Okay, maybe some clarification is in order. My idea wasn't necessarily a replacement for what the submission was trying to do. It just tackles the general problem of "how to translate a lot of stuff". The idea is the program -- which has to have a special module for each target language -- PLUS crowdsourcing the easier work of marking up the source text. So you are correct that writing the program requires knowledge of the target language, and some kind of internal representation format. However, using it does not.
IMHO it's still a better idea any other I've seen for large scale translation of natural languages.
So when you say "Instead of having to know two languages, all that the crowd has to know is what the text actually means, which then allows them to disambiguate it for the program," what you really mean is "Instead of having to know two language, all that crowd has to know is some intermediate representation language and the target language."
Whoa, not so fast! Under my idea, you don't need to know an intermediate representation language. (And you don't need to know the target language, just the source language, but I assume that's what you meant.) You just need to be able to disambiguate potential meanings to arbitrary precision, which you can certainly do if you understand it. Certainly, you have to learn how to "tag this as the verb", "pick which meaning of 'set' is being used here", "identify the antecedent of 'him' in this sentence", etc. But that's not an intermediate language, any more than knowing how to draw in PhotoShop is a language.
And it would most certainly be an improvement over English as a lingua franca. English is very difficult to learn, and everyone would have to know it. With my idea, everyone keeps their language. All that any text requires is that at least one person -- and that could be the author -- take the time to mark up the text. And the qualifications are low: you just have to know the language it's written in and learn how to use the markup program.
You seem to think the idea involves the crowd knowing the target language and making final approval. It actually involves the crowd only knowing the language it's written in. Checking the validity, like I noted, is performed by translating into the language and back. If it looks incomprehensible, you know you didn't disambiguate enough.
Here's what I think is the best way to facilitate "crowdsourced" translation: write a "semi-automatic" translator. That is, you have to spoonfeed it information about the grammatical function and meaning of all of the text, which signficantly simplifies the problem of automatically translating it. Then, you can turn over any text to crowdsourced translation. Instead of having to know two languages, all that the crowd has to know is what the text actually means, which then allows them to disambiguate it for the program.
It's relatively easy to do sanity checks too: The "clarifier" just tells it to translate into the target language and back, giving the worst (or "lowest probability") possible translation consistent with the disambiguation constraints, which tells the crowd what they need to further clarify the meaning of. Plus, you only have to do the clarification once for each text, instead of once for each target language.
I actually started developing this a few years ago, and even hired someone to develop it. (Just the interface, though, which allows you to easily mark up the text and see what you've done to it.) I had even contacted several law firms for a patent search, but strangely, all of them told me that this would would put them in a conflict of interest with a large corporate client. Too bad we haven't seen results from them...
The fact that I was modded up just shows how pissed off people are in general about the stupid, Vistaesque crap they keep piling on, since merely voicing my dissatisfaction gets me modded up to five.
Where to fucking start? First of all, despite all the customizability, there isn't even an option to go back to how it was before they started fucking everything up. Second of all, it overloads my cpu with processes so that I have to have a relatively new computer just to browse without clawing my eyeballs out. Gee guys, why is it an atrocity for new Windows releases to force you to upgrade to bleeding edge hardware, but Slashdot wants to hog all of my computer's resources for a fucking text-only discussion site!
Third, it's breaking normal browser functionality. When I hit "back", I want to fucking go to the previous page, not the last one I was on before you slurped me into your glammed-up ajax bullshit. Fourth, it hides most of the day's stories, so you get to play a guessing game to figure out where the last story you were looking at went -- what magic button do I have to hit to get back to it?
Fifth, any computer with half-decent security or script blocking (read: computers at work) disables enough of the cutesiness you're trying to pimp, that the page looks like an "under construction" site, circa 1995.
Sixth, did I mention how it doesn't let me "opt out" of this bullshit fanciness, cooked up my some meth-addled former Apple employees?
