The serious issue your joke illuminates is the possibility of people growing a clone for the purpose of "spare parts." No risk of rejection when you do the transplantation, see?
Evolution will tend to produce good solutions to problems, but it will hardly ever produce the best possible solution.
Not so. Unless the space of solutions is extremely unusual -- not simply connected, something like that -- natural selection will always find the optimum solution, given enough time. Deliberate engineering gets you to the optimum faster, that's all. But natural selection has got one hell of a head start on deliberate engineering as far as our bodies go, like maybe four million years' worth.
I think the main reason to favor regeneration over prosthetics is economy. See, the program to regenerate your leg already exists in your body. It's just a question of turning it on, and the signal is very likely to be the same for everyone. So once you can figure out how to do that -- and that will undoubtably be a monstrously expensive undertaking, yes -- then all you need to do to regenerate limbs is apply the signal. Say, you get a $50 injection from a nurse of a tailored virus, and, ding, you grow a new hand over the next four months. Don't need to stay in the hospital, have expensive technicians custom-build a prosthesis for you, learn to use it and take care of it. You just go home and eat a little extra protein every day, and the thing takes care of itself.
That would save large amounts of medical costs. Not to mention revolutionizing the treatment of all kinds of injuries and diseases. Aggressive gangrene or flesh-eating bacteria in a wound? Arm half bitten off by a shark? No need for expensive microsurgery -- just lop off the thing and grow it back clean and whole.
Or perhaps the nation has a much greater duty to help young men and women who have volunteered to put their lives on the line to defend us, and who have lost a limb in the process.
It's not quite clear the nation owes the same consideration to J. Random Citizen who gets himself racked up on the highway, say, by drinking and driving, or even through plain bad luck.
Eh...I'd have to disagree with that. What's important to realize is that science is, by and large, a process of finding what works by systematically trying everything that doesn't work first. That's one reason it's enormously expensive and takes so much time.
In hindsight you can often recognize the tender little shoot of the Right Idea growing, and, yes, it is often growing in some neglected garden with very little fertilizer (a.k.a. money). You'd naturally think that "all" you have to do to be much more efficient is "just" identify that shoot a little earlier, and pour your resources into it.
Alas, in the first place it's typically impossible to identify the right idea except in hindsight. And in the second, the vast sterile fields of weeds surrounding the right idea are not wasted effort. They serve the very important purpose of demonstrating what does not work. This is important, because people are so enthusiastic about their theories that only concrete demonstrations of their failure will convince folks to abandon false theories and look around for better.
Another way to put it is: without the vast bitter harvest of Wrong, we would not be motivated enough to search out the rare fruit of Right. Senator Mikulski notwithstanding, it isn't logically possible to make scientific advance more efficient. Its inefficiency is part of what makes it work.
I think the point is to be able to generate electricity much more efficiently. This is not a replacement for a gasoline engine in your car. It's a replacement for a laptop battery for a traveling salesman or satellite-phone battery for a USMC lieutenant in the field.
As such, it's a big win. Batteries are an environmental disaster, since they often need nasty heavy metals (e.g. lead or mercury), and they don't last very long. Furthermore, you waste a lot of transportation energy transporting around the mass of batteries in something that's supposed to be portable. Finally, the process of generating and distributing the electricity you need to use to recharge the batteries is itself not very efficient at all. Generation losses, transmission losses, the fact that you can't store the stuff easily and have to have it running all the time for the intermittent occasions you need to recharge your batteries, et cetera.
This way, you generate your electricity on the spot, very efficiently (hence fewer emissions). And you don't need a heavy battery containing noxious metals.
we only get a very small percentage of the generated energy.
Oh no, we get enormous quantities of it. Far more than we could easily use. I'd say the problem is that it rains down in the form of high-energy photons which are difficult to collect and store.
Just you wait, sonny. When you turn 55 or so, your other choice is to have the doc stick a fat periscope up there to take a look, screen you for bowel cancer. Bring on the robots, I say.
