I wonder if an enterprising prosecutor will charge members of this company with murder, now that they are fully aware of how dangerous their product is, yet continue to sell it.
I hope so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I never made such a statement. But in markets where only companies that practice forcible sodomy can compete, those companies will predominate. In the words of a construction manager friend of mine: "If I'm not driving my subcontractors out of business, I'm not doing my job."
He left construction management when he got the chance.
That was a good read, thanks. Nonetheless, if the company's behavior is incompatible with the bottom line, market forces will squash that company. The company with a constraint of "never behave like a sociopath" is at a competitive disadvantage to the company without that constraint.
Perhaps your brother was really awesome at doing his job, and that was a calculated risk on the part of his company. Perhaps they did it to make an example of him and raise the morale of everyone else there. But if they just did it out of the kindness of their hearts, then they violated their fiduciary duty to maximize their shareholder's profits.
No one should ever mistake a company for anything but a profit seeking machine. They vary in their competence toward seeking this goal, and in the timeframes over which they expect returns, but that is what is at their core. Companies that don't behave this way just get eaten by those that do. It isn't even their choice.
I thought about it too. Your post misleads because you compare ISS cost to the total public and private R&D spending of the US. Most of that isn't science. That's things like Charmin engineering a softer pleat of toilet paper.
$100 billion over 17 years is approximately the money spent on the National Science Foundation over that time. We could have doubled the NSF budget for the last 17 years. That would have been something.
NSF budget history:
http://proposalexponent.com/NS...
I saw Don Eigler present this work. Dominoes were also his analogy. As I remember it was pretty slow, with gates taking many microseconds. Most frustrating was the fact that it was one-shot, with many tedious hours following each computation to rebuild. However, it was amazingly small and very fun to watch.
Like you, I used to be a believer. Then I went to space camp and realized that manned spaceflight is an exercise in marketing, not science.
>That's harsh. Apparently corruption managed to land us on the moon, send dozens of probes out into the solar system, and built an International Space Station complete with the capability to take routine space trips every 4 months.
A space station, built at an exorbitant $100 billion, that has delivered very little serious scientific research. That's 18 years of NSF funding... science on the ground in the US could have been transformed with that money in a way not seen since the funding increases that were a response to sputnik. We could have Cassini quality unmanned probes around every planet, and a hubble replacement ready to go, for a fifth of that. But no, we had to have MANNED spaceflight.
>Well the first thing they told me in economics is that technological innovation drives the economy...
Yes. Notice that they didn't jump straight from the agrarian age to the information age. Economies advance in modest steps, and each step is profitable at the time it is made. Until there are compelling economic reasons to go into space, it isn't going to happen. You might call an ancient Mayan trying to create a transistor far sighted, but if he dumps a ton of money into the problem, gets nowhere, and asks for more money, you are a fool to give it to him. What we need to do is fund r&d on the ground. Eventually materials advances may cheapen the cost of of getting into space. Then everything else follows on it's own. This has already happened for the special case of the communications satelite, because they are light and don't need constant resupply, like people do.
>Did you know that rust is literally covering the surface of mars? Did you know that iron ore is literally pulled out of holes in the ground in Minnesota? You need to give me very compelling reason to convince me to go to mars for it.
>Advances in bio-chemistry that would come... NASA has sold manned spaceflight to the US public since Skylab with these kind of boilerplate promises of the great science that will be done in "the ideal laboratory of space". 30+ years later and it hasn't panned out. NASA people who keep hyping these promises are full of crap. Space is an ideal lab for a few things- some fundemental physics, like LISA (LIGO's planned, yet largely unfunded descendant), and for observational astronomy. It is NOT an ideal lab for biochemistry, metalurgy, manufacturing, or anything else that requires people. And putting people up there won't change that fact. As Doug Osheroff, physicist and Columbia accident investigator, put it to me: "The only scientific reason for manned space flight is to study the effects of space on people."