Nothing to say about the story, but CAN YOU MORON EDITORS STOP FUCKING UP MY SLASHDOT??? Please, for the love of all that is good, STOP adding "enhancements" to the page, and LET ME HAVE MY GODDAMN CLASSIC SLASHDOT LOOK BACK!!!!
What an irresponsible idea to "surprise" people this way (and unless you blanket the public with warnings for the week prior, it's going to surprise a lot of people, no matter how many notices there are on the White House's website).
Sure, sure, the people of New York could have run some numbers and figured out that there was really no threat, but come on -- in a case like this you're going to want to be safe before sorry. And remember, the smartest people in town just blew up the global economy!;-)
Seriously though, what next? Pilot an unmanned 747 into the Empire State Building but make it blow up harmlessly at the last second, all without even warning the FAA?
This is like those towns whose police think they're clever and noble for pulling over good drivers to "reward" them with $5 gift cards to Starbucks.
What msbmsb said. Also, this sounds similar to the problem already tackled (and aced) by Google Sets (or whatever they call it now). That's the feature where you give it some members of a set you have in mind (but you don't tell it what it's a set *of*) and it outputs more members from that set. For example, you give it "apple, orange, banana", and it gives you "grape, strawberry, lime". I'm guessing the way Google sets works is:
1) Run a search on all input phrases. 2) Find the most common statistically-improbable phrase in all of the results. 3) Run a search on the phrase derived in 2. 4) Output the most common statisticall-improbable phrases found in three which were not given as inputs.
In the example you gave, there will be more search results with "hamlet", "playwright", and "Shakespeare" than "hamlet", "playwright", and some other SIP.
There are, of course, many other cases where it will get tripped up (like puns and rhyming), but that's not one of them.
Unfortunately, you can only exploit your knowledge that X is overpriced, if you also know *when* the correction will occur (or you already own X, in which case you can sell). Otherwise, you'll end up bankrupting yourself by being stuck in a "short squeeze"[1] or buying worthless puts.
IMHO, the problem is not the risk; it's the coupling. That is, if everyone actually bore the full cost of their investment, and knew all of the ultimate counterparties, then it wouldn't be possible for one screwup to cascade to the entire system. If some investment lost, the direct investors would be out money that they themselves put up, and maybe those who lend them the money. It wouldn't be a complex web of leverage on top of unknown leverage on top of unknown leverage, all hidden in "safe" savings accounts.
[1] that's when your short-sell X -- borrow it and sell it -- and then it rises too much, forcing you to close out your position unfavorably.
*sigh* I was using "use value" in the sense that you were originally using the term -- to refer to its "use value" in electronics. Let me rephrase what I want so we can avoid your clever equivocation:
"Gold can't provide less than $80/ounce of value in its capacity as a conductor, or nobody would pay $900/ounce to use it as a conductor."
I think it is incoherent to consider the matter. Gold can't be worth $80 "for its use value" or nobody would pay $900 to use it!
As for what would happen if central banks dumped their gold, you're ignoring two effects:
1) Doing so would simulatenously kill the dollar/pound/etc, because the reserve banks would then only have government bonds as assets, placing the currencies on much flimsier foundantions, and devaluing the currency.
2) Because gold has so many alternate uses just waiting to be exploited (but aren't today because it's too expensive), then industry would start doing a lot more things with it, bidding the price back up.
Quick question: Is anyone else buying up physical, in-your-possession gold? Given all that's been going on, it seems like it's virtually impossible for major currencies *not* to get severely devalued. The massive underfunded pension tidal waves, medicare programs, new spending, banks that will be unable to pay back loans...
I recently bought at Bullion Direct, a few Canadian Maple gold coins. Well, Bullion Vault just got some free advertising, because it looks like they offer a better deal on an ounce of gold. But I think you're best off buying in coin form since you may have some defense in the even the government decides to seize gold; it will probably exempt some small amount for "collector's purposes", which wouldn't apply to bars.