The only problem with this propulsion method is that you need an awful number of photons...
Hmmm, I'd always thought the major problem with matter-annihilation drives was the lack of antimatter deposits in the Earth's crust from which the fuel could be mined...
Yah, it's a Bose-Einstein gas. And all gases, quantum or no, exert a pressure when they're confined*. The simplest argument for why relies on the Second Law: any gas must inevitably tend to spread out, because filling the universe uniformly is the state of maximum entropy. It clearly takes an inward force to prevent the spreading out. Hence, the gas exerts a pressure.
------------- * For quantum pedants: I'm assuming the gas is not in a coherent state, OK? Ergodicity applies. Very reasonable when the apparatus is at room temperature.
Despite the fact that China has repeatedly asked to participate in the International Space Station, the US has always refused. Some have argued this is because of a reluctance to share technologies that might be co-opted for military purposes, but others say it is simply down to politics, with space the last bastion of Cold War thinking.
If so, I wonder if it's really the US that blackballs the Chinese. The country with the most to fear from China is actually Russia. They share an enormous common border. On the Russian side you've got endless empty taiga, natural resources galore...a paltry 140 million citizens...on the Chinese side, a billion hungry peasants. What's the Chinese for Lebensraum, I wonder?
Me, I'm totally OK with a strictly competitive stance vis-a-vis the Chinese in space. Much more gets done in that brisk atmosphere than in the suffocating 'cooperation in space' fug through which the ISS drifts, poor thing.
Well...fair enough, but I'd probably trade places with you in a New York minute. Not worry about whether I've given the daughter the right kind of guidance as she begins high school. Be able to re-make the decision of who to marry and get it right this time. Be able to move anywhere I like, take any job I want, change the career in any direction I please, because it's just me (and maybe a young partner) and we could work 80-hour weeks and eat out of cans while I came up to speed. Not to mention be (I assume) about twenty years younger and not have my back hurt every God-damned morning when I get up, or need a separate pair of glasses to make out the print on the computer screen.
Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, huh? Sheesh. What a world.
WhyTF would you not take $900M?! Power? Money IS power.
Alas, no. It's certainly the next best thing, and can often be turned into power with judicious and wise use, but money is not synonymous with power. Just ask, oh, say Martha Stewart or Ken Lay.
He could....[insert random business plan here]...
No doubt. But what makes you think your plan would work? For every 100,000 "brilliant" ideas to make a bazillion dollars that one can think up, you'd be unbelievably lucky to find even one that actually works out in the real world.
That's the problem. He knows that this idea works (so far, at least). He doesn't know if he has, or will ever have, another idea that will work. Yes it would be nice to have half a billion dollars. But it would be very sad to have the experience of working out your (only!) good idea begun and ended before you turn 25.
Software makers couldn't just make one version of their application and run it on all platforms...so they only supported certain UNIX versions. And in the end, they got tired of the proprietary mess that was UNIX and abandoned it altogether, and only supported Windows because at least it was consistent.
I'm not a developer, but I was a heavy user of Unix hardware in the 80s and 90s, and I don't remember it this way at all. First of all, most any ordinary simple application you wanted came with the OS and the hardware. In those days the hardware was $50,000 or so for a workstation, the OS license another $1000. Any ordinary modest application -- mail user agent, debugger -- was at most a few extra hundred dollars, less than the sales tax on the machine. You got this stuff more or less thrown in. I don't get the impression it was all that complicated for the vendors to produce, either. They had a fairly captive market who were willing to pay what by modern standards are princely sums for applications, so the cost of porting something to their particular brand of Unix wasn't to steep to handle. Or so it seems. In any event, you tended to end up with a lot of vertical integration in your software, as I recall. If you were an IBM shop, you bought IBM hardware, used AIX and IBM's own compiler, IBM's own user application suite, and so forth.
