete at the same time. Cars last longer... need fewer mechanics. Local restaurant buys new labor-saving equipment... needs fewer kitchen staff. The list goes on. And the effects compound: fewer mechanics means fewer people eat at the restaurant, which means the restaurant lets a couple more kitchen staff go, which means fewer people in town that own cars, so you need even fewer mechanics, etc.
Again, in the big city, all that unused labor can be absorbed into new industries. With few exceptions, though, people don't start new companies/industries in small towns anymore. So those jobs never get replaced, and such towns just continue to dwindle in size. Note, however, that it is only a temporary solution to "buy local". The long-term solution unfortunately, is for people to move away from small towns. Also, note that this is only really true for small, isolated towns. It is not true for small bedroom communities that may be near metropolitan areas but still maintain a small-town feel. Those latter communities are really just suburbs, not really small towns in the way I've been thinking about it above.
I actually think your argument tends to favor central "rescue wagon" teams. You either need a few central teams that can be airlifted to the site of trouble, or you would have to have an equivalent team in place at every facility. Seems like it would be more effective to have a few central teams, well trained, on 24-hr alert, then have to provide that same level of training and readiness in place at each and every facility.
Chernobyl was a catastrophic failure which occurred over a matter of minutes. Once that failure occurred, there was really not much that could have been done to mitigate the damage. At least not much more than was actually done.
In the case of Fukushima, the ultimate failures occurred over the days following the tsunami. Even emergency systems that might take a day or two to put in place could have dramatically reduced the damage.
Completely different situations. You avoid Chernobyl through better design and operating guidelines. You avoid Fukushima by having better backup plans.
In fact, publishing something in a single newspaper would not be considered to be making something public. Your comments about press releases and 8-Ks is also just not true. Everyone has free, public access to the SEC's website to read 8-Ks. No subscription requried. Both press releases and 8-Ks also get published to the company's website (which is considered a proper way to disseminate information). Press releases get broadly disseminated very quickly by a wide variety of services available to investors, both free services and pay services.
You don't understand how press releases work, do you. They get disseminated rapidly through a wide variety of sources. If Netflix puts out a press release, it shows up on investors' screens around the world within minutes.
Press releases get disseminated rapidly across a wide variety of platforms, including the given company's website. A Facebook post shows up where, exactly? Just Facebook, right?
Press releases can be subscribed to through central services. You just list the companies you are interested in. No such option for Facebook. You'd have to track down every page of every senior executive manually. It's really not the same thing.
But I'm sure it's much more comforting to just believe that a beaurocrat is a shithead.
So how many Facebook pages do you think investors would have to subscribe to in order to follow every senior executive of every company in their portfolio?
Having said that, the regulation is vague as to whether a Facebook page would fit the bill. Any material information has to be disseminated through a Form 8-K filing or "through another method (or combination of methods) of disclosure that is reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public."
* The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.
Actually, it is exactly that you are piping the energy somewhere else. That's the entire point of solar photovoltaic.
I agree. To me, text messages are the equivalent of short phone calls. Want to listen in to the actual call? Get a warrant. But don't demand that the phone company record all my calls just in case one day a judge grants a warrant.
But drug abusers and other types that someone like NSA would also want to avoid hiring tend to be crappy liars. There are various layers in those security clearances. Every layer doesn't work against every threat.
That's not the correct analogy at all. Because the government doesn't owe that money to itself. It owes that money to social security beneficiaries. The government is borrowing from all of us (taking social security taxes today and paying out benefits in the future). But instead of holding the money in a savings account in the interim, it holds the money as bonds. Those bonds have exactly the same economic value as any other bonds that the U.S. issues. They are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.
This analysis presupposes that movement in the prediction markets will cause movement in the actual election. This is not obviously true, to this humble observer. Frankly, the most recent election tends to contradict that entire line of reasoning. The overwhelming media analysis matched what was on the prediction markets (very close election with maybe Obama slightly favored). Meanwhile, it really wasn't close at all, at the end of the day.