Hi, I'm am amateur movie critic. Today I'm going to show you an example of poor film-making. blah blah blah...
*Plays entire Star Wars: Episode I*
So, as you can see by the [cinematography jargon] and [screen writing jargon], this movie sucked and I hope you learn from it in making your own movies.
One week later:
"No! You can't take down my video. This is CLEARLY fair use, since I have OBVIOUSLY used it for educational commentary, and the entire clip was VITAL for showing how much Episode I sucked."
Well, I'm glad you reconsidered your opinion on randomness in light of my post. I was just concerned that I was coming off as too confrontational. Many times, people get attached to their ideas and are reluctant to let go, preferring to "attack the messenger". I will gladly admit to being guilty of this on more than one occasion! So, keep up the good work in not being like that.:-)
Well, it's not that simple. I was recently reading the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky who has convincing reasons why "randomness hath no power". His point is basically that success of an algorithm depends on its *non*-random exploitation of knowledge of the search space. Any apparent success of randomness is due to the fact that the algorithm lacks enough information to make a better guess, so any method of choosing will, on average, do just as well. Or to put it differently, if your randomness-using algorithm isn't working well, does it make sense to try to improve it by drawing from a *more* random source, like thermal noise?
(Aside: The other way Yudkowsky allows that randomness can be helpful if it's to prevent an opponent from being able to make inferences about you, such as in cryptography. More generally, it helps any time you want to destroy the "mutual information" between two variables so as to isolate one specific effect. As I like to put it, "Randomness is like poison: yes, it can help you, but only if you feed it to someone *else*.)
In the case of evolutionary algorithms, Yudkowsky argues that the success is not due to the small amount of randomness it uses, but to the large amount that it *doesn't*. Whatever evolutionary algorithm you're referring to, a huge part of it is how it selects candidates ("genes") according to a fitness function, a very non-random feature.
You said that the randomness is necessary to avoid being trapped in a local optimum. But it isn't the randomness that keeps you out of the local optimum; it's the fact that you're making a huge change to the candidate that moves it to a different "domain of attraction".
The success of evolutionary algorithms, then, is due to the extent to which it exploits knowledge of the structure of the search space, not to randomness. In cases where this assumption about the search space is wrong, they fail miserably. For example, if the problem you're attacking is to guess a secret number within a certain range, where only one answer is any better than the others, then no amount of cross-breeding, selection, mutuation, splicing, etc. will help.
Anyway, I didn't mean to pounce on you, I just wanted to give the other side.
I don't know what your point was, but this wouldn't refute genetic determinism; it just says that the genes determining "you" include those of bacteria.
Incidentally, I don't understand what's so new about this insight. I read a book published in 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett (a philosopher rather than a biologist so he was only drawing on what was long-established consensus at the time). It described the view of the body as an ecosystem and suggested that human cells were like "altruistic versions of ant cells" since human cells share even more genetic material (100%) with their neighbors.
I didn't say it's a great investment. I just said Tesla has a reasonable chance of paying it back. For it to be a good *investment*, the interest rate would have to be high enough to compensate for the risk. But since the government is charging them ~5% interest, it wouldn't be a good idea for me to loan them the money when I can get 5% with lower risk elsewhere (like on high-grade corporate bonds). In exactly the same way, I fully expect the US government to pay back all 2-year loans it gets, but it wouldn't be a good investment to loan to them at 0.5% when the prevailing rate is 1.5% (or whatever).
Look, I appreciate your point that government shouldn't be deciding what counts as a good investment. And I completely agree. That's why I added the caveats that:
-Loaning to Tesla is only a good idea from the standpoint of having to loan money to *some* car company to make energy efficient cars; they're far more deserving than GM.
-Currently, profitability most certainly *does not* equate to "good investment", for the simple reason that the market currently does not price in the damage fossil fuels do to others via the environment. And the way to correct this is to make it so that the market does, not by trying to discern which is the best way to pump up energy efficiency, which, without a carbon tax or cap/trade system, will probably just result in higher total fossil fuel use anyway. (See Jevons Paradox.)