Nor do I think software makers "switched" from Unix to Windows, and even less so because it was consistent. First of all, I can hardly think of any application that ran on Unix big iron that people imagined ought to be crammed onto a desktop with a 486 and 64 Mb of RAM. Desktop was for e-mail and your secretary to type your manuscripts. The Unix workstation or minicomputer was for doing serious work. Not much overlap in the applications needed, at least until the mid 90s when desktop hardware finally closed the performance gap with the workstation.
And that last is actually why I think people started making more serious software for the desktop: just because the hardware got so good you could use a cheap PC for fairly serious work. Then they made it for Windows merely because Windows had the dominant place on the desktop. I don't think there was much advantage in Windows in terms of consistency. As I said, I'm not a developer, but my impression is that getting things straight with the different varieties of Windows (Win 3.3, Win 95, Win NT) was at least as much trouble as getting things straight between, say, AIX and SunOS. But I speak under correction.
Also worth noting is that the cost of hardware so dominated the cost of computing at that time that it was not uncommon to write your own code in-house, except for very complicated applications for which you were anyway going to spend big bucks. You needed hackers to run the hardware anyway, and paying them to write some code too wasn't a big deal. The present era, when hardware is dirt cheap and the competition among sellers of even small applications is keen, seems like a very different market.
Well...first of all, he's not going to get the whole 900 megabucks. He doesn't own the entire company, only a majority of its stock. The deal may not be strictly cash, too -- it may well involve quantities of Yahoo stock valued at their trading price on the day of the acquisition.
Secondly, the guy is already fairly rich. Going from being a millionaire to a half-billionaire (say) is nice in many ways, but it's going from riches to more riches, not rags to riches.
Third, one suspects he actually gets more out of the power and glory of running a successful company. It doesn't sound like his Main Goal is to have lots of money. It sounds like he enjoys more the constructive pleasures of building a massively successful venture. Who wouldn't? I mean, unless you're a total slacker, then being successful, admired, influential and seeing your ideas come to fruition exactly as you'd want them to is much more rewarding than the next million (once you already have a few million in the bank already).
What happens if he sells the company? Sure, he's got a lot of dough, but he's no longer in sole control of the company. He's working for Yahoo. He's got a boss. Not likely he's going to enjoy that very much.
He could take his big chunk o' change and his fame and go start another copmany. But no doubt the deal would include a non-compete clause, so it can't be the same type of company. Got to be a totally new venture. What are the odds lightning will strike twice? That the next "brilliant" idea he has about a company is going to work out as well? He's going to be worrying about that.
If he had run the company for 10 years already and had had all the fun there was to have in it, I think he'd sell. But he's only run it for a very short time. On the other hand, he also knows what the commenters here are saying, which is that this is probably his best golden opportunity. I'd say the guy's in a bit of a bind.
My friend, it's a perfectly plausible argument, and I'm perfectly willing to agree that in this situation you are probably dead right. The problem I have is that whether you are right or not is a pretty complicated logical question. To be absolutely sure -- and we would need to be, since when we talk property values we're often talking about the bulk of a person's life's savings -- I say, to be absolutely sure you're right, we'd need to have access to all the facts of the case, and we'd need to be very just and wise in our reasoning.
Now, I might be willing to accept that you personally can do all those things in this situation. And maybe I might be willing to agree that a few other people in my acquaintance are. But am I generally willing to grant that kind of power to any random elected official? To, more or less, any member of the species who is capable of wearing a tie and knowing to defecate in private (because that's about the only minimum qualification for being elected to the town council)? The answer is emphatically no. I'm not. There is just too much potential for horrible abuse.
This is the generic problem with social engineering, of which zoning is one example. It requires a level of unselfish wisdom and objectivity in human beings that they generally don't demonstrate. It would probably work just fine with a different species, but for H. sapiens it tends not to.
That said, I do appreciate your point, and I am not saying zoning is something I would abolish were I made God Emperor tomorrow. Frankly, I just don't know. Like I said, the concept troubles me, and vide supra I generally hate the idea of allowing the majority power over the individual allegedly for the greater good, but I do recognize some degree of oversight of private transactions seems to be necessary.