>People willingly sacrifice their lives in return for the chance to explore space. Fine with me. But don't defend NASA when they make false promises to the taxpayer to get them to foot the bill.
>To say that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money and no better than waging a war. Better than waging an unnecessary war, of course. But the space station is no better than a pork project along the lines of the "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.
> the mill both faced windward in whatever direction the wind decided to come from as well as spun faster than a bat out of hell to put it mildly, quite a lot faster than the windspeed if built correctly is quite possible - These mills will basically blaze away!!!
>maybe it's time to find the right bearings that can take the correct angle of pressure etc. and slam that hunk of junk together and start generating some $$$ from the savings as well as doing something right for the environment.
Hunk of junk... these mills make.5 past windspeed, don't they?
> Really? I can reshape my body at will? Great news! I've always wanted to be about 20 pounds heavier than I am. Actually, my doctors want me to gain some weight too. I've tried everything that I can think of, and I've also tried everything that my doctors can think of.
Have you tried everything your doctors can think of? I am quite sure that anabolic steriods would have you bulking up in no time. The side effects, well... let's hope that your added weight doesn't come in the form of breasts.
I imagine that they would like to have a way to shoot at this very potent anti-ship missile:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/tai wan/2000/e-03-28-00-11.htm
It's hard to hit an incoming missile with projectiles when those projectiles don't go much faster than the missile. Maybe this is why they want a railgun. The ability to take out distant ships or planes that might launch this missile, without using carrier launched planes or precious Tomahawks, would also be very useful.
> How in the world is this insightful? You are recommending to people who have no clue what the consequences of just going out and taking some medication might be to give it a whirl since it isn't a controlled substance. Regardless of how we would all love to find out that you could just go to the grocery and grab a bottle of "No More Cancer," suggesting that people experiment on themselves is NOT a reasonable suggestion.
And yet it is wholly reasonable for us to experiment on people in clinical trials. Why is it ethical to do this? Because people consent to it knowing the risks. They do this because they are desperate (dying of cancer) and have exhausted the conventional treatments. A lot of animal tests go on before those clinical trials to show that 1) the drug probably does something good and 2) the drug isn't poisonous at the dose needed to show a positive effect.
All we have now is some tissue experiments and a fairly large (low toxicity) animal LD50. This is just the beginnning of the background work needed before a human clinical trial. But this is only a quantitatively changes the decision about whether or not it is rational for a desperate person to participate in an experiment with the drug. It doesn't qualitatively change the ethics of the experimentation. For a sufficiently desperate person who is well informed of the potential risks and benefits (NOT deceived by a quack's marketing ploys), self-experimentation might be rational. Allowing this person that choice certainly is ethical.
>Science is not the culmination of anecdotal evidence, just because it worked for someone does not mean it will work for you nor that what you think happened is actually what happened (e.g. just because you no longer have cancer after giving it a try doesn't mean that it was what caused the remission) Giving out advice as you have should be done with great care which you have not displayed.
Scientific inquiries often begin with anecdotal evidence. Sometimes it's all wrong, but there are diamonds in the rough. You are right that science is much more than the accumulation of anecdotes, but the desperate person dying of cancer doesn't have time to wait for science to separate false anecdote from fact, and anyway it's their body and thus up to them as to what they want to do with each anecdote they hear about.
As Asomov said, science isn't about "eureka!", it's about "that's funny." Once the story of "that's funny" starts to get around, (possibly with a false explanation of the curious observation), then it's an anecdote.
I love how all the "Tesla did it first" comments come out whenever there is a post about early electrical technology. Unsung genius? Yes, certainly. But not the only one. Why does Tesla get so much attention? Why is he, and not some other unsung genius, featured so prominently on these wierd "alternative science" websites, for example http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tesla/esp_tesla_ a.htm ? What is it about him or his work? Is it all the weird pictures of large inductors throwing sparks? It can't simply just be the "eccentric mysterious inventor mystique", because lots of other have that.
Tesla is a phenominon now. Why him?