You're ultimately correct that the loan is not a bailout for Tesla, but I wanted to add a few clarifying points (which make Tesla look even better):
Much of the bailout for the Big Three was also in the form of loans. Where Tesla differs, however, is that Tesla actually has a chance of paying it back, while it's pure fantasy to believe GM and Chrysler could do the same. The former's bonds are currently yielding 220% or thereabouts, meaning investors place a HUGE risk discount on loaning to GM. In contrast, Tesla's biggest "problem" is keeping up with demand.
Moreover, whatever the pretense of the "loans", including the one allegedly to help "retool" for more energy efficient cars, the fact of the matter is that the money for the Big Three is really going to pay off legacy costs that they were too stupid and short-sighted to plan for, *not* to improving technology, and especially not when you consider how close to collapse they are.
Now, in fairness, I don't think the government should be making these loans at all. (To the extent that the environment is a problem, that should be addressed by pricing environmental costs into fossil fuels, and then let the market do whatever's efficient given that price premium.) However, *if* it's going to make these loans, they should go to companies that have a realistic chance of accomplishing the stated goals of the loans. And so far, Tesla has been far more efficient at it, and has no legacy costs to pay off.
Exactly! Thank you for bringing common sense to this. As I would put it: yes, the first person to get off his ass and gather widely-scattered information into one convenient place... will have a monopoly on that information. At least for a while. That's just how reality works.
Now, Mr. Librarian, how many databases of orphaned works did you have access to before Google started doing this? Oh, right, none.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, maybe some clarification is in order. My idea wasn't necessarily a replacement for what the submission was trying to do. It just tackles the general problem of "how to translate a lot of stuff". The idea is the program -- which has to have a special module for each target language -- PLUS crowdsourcing the easier work of marking up the source text. So you are correct that writing the program requires knowledge of the target language, and some kind of internal representation format. However, using it does not.
IMHO it's still a better idea any other I've seen for large scale translation of natural languages.
So when you say "Instead of having to know two languages, all that the crowd has to know is what the text actually means, which then allows them to disambiguate it for the program," what you really mean is "Instead of having to know two language, all that crowd has to know is some intermediate representation language and the target language."
Whoa, not so fast! Under my idea, you don't need to know an intermediate representation language. (And you don't need to know the target language, just the source language, but I assume that's what you meant.) You just need to be able to disambiguate potential meanings to arbitrary precision, which you can certainly do if you understand it. Certainly, you have to learn how to "tag this as the verb", "pick which meaning of 'set' is being used here", "identify the antecedent of 'him' in this sentence", etc. But that's not an intermediate language, any more than knowing how to draw in PhotoShop is a language.
And it would most certainly be an improvement over English as a lingua franca. English is very difficult to learn, and everyone would have to know it. With my idea, everyone keeps their language. All that any text requires is that at least one person -- and that could be the author -- take the time to mark up the text. And the qualifications are low: you just have to know the language it's written in and learn how to use the markup program.
You seem to think the idea involves the crowd knowing the target language and making final approval. It actually involves the crowd only knowing the language it's written in. Checking the validity, like I noted, is performed by translating into the language and back. If it looks incomprehensible, you know you didn't disambiguate enough.
Here's what I think is the best way to facilitate "crowdsourced" translation: write a "semi-automatic" translator. That is, you have to spoonfeed it information about the grammatical function and meaning of all of the text, which signficantly simplifies the problem of automatically translating it. Then, you can turn over any text to crowdsourced translation. Instead of having to know two languages, all that the crowd has to know is what the text actually means, which then allows them to disambiguate it for the program.
It's relatively easy to do sanity checks too: The "clarifier" just tells it to translate into the target language and back, giving the worst (or "lowest probability") possible translation consistent with the disambiguation constraints, which tells the crowd what they need to further clarify the meaning of. Plus, you only have to do the clarification once for each text, instead of once for each target language.