I'm not a politician, so I can't say exactly what that oversight should be. I restrict my participation to being extremely skeptical of what the lawyers and legislators propose. I figure I'm a useful counter-weight to the socialist enthusiasts out there who would like to use the power of the majority to force everyone to not only work the right jobs and build the right kind of houses, but no doubt think the right kind of thoughts, too.
Thank you for the insightful and courteous exchange.
Well, for all the coolness of the hardware, it's the work of people such as yourself that made (and still makes) the USAF and USN an effective national defense.
I've seen the F-22 fly, at the Edwards Open House a few years ago. Very impressive.
By the way, for anyone in SoCal, the Edwards Open House (late October this year) is the place to see the world's most amazing aircraft engineering, both old and new. Worth the trip.
I dunno. The USSR was always going to catch up and pass us in the next 5 years, too. Every five years they said that, from about 1960 right through to 1991, when the house of cards came tumblin' down. For that matter, we were told Japan, Inc. was going to become the world dominant economic power from about 1975 through 1995, when it finally became clear that, well, they weren't.
Plus, my modest experience with the Chinese government and their statistics is that they lie unbelievably. Just for example, I know from direct experience that they routinely falsify the standardized test scores of their graduating science and tech students. On paper they have the most amazing graduating classes. But it doesn't hold up if you look closer, get to know the students in person. (I'm not saying they don't have good science and tech students -- they do. Just not nearly as many as the government says they do. And certainly on a per-capita basis fewer than the United States.)
Uh...so far as I know, the big developer isn't treated in principle any different from you the little guy developer. If you have to pay to have the sewer extended to your front door, he does too. I've never heard of a community offering to pay for services that are only used by the development, unless the community really wants to encourage new development. And if that's what the citizens are up to, well that's their free choice. You can't logically offer to subsidize development and then complain that it's costing you money.
But anyway, I thought the costs we were talking about were costs that were not only used by the development. For example, you get a lot more traffic on a county access road that leads to the development, so the county decides it needs to widen the road and install some traffic signals. That's not usually paid for by developers, of course, but by the citizens. (Actually a lot of it is paid by the state, and there's another can of worms: why should the citizens of one part of the state -- which may be in a recession -- pay for the infrastructure in another part of the state that's booming?)
Er...well, fine. But if you've got the votes to require them to pay for infrastructure costs, then you've got the votes to prevent any such silly things as subsidies and tax incentives, don't you?
I mean, if the citizens have already voted to subsidize development, it seems a little schizophrenic for them to then turn around and complain that development is costing them money.
Also, what makes development profits "obscene," anyway? They charge all the market will bear, surely. And what's wrong with that? Do you volunteer to get paid less than the prevailing wage for your skill set? Why would you? Let's say you've owned a house in town for 8 years, and because of whatever's driving development -- surely a skyrocketing real estate market -- you're now in a position to quadruple your money. Are you going to turn all that money down, sell your house for a nice, non-obscene profit of only 20%? Why?
No one's forcing anyone to buy the houses. If the developer puts up crappy shacks that cost him $2 each to raise, and crazies come in and buy them for half a mil, why is the developer being evil? I mean, if you offer to sell your collection of Barry Manilow 45s on eBay and some oddball buys it for $5,000, is that your fault?
I appreciate the urge to stick it to someone who's changing the terms of what you thought was a life-time deal, especially someone big and faceless with a lot of pocket change. But I'd stop and wonder whether the principle of the thing is a good idea. Once you start saying it's cool for the majority to stick it to big mass developers, munging up the concept of property rights in the process, where will it stop? Think government is just going to let that power lie around unused when there's no big boys to beat up? Think again. Power once put into the hands of government is never allowed to gather dust. Then one day when you find yourself on the other side of the deal -- think Susette Kelo -- you could seriously regret your previous support for an erosion of the ability of the private owner to defy the will of the majority. You have to bear in mind that the