I've heard enough about Tesla. Here's your new unsung genius, who you probably know very little about but whose conceptual understanding of electricity underpins so much modern technology. And he was at least as nuts as Telsa:
Swords... Reminds me of a guy I know who as a boy was fascinated by his father's Katana, which was strictly off limits (and therefore even more interesting). So one day he gets it down off the wall and sets it across his legs as he sits in a chair. And he turns it over and over and examines it in fascination. And then he notices that it has cut deeply into his legs just by its own weight.
I had the 160 in one that came in the wood box, from about 1983. That thing kicked ass and was my most used Christmas toy, except for perhaps Legos. Thank you for reminding me of it. The descendants of that toy were getting dumbed-down even in the late 80's. However, dumbed-down is a relative term: The manual for my 160 and one box had some technical explanations of transistor biasing that would be typical for a lab in an electrical fundementals EE course.
No, science got politicized when governments realized that the fruits of science can include immense millitary power. Manhattan project, if you want to pick the most obvious turning point. Some scientists grew concerned about the use of what they discovered, hense "Union of Concerned Scientists." Others took the Wernher von Braun attitude: "I just build the rocket. What they put on the end of it is not my department."
Look at the board: http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/board.html
There you see the name of Richard Garwin, who was central to the technical effort of getting from the Teller-Ulam
theory of the hydrogen bomb to the first working device, the Ivy Mike test. This was in the early fifties. After that he worked on satellite-based photography of the Soviets. To this day he serves on the Defense Science Board, which is basically a club of extremely smart techies that the pentagon asks for advice.
He sure sounds like an anti-American commie to me!
Mod files were the old amiga standard for doing this, except they didn't have much space for samples so all tonal instruments were just one sample played at different rates. It was amazing what could be done with just four notes at once. A song was typically 100 KB.
Nice to see what the little man in the synthesizer actually looks like, though.
> I guess in the end I just ask that you don't tell a nation not to do something but offer them an inexpensive or practical alternative... or, hell, maybe even compensate them for lost wealth? I don't know, I'm not an economist and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of negative replies for defending China or people cutting down rain forest for land. Oh well.
You are right on. This is an angle that the environmental movement has not yet come to terms with. The gorilla in the room is not the carbon production of the currently industrialized countries, it is the carbon production in the near future (20-50 years) of the currently inductrializing countries, which are far more populous. Most of the rhetoric of the global warming movement has been centered about modest lifestyle changes in developing countries: smaller cars, power conservation, and subsidizing carbon neutral energy sources. These are easy changes to make for the average westerner: They don't strongly impact our quality of life. Too bad the the carbon withheld from the atmosphere due to these changes is so small compared to the quantities that will be released a generation from now from the populous countries that are currently industrializing.
For the global warming movement to address the gorilla in the room, they would have to ask people in China and India to forgo that first refrigerator, automobile, computer, tractor, or paved road. And that is not a morally defensable or politically feasable position. Until the global warming movement faces up to this fact their efforts in the developed world are just a sideshow.
I think human carbon emmisions contribute to global warming, and that human carbon emmisions will explode in the next 50 years due to the industrialization of populated countries and due to increasing carbon emissions from alternative oil sources. (Coal gassification, tar sands, extra heavy oil... all of these release a ton of carbon just to produce, before they are even burned!) Greens should be lobbying the governments of devloped countries hard for r&d into affordable carbon neutral technologies that can be scaled to the meet to enourmous quantities of energy that the developing world will soon be demanding. The only tech. I know of that is carbon neutral, sufficiently scalable, reasonably affordable, and could be implemented on a massive scale just one generation from now is nuclear fission. If greens aren't advocating for this than I don't think they are serious about putting a major dent in global warming.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if an enterprising prosecutor will charge members of this company with murder, now that they are fully aware of how dangerous their product is, yet continue to sell it. I hope so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I never made such a statement. But in markets where only companies that practice forcible sodomy can compete, those companies will predominate. In the words of a construction manager friend of mine: "If I'm not driving my subcontractors out of business, I'm not doing my job." He left construction management when he got the chance.