I actually started developing this a few years ago, and even hired someone to develop it. (Just the interface, though, which allows you to easily mark up the text and see what you've done to it.) I had even contacted several law firms for a patent search, but strangely, all of them told me that this would would put them in a conflict of interest with a large corporate client. Too bad we haven't seen results from them...
So, who's implemented my idea already?
The fact that I was modded up just shows how pissed off people are in general about the stupid, Vistaesque crap they keep piling on, since merely voicing my dissatisfaction gets me modded up to five.
Where to fucking start? First of all, despite all the customizability, there isn't even an option to go back to how it was before they started fucking everything up. Second of all, it overloads my cpu with processes so that I have to have a relatively new computer just to browse without clawing my eyeballs out. Gee guys, why is it an atrocity for new Windows releases to force you to upgrade to bleeding edge hardware, but Slashdot wants to hog all of my computer's resources for a fucking text-only discussion site!
Third, it's breaking normal browser functionality. When I hit "back", I want to fucking go to the previous page, not the last one I was on before you slurped me into your glammed-up ajax bullshit. Fourth, it hides most of the day's stories, so you get to play a guessing game to figure out where the last story you were looking at went -- what magic button do I have to hit to get back to it?
Fifth, any computer with half-decent security or script blocking (read: computers at work) disables enough of the cutesiness you're trying to pimp, that the page looks like an "under construction" site, circa 1995.
Sixth, did I mention how it doesn't let me "opt out" of this bullshit fanciness, cooked up my some meth-addled former Apple employees?
Nothing to say about the story, but CAN YOU MORON EDITORS STOP FUCKING UP MY SLASHDOT??? Please, for the love of all that is good, STOP adding "enhancements" to the page, and LET ME HAVE MY GODDAMN CLASSIC SLASHDOT LOOK BACK!!!!
What an irresponsible idea to "surprise" people this way (and unless you blanket the public with warnings for the week prior, it's going to surprise a lot of people, no matter how many notices there are on the White House's website).
Sure, sure, the people of New York could have run some numbers and figured out that there was really no threat, but come on -- in a case like this you're going to want to be safe before sorry. And remember, the smartest people in town just blew up the global economy! ;-)
Seriously though, what next? Pilot an unmanned 747 into the Empire State Building but make it blow up harmlessly at the last second, all without even warning the FAA?
This is like those towns whose police think they're clever and noble for pulling over good drivers to "reward" them with $5 gift cards to Starbucks.
What msbmsb said. Also, this sounds similar to the problem already tackled (and aced) by Google Sets (or whatever they call it now). That's the feature where you give it some members of a set you have in mind (but you don't tell it what it's a set *of*) and it outputs more members from that set. For example, you give it "apple, orange, banana", and it gives you "grape, strawberry, lime". I'm guessing the way Google sets works is:
1) Run a search on all input phrases.
2) Find the most common statistically-improbable phrase in all of the results.
3) Run a search on the phrase derived in 2.
4) Output the most common statisticall-improbable phrases found in three which were not given as inputs.
In the example you gave, there will be more search results with "hamlet", "playwright", and "Shakespeare" than "hamlet", "playwright", and some other SIP.
There are, of course, many other cases where it will get tripped up (like puns and rhyming), but that's not one of them.
Unfortunately, you can only exploit your knowledge that X is overpriced, if you also know *when* the correction will occur (or you already own X, in which case you can sell). Otherwise, you'll end up bankrupting yourself by being stuck in a "short squeeze"[1] or buying worthless puts.
IMHO, the problem is not the risk; it's the coupling. That is, if everyone actually bore the full cost of their investment, and knew all of the ultimate counterparties, then it wouldn't be possible for one screwup to cascade to the entire system. If some investment lost, the direct investors would be out money that they themselves put up, and maybe those who lend them the money. It wouldn't be a complex web of leverage on top of unknown leverage on top of unknown leverage, all hidden in "safe" savings accounts.