In my opinion, it's a little silly to believe that billions in advertising, direct mail, social media, etc. was unable to close the gap, but manipulation of the Intrade trading range could swing the whole thing. (I'm not trying to claim those billions had no effect. I'm only claiming that with all the noise in the election, the signal from any manipulation of the prediction markets would likely be swamped.)
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ISS missions are a tiny piece of the pie. The real money is launching very expensive satellites. You really don't want to be blowing those up.
And you think that with other systems, all kinds of split-second decisions are being made from ground control? Space-X is not fundamentally doing anything differently than anyone else. They've just been able to do it cheaper by starting with off-the-shelf components and decades-newer technology.
Julius Caesar was never emperor of Rome.
The senate declared him "dictator in perpetuity", but that's not quite the same thing. Augustus is considered the first emperor, having real imperial power as we'd mean it today, even though he eschewed any title which would seem to give him monarchical status. He did use the title Imperator, from which the English word Emperor derives, but it did not really have the same meaning at the time. He also used the title Princeps, meaning first citizen, but that also was not a title similar to Emperor. Effectively, Augustus had absolute power, but did not have a title recognizing that power.
Later Roman Emperors held various titles, but even those varied over time.
I find it interesting, furthermore, that the term "Caesar" became associated with the imperial position in Rome. It did not start out as anything more than the cognomen for Gaius Julius. Roman Emperors started adding it to their names to try to link themselves to the famous (and popular) Gaius Julius Caesar. Eventually, it became such a standard part of the title that it eventually came to mean "emperor" or "king" for various European cultures.
(Your comment was not really wrong, btw, considering the context. I just thought you or orther readers might be interested in additional detail about the term Emperor of Rome.)
They're not lasers. They're blasters. The Star Wars geek community has done an admirable job coming up with the explanation that blasters fire packets of plasma. I believe the popular explanation is that blaster bolts and light saber blades are made of the same type of plasma, where the blaster bolt has been separated from it's source and accelerated to what seems to me to be approximately bow-and-arrow speeds. ;-)
Yes. We have an Electoral College system because a popular vote at the time would have dramatically favored non-slave-state voters. The Electoral College system weights the vote to include the 3/5 calculation for slaves. The Electoral College also overweights states with below-average populations (below average number, I mean). Both of those weightings helped the slave-states (as compared to the non-slave-states) in influencing who gets to be president.
Yes. But 1:100 still means that it is probably more likely to be a systematic error. I think about it as asking the following question: "Is the probability that there is a systematic error of this magnitude in ATLAS or CMS greater or less than 1:100?" Considering the complexity of the systems, I would tend to think the probability of that kind of error being systematic is better than 1%.
In other words, in order for random error to be more likely, ATLAS and CMS both need to be accurate at measuring collision results in an energy range that we've never measured before, to an accuracy of better than 99%... and that accuracy range needs to include all of the numerical analyses and modeling assumptions that are used to build up from the experimental results to the final conclusion. That seems like a pretty high bar to me. (Neither experiment just dumps out a number that is the mass of the Higgs boson. Both require interpretation of experimental results to get to the mass. Errors in the interpretation process need to be part of that 99% number.)
Those things are not really different from an economic perspective. What really matters is that they reflect increases in productivity (some combination of labor productivity and capital productivity). When productivity increases in an industry, a market economy will find other ways to utilize the labor and capital that was saved. The problem I was pointing out was that a market economy may not be able to utilize that labor and capital in the same location. Small towns are much less likely to develop new businesses to utilize those surpluses, compared to more diversified cities -- where new industries and businesses are much more likely to be developed.