That was a good read, thanks. Nonetheless, if the company's behavior is incompatible with the bottom line, market forces will squash that company. The company with a constraint of "never behave like a sociopath" is at a competitive disadvantage to the company without that constraint.
Perhaps your brother was really awesome at doing his job, and that was a calculated risk on the part of his company. Perhaps they did it to make an example of him and raise the morale of everyone else there. But if they just did it out of the kindness of their hearts, then they violated their fiduciary duty to maximize their shareholder's profits. No one should ever mistake a company for anything but a profit seeking machine. They vary in their competence toward seeking this goal, and in the timeframes over which they expect returns, but that is what is at their core. Companies that don't behave this way just get eaten by those that do. It isn't even their choice.
How are they going to find enough pornographic images to properly train the system?
I thought about it too. Your post misleads because you compare ISS cost to the total public and private R&D spending of the US. Most of that isn't science. That's things like Charmin engineering a softer pleat of toilet paper. $100 billion over 17 years is approximately the money spent on the National Science Foundation over that time. We could have doubled the NSF budget for the last 17 years. That would have been something. NSF budget history: http://proposalexponent.com/NS...
>Just wait until the first air disaster, with numbers like "six hundred dead...".
People die in huge numbers from ferry disasters every few years. People still take ferries.
I saw Don Eigler present this work. Dominoes were also his analogy. As I remember it was pretty slow, with gates taking many microseconds. Most frustrating was the fact that it was one-shot, with many tedious hours following each computation to rebuild. However, it was amazingly small and very fun to watch.
> "-1, bad spelling" for your "-1, innane"
"-1 nitpicking".
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people. -E.L. Kersten http://www.despair.com/demotivation.html
Like you, I used to be a believer. Then I went to space camp and realized that manned spaceflight is an exercise in marketing, not science.
>That's harsh. Apparently corruption managed to land us on the moon, send dozens of probes out into the solar system, and built an International Space Station complete with the capability to take routine space trips every 4 months.
A space station, built at an exorbitant $100 billion, that has delivered very little serious scientific research. That's 18 years of NSF funding... science on the ground in the US could have been transformed with that money in a way not seen since the funding increases that were a response to sputnik. We could have Cassini quality unmanned probes around every planet, and a hubble replacement ready to go, for a fifth of that. But no, we had to have MANNED spaceflight.
>Well the first thing they told me in economics is that technological innovation drives the economy...
Yes. Notice that they didn't jump straight from the agrarian age to the information age. Economies advance in modest steps, and each step is profitable at the time it is made. Until there are compelling economic reasons to go into space, it isn't going to happen. You might call an ancient Mayan trying to create a transistor far sighted, but if he dumps a ton of money into the problem, gets nowhere, and asks for more money, you are a fool to give it to him.
What we need to do is fund r&d on the ground. Eventually materials advances may cheapen the cost of of getting into space. Then everything else follows on it's own. This has already happened for the special case of the communications satelite, because they are light and don't need constant resupply, like people do.
>Did you know that rust is literally covering the surface of mars?
Did you know that iron ore is literally pulled out of holes in the ground in Minnesota? You need to give me very compelling reason to convince me to go to mars for it.
>Advances in bio-chemistry that would come...
NASA has sold manned spaceflight to the US public since Skylab with these kind of boilerplate promises of the great science that will be done in "the ideal laboratory of space". 30+ years later and it hasn't panned out. NASA people who keep hyping these promises are full of crap. Space is an ideal lab for a few things- some fundemental physics, like LISA (LIGO's planned, yet largely unfunded descendant), and for observational astronomy. It is NOT an ideal lab for biochemistry, metalurgy, manufacturing, or anything else that requires people. And putting people up there won't change that fact. As Doug Osheroff, physicist and Columbia accident investigator, put it to me: "The only scientific reason for manned space flight is to study the effects of space on people."