[1] that's when your short-sell X -- borrow it and sell it -- and then it rises too much, forcing you to close out your position unfavorably.
Funny, but is that a reference to something?
When did sleeping in your car become illegal?
*sigh* I was using "use value" in the sense that you were originally using the term -- to refer to its "use value" in electronics. Let me rephrase what I want so we can avoid your clever equivocation:
"Gold can't provide less than $80/ounce of value in its capacity as a conductor, or nobody would pay $900/ounce to use it as a conductor."
Now, think up something clever again!
"ChryslerArt.com" might be a little more problematic.
Yeah, it's quite fraudulent to call anything by Chrysler "art".
Okay, okay, maybe the foresight in scamming pensioners...
I think it is incoherent to consider the matter. Gold can't be worth $80 "for its use value" or nobody would pay $900 to use it!
As for what would happen if central banks dumped their gold, you're ignoring two effects:
1) Doing so would simulatenously kill the dollar/pound/etc, because the reserve banks would then only have government bonds as assets, placing the currencies on much flimsier foundantions, and devaluing the currency.
2) Because gold has so many alternate uses just waiting to be exploited (but aren't today because it's too expensive), then industry would start doing a lot more things with it, bidding the price back up.
Quick question: Is anyone else buying up physical, in-your-possession gold? Given all that's been going on, it seems like it's virtually impossible for major currencies *not* to get severely devalued. The massive underfunded pension tidal waves, medicare programs, new spending, banks that will be unable to pay back loans...
I recently bought at Bullion Direct, a few Canadian Maple gold coins. Well, Bullion Vault just got some free advertising, because it looks like they offer a better deal on an ounce of gold. But I think you're best off buying in coin form since you may have some defense in the even the government decides to seize gold; it will probably exempt some small amount for "collector's purposes", which wouldn't apply to bars.
Heh. I think people have already tried that.
Hi, I'm am amateur movie critic. Today I'm going to show you an example of poor film-making. blah blah blah ...
*Plays entire Star Wars: Episode I*
So, as you can see by the [cinematography jargon] and [screen writing jargon], this movie sucked and I hope you learn from it in making your own movies.
One week later:
"No! You can't take down my video. This is CLEARLY fair use, since I have OBVIOUSLY used it for educational commentary, and the entire clip was VITAL for showing how much Episode I sucked."
This still doesn't address drive by exploits, XSS, SQL injections,
True, but I think we could take care of the last one by prohibiting people from taking any legal name that includes the string "); Drop Table"
I suspect the negative should be inside the square root.
I never lose.
You never lose Hangman. You definitely lose friends!
Well, I'm glad you reconsidered your opinion on randomness in light of my post. I was just concerned that I was coming off as too confrontational. Many times, people get attached to their ideas and are reluctant to let go, preferring to "attack the messenger". I will gladly admit to being guilty of this on more than one occasion! So, keep up the good work in not being like that. :-)
Well, it's not that simple. I was recently reading the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky who has convincing reasons why "randomness hath no power". His point is basically that success of an algorithm depends on its *non*-random exploitation of knowledge of the search space. Any apparent success of randomness is due to the fact that the algorithm lacks enough information to make a better guess, so any method of choosing will, on average, do just as well. Or to put it differently, if your randomness-using algorithm isn't working well, does it make sense to try to improve it by drawing from a *more* random source, like thermal noise?
(Aside: The other way Yudkowsky allows that randomness can be helpful if it's to prevent an opponent from being able to make inferences about you, such as in cryptography. More generally, it helps any time you want to destroy the "mutual information" between two variables so as to isolate one specific effect. As I like to put it, "Randomness is like poison: yes, it can help you, but only if you feed it to someone *else*.)
In the case of evolutionary algorithms, Yudkowsky argues that the success is not due to the small amount of randomness it uses, but to the large amount that it *doesn't*. Whatever evolutionary algorithm you're referring to, a huge part of it is how it selects candidates ("genes") according to a fitness function, a very non-random feature.