So any analysis that tries to determine whether it is better to pay more for a book (and have the profits stay local) or pay less for a book (and have surplus buying power to spend locally), needs to take into consideration the dynamics of the local economy. Large, diversified local economies tend to be able to adjust to those types of efficiency gains. Walmart comes into a big city and puts some small mom-and-pops out of business... it's tough for those business owners, but you'd have a hard time showing that it negatively impacted that city's economy. When that happens in a small town, you can document how quickly local economic dynamics change (often deteriorate) as Walmart pushes out local businesses. There are winners in that situation -- the people who make just as much money but get cheaper goods -- but the losers also become obvious, as they have a harder time getting reintegrated into the economy than they would in a more diversified economic environment.
This is really a well-described phenomenon. The only controversy is that some people think we should do something to stop "Walmartification". Others think that such efficiency gains represent the normal course of business over time, you can't hold back progress.
I just meant that Chernobyl happened fast. No backup system that would take more than a few minutes to kick in would have helped (whether it was on-site or merely nearby). Fukishima happened slow. Lots of time to bring backup systems on-line, or even fly them in from far away.
That is the only distinction I was trying to make.
In most countries without a communist past, the reactors do not have the same likelihood of fast catastrophes like Chernobyl's. We've pretty much made it very hard for those types of accidents to happen (not impossible, but very hard). So if we're going to make further increases in safety, we should be looking at the slow things... like what happened at Fukushima.
And regardless of the cause, I do find it hard to understand the claim that Chernobyl wasn't a catastrophic failure. It was a catastrophe. And it was a failure. The fact that there was serious levels of human error involved doesn't really change that. What am I missing?
Nothing in the article violates the laws of physics. It's merely a question of who did the math more accurately for the specific case of the given arrangement of electrons.
Cherenkov radiation is a well understood phenomenon. What you are missing is that the cosmic speed limit is the speed of light in a vacuum. Where the speed of light is slower (i.e. glass), it does not violate the laws of physics for a particle to move faster than that speed. In the given example: the electrons move faster in glass than light moves in glass, but still slower than light moves in a vacuum.
In economics people like to discuss job creators and wealth movement, trickle-up and trickle-down, the loss of businesses, poor people and rich people... but they fail to understand wealth. Take the "shop locally" thing... if you have a local bookstore versus Amazon, people tell you to shop locally because it "keeps the money in the community." Problem is the local bookstore is crap, they order from the big publishers and distributors, etc; some folks argue Walmart or B&N are as bad as Amazon and not like a local bookstore, but their stores still pay local taxes on their income, they still pay rent, hire sales people, and order from the same distributors.
Now let's say you order from Amazon because it's $10 cheaper. That money leaves the local community, but $10 stays ... you're $10 wealthier. The local bookstore has terrible selection and is expensive... it goes out of business. Meanwhile you've got a local farmer's market and you shop there with the extra $10 you have. That's wealth creation: you have the same goods (a book) plus more money ($10) to buy other goods (fresh food). If this is the general trend, the Farmer's Market garners that much more business, expands, and replaces the local book shop's place in the community--the community demand for a farmer's market was higher than a local bookstore, the community is now wealthier.
This only works in communities that are big enough to absorb the job losses from the bookstore closing. In big cities, the bookstore closes, the workers all eventually get other jobs, often in new industries. The economy expands. Labor is moved to more efficient uses. Everything works great.
In small towns, when the bookstore closes, there might not be any other new industry to pick up the slack. Not only are those people out of work, but lots of other jobs in small towns become obsolete at the same time. Cars last longer... need fewer mechanics. Local restaurant buys new labor-saving equipment... needs fewer kitchen staff. The list goes on. And the effects compound: fewer mechanics means fewer people eat at the restaurant, which means the restaurant lets a couple more kitchen staff go, which means fewer people in town that own cars, so you need even fewer mechanics, etc.
Again, in the big city, all that unused labor can be absorbed into new industries. With few exceptions, though, people don't start new companies/industries in small towns anymore. So those jobs never get replaced, and such towns just continue to dwindle in size. Note, however, that it is only a temporary solution to "buy local". The long-term solution unfortunately, is for people to move away from small towns. Also, note that this is only really true for small, isolated towns. It is not true for small bedroom communities that may be near metropolitan areas but still maintain a small-town feel. Those latter communities are really just suburbs, not really small towns in the way I've been thinking about it above.