>People willingly sacrifice their lives in return for the chance to explore space.
Fine with me. But don't defend NASA when they make false promises to the taxpayer to get them to foot the bill.
>To say that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money and no better than waging a war.
Better than waging an unnecessary war, of course. But the space station is no better than a pork project along the lines of the "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.
> the mill both faced windward in whatever direction the wind decided to come from as well as spun faster than a bat out of hell to put it mildly, quite a lot faster than the windspeed if built correctly is quite possible - These mills will basically blaze away!!!
.5 past windspeed, don't they?
>maybe it's time to find the right bearings that can take the correct angle of pressure etc. and slam that hunk of junk together and start generating some $$$ from the savings as well as doing something right for the environment.
Hunk of junk... these mills make
> Really? I can reshape my body at will? Great news! I've always wanted to be about 20 pounds heavier than I am. Actually, my doctors want me to gain some weight too. I've tried everything that I can think of, and I've also tried everything that my doctors can think of.
Have you tried everything your doctors can think of? I am quite sure that anabolic steriods would have you bulking up in no time. The side effects, well... let's hope that your added weight doesn't come in the form of breasts.
I imagine that they would like to have a way to shoot at this very potent anti-ship missile: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/tai wan/2000/e-03-28-00-11.htm
It's hard to hit an incoming missile with projectiles when those projectiles don't go much faster than the missile. Maybe this is why they want a railgun. The ability to take out distant ships or planes that might launch this missile, without using carrier launched planes or precious Tomahawks, would also be very useful.
> How in the world is this insightful? You are recommending to people who have no clue what the consequences of just going out and
taking some medication might be to give it a whirl since it isn't a controlled substance. Regardless of how we would all love to find out that you could just go to the grocery and grab a bottle of "No More Cancer," suggesting that people experiment on themselves is NOT a reasonable suggestion.
And yet it is wholly reasonable for us to experiment on people in clinical trials. Why is it ethical to do this? Because people consent to it knowing the risks. They do this because they are desperate (dying of cancer) and have exhausted the conventional treatments. A lot of animal tests go on before those clinical trials to show that 1) the drug probably does something good and 2) the drug isn't poisonous at the dose needed to show a positive effect.
All we have now is some tissue experiments and a fairly large (low toxicity) animal LD50. This is just the beginnning of the background work needed before a human clinical trial. But this is only a quantitatively changes the decision about whether or not it is rational for a desperate person to participate in an experiment with the drug. It doesn't qualitatively change the ethics of the experimentation. For a sufficiently desperate person who is well informed of the potential risks and benefits (NOT deceived by a quack's marketing ploys), self-experimentation might be rational. Allowing this person that choice certainly is ethical.
>Science is not the culmination of anecdotal evidence, just because it worked for someone does not mean it will work for you nor that what you think happened is actually what happened (e.g. just because you no longer have cancer after giving it a try doesn't mean that it was what caused the remission) Giving out advice as you have should be done with great care which you have not displayed.
Scientific inquiries often begin with anecdotal evidence. Sometimes it's all wrong, but there are diamonds in the rough. You are right that science is much more than the accumulation of anecdotes, but the desperate person dying of cancer doesn't have time to wait for science to separate false anecdote from fact, and anyway it's their body and thus up to them as to what they want to do with each anecdote they hear about.
As Asomov said, science isn't about "eureka!", it's about "that's funny." Once the story of "that's funny" starts to get around, (possibly with a false explanation of the curious observation), then it's an anecdote.
I love how all the "Tesla did it first" comments come out whenever there is a post about early electrical technology. Unsung genius? Yes, certainly. But not the only one. Why does Tesla get so much attention? Why is he, and not some other unsung genius, featured so prominently on these wierd "alternative science" websites, for example http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tesla/esp_tesla_ a.htm ? What is it about him or his work?
Is it all the weird pictures of large inductors throwing sparks? It can't simply just be the "eccentric mysterious inventor mystique", because lots of other have that.