You said that the randomness is necessary to avoid being trapped in a local optimum. But it isn't the randomness that keeps you out of the local optimum; it's the fact that you're making a huge change to the candidate that moves it to a different "domain of attraction".
The success of evolutionary algorithms, then, is due to the extent to which it exploits knowledge of the structure of the search space, not to randomness. In cases where this assumption about the search space is wrong, they fail miserably. For example, if the problem you're attacking is to guess a secret number within a certain range, where only one answer is any better than the others, then no amount of cross-breeding, selection, mutuation, splicing, etc. will help.
Anyway, I didn't mean to pounce on you, I just wanted to give the other side.
The automated ATM machines that use K's KDE destop environment, you mean?
I don't know what your point was, but this wouldn't refute genetic determinism; it just says that the genes determining "you" include those of bacteria.
Incidentally, I don't understand what's so new about this insight. I read a book published in 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett (a philosopher rather than a biologist so he was only drawing on what was long-established consensus at the time). It described the view of the body as an ecosystem and suggested that human cells were like "altruistic versions of ant cells" since human cells share even more genetic material (100%) with their neighbors.
I didn't say it's a great investment. I just said Tesla has a reasonable chance of paying it back. For it to be a good *investment*, the interest rate would have to be high enough to compensate for the risk. But since the government is charging them ~5% interest, it wouldn't be a good idea for me to loan them the money when I can get 5% with lower risk elsewhere (like on high-grade corporate bonds). In exactly the same way, I fully expect the US government to pay back all 2-year loans it gets, but it wouldn't be a good investment to loan to them at 0.5% when the prevailing rate is 1.5% (or whatever).
Look, I appreciate your point that government shouldn't be deciding what counts as a good investment. And I completely agree. That's why I added the caveats that:
-Loaning to Tesla is only a good idea from the standpoint of having to loan money to *some* car company to make energy efficient cars; they're far more deserving than GM.
-Currently, profitability most certainly *does not* equate to "good investment", for the simple reason that the market currently does not price in the damage fossil fuels do to others via the environment. And the way to correct this is to make it so that the market does, not by trying to discern which is the best way to pump up energy efficiency, which, without a carbon tax or cap/trade system, will probably just result in higher total fossil fuel use anyway. (See Jevons Paradox.)
You're ultimately correct that the loan is not a bailout for Tesla, but I wanted to add a few clarifying points (which make Tesla look even better):
Much of the bailout for the Big Three was also in the form of loans. Where Tesla differs, however, is that Tesla actually has a chance of paying it back, while it's pure fantasy to believe GM and Chrysler could do the same. The former's bonds are currently yielding 220% or thereabouts, meaning investors place a HUGE risk discount on loaning to GM. In contrast, Tesla's biggest "problem" is keeping up with demand.
Moreover, whatever the pretense of the "loans", including the one allegedly to help "retool" for more energy efficient cars, the fact of the matter is that the money for the Big Three is really going to pay off legacy costs that they were too stupid and short-sighted to plan for, *not* to improving technology, and especially not when you consider how close to collapse they are.
Now, in fairness, I don't think the government should be making these loans at all. (To the extent that the environment is a problem, that should be addressed by pricing environmental costs into fossil fuels, and then let the market do whatever's efficient given that price premium.) However, *if* it's going to make these loans, they should go to companies that have a realistic chance of accomplishing the stated goals of the loans. And so far, Tesla has been far more efficient at it, and has no legacy costs to pay off.
Exactly! Thank you for bringing common sense to this. As I would put it: yes, the first person to get off his ass and gather widely-scattered information into one convenient place ... will have a monopoly on that information. At least for a while. That's just how reality works.
Now, Mr. Librarian, how many databases of orphaned works did you have access to before Google started doing this? Oh, right, none.
A monopoly is better than a "nullopoly".