I actually think your argument tends to favor central "rescue wagon" teams. You either need a few central teams that can be airlifted to the site of trouble, or you would have to have an equivalent team in place at every facility. Seems like it would be more effective to have a few central teams, well trained, on 24-hr alert, then have to provide that same level of training and readiness in place at each and every facility.
Chernobyl was a catastrophic failure which occurred over a matter of minutes. Once that failure occurred, there was really not much that could have been done to mitigate the damage. At least not much more than was actually done.
In the case of Fukushima, the ultimate failures occurred over the days following the tsunami. Even emergency systems that might take a day or two to put in place could have dramatically reduced the damage.
Completely different situations. You avoid Chernobyl through better design and operating guidelines. You avoid Fukushima by having better backup plans.
Press releases get widely disseminated even without being picked up and regurgitated by reporters. The same is not currently true of Facebook posts.
In fact, publishing something in a single newspaper would not be considered to be making something public. Your comments about press releases and 8-Ks is also just not true. Everyone has free, public access to the SEC's website to read 8-Ks. No subscription requried. Both press releases and 8-Ks also get published to the company's website (which is considered a proper way to disseminate information). Press releases get broadly disseminated very quickly by a wide variety of services available to investors, both free services and pay services.
You don't understand how press releases work, do you. They get disseminated rapidly through a wide variety of sources. If Netflix puts out a press release, it shows up on investors' screens around the world within minutes.
Press releases get disseminated rapidly across a wide variety of platforms, including the given company's website. A Facebook post shows up where, exactly? Just Facebook, right?
Press releases can be subscribed to through central services. You just list the companies you are interested in. No such option for Facebook. You'd have to track down every page of every senior executive manually. It's really not the same thing.
But I'm sure it's much more comforting to just believe that a beaurocrat is a shithead.
So how many Facebook pages do you think investors would have to subscribe to in order to follow every senior executive of every company in their portfolio?
Having said that, the regulation is vague as to whether a Facebook page would fit the bill. Any material information has to be disseminated through a Form 8-K filing or "through another method (or combination of methods) of disclosure that is reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public."
* The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.
Actually, it is exactly that you are piping the energy somewhere else. That's the entire point of solar photovoltaic.
You clearly didn't RTFA. Don't worry. Apparently, almost nobody else did either.
Why would you want live-in hookers? Isn't the whole point of hookers that they go away afterwards? ;-)
I agree. To me, text messages are the equivalent of short phone calls. Want to listen in to the actual call? Get a warrant. But don't demand that the phone company record all my calls just in case one day a judge grants a warrant.
But drug abusers and other types that someone like NSA would also want to avoid hiring tend to be crappy liars. There are various layers in those security clearances. Every layer doesn't work against every threat.
That's not the correct analogy at all. Because the government doesn't owe that money to itself. It owes that money to social security beneficiaries. The government is borrowing from all of us (taking social security taxes today and paying out benefits in the future). But instead of holding the money in a savings account in the interim, it holds the money as bonds. Those bonds have exactly the same economic value as any other bonds that the U.S. issues. They are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.
This analysis presupposes that movement in the prediction markets will cause movement in the actual election. This is not obviously true, to this humble observer. Frankly, the most recent election tends to contradict that entire line of reasoning. The overwhelming media analysis matched what was on the prediction markets (very close election with maybe Obama slightly favored). Meanwhile, it really wasn't close at all, at the end of the day.
In my opinion, it's a little silly to believe that billions in advertising, direct mail, social media, etc. was unable to close the gap, but manipulation of the Intrade trading range could swing the whole thing. (I'm not trying to claim those billions had no effect. I'm only claiming that with all the noise in the election, the signal from any manipulation of the prediction markets would likely be swamped.)