Tesla is a phenominon now. Why him?
I've heard enough about Tesla. Here's your new unsung genius, who you probably know very little about but whose conceptual understanding of electricity underpins so much modern technology. And he was at least as nuts as Telsa:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
I'd do it myself if I could. This is a very interesting website.
Swords...
Reminds me of a guy I know who as a boy was fascinated by his father's Katana, which was strictly off limits (and therefore even more interesting). So one day he gets it down off the wall and sets it across his legs as he sits in a chair. And he turns it over and over and examines it in fascination. And then he notices that it has cut deeply into his legs just by its own weight.
I had the 160 in one that came in the wood box, from about 1983. That thing kicked ass and was my most used Christmas toy, except for perhaps Legos. Thank you for reminding me of it. The descendants of that toy were getting dumbed-down even in the late 80's. However, dumbed-down is a relative term: The manual for my 160 and one box had some technical explanations of transistor biasing that would be typical for a lab in an electrical fundementals EE course.
No, science got politicized when governments realized that the fruits of science can include immense millitary power. Manhattan project, if you want to pick the most obvious turning point. Some scientists grew concerned about the use of what they discovered, hense "Union of Concerned Scientists." Others took the Wernher von Braun attitude: "I just build the rocket. What they put on the end of it is not my department."
Look at the board: http://www.ucsusa.org/ucs/about/board.html
There you see the name of Richard Garwin, who was central to the technical effort of getting from the Teller-Ulam theory of the hydrogen bomb to the first working device, the Ivy Mike test. This was in the early fifties. After that he worked on satellite-based photography of the Soviets. To this day he serves on the Defense Science Board, which is basically a club of extremely smart techies that the pentagon asks for advice.
He sure sounds like an anti-American commie to me!
with apologies to Vonnegut
Mod files were the old amiga standard for doing this, except they didn't have much space for samples so all tonal instruments were just one sample played at different rates. It was amazing what could be done with just four notes at once. A song was typically 100 KB.
Nice to see what the little man in the synthesizer actually looks like, though.
> I'll celebrate by having baked beens and onions for dinner.
> I guess in the end I just ask that you don't tell a nation not to do something but offer them an inexpensive or practical alternative ... or, hell, maybe even compensate them for lost wealth? I don't know, I'm not an economist and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of negative replies for defending China or people cutting down rain forest for land. Oh well.
You are right on. This is an angle that the environmental movement has not yet come to terms with. The gorilla in the room is not the carbon production of the currently industrialized countries, it is the carbon production in the near future (20-50 years) of the currently inductrializing countries, which are far more populous. Most of the rhetoric of the global warming movement has been centered about modest lifestyle changes in developing countries: smaller cars, power conservation, and subsidizing carbon neutral energy sources. These are easy changes to make for the average westerner: They don't strongly impact our quality of life. Too bad the the carbon withheld from the atmosphere due to these changes is so small compared to the quantities that will be released a generation from now from the populous countries that are currently industrializing.
For the global warming movement to address the gorilla in the room, they would have to ask people in China and India to forgo that first refrigerator, automobile, computer, tractor, or paved road. And that is not a morally defensable or politically feasable position. Until the global warming movement faces up to this fact their efforts in the developed world are just a sideshow.
I think human carbon emmisions contribute to global warming, and that human carbon emmisions will explode in the next 50 years due to the industrialization of populated countries and due to increasing carbon emissions from alternative oil sources. (Coal gassification, tar sands, extra heavy oil... all of these release a ton of carbon just to produce, before they are even burned!) Greens should be lobbying the governments of devloped countries hard for r&d into affordable carbon neutral technologies that can be scaled to the meet to enourmous quantities of energy that the developing world will soon be demanding. The only tech. I know of that is carbon neutral, sufficiently scalable, reasonably affordable, and could be implemented on a massive scale just one generation from now is nuclear fission. If greens aren't advocating for this than I don't think they are serious about putting a major dent in global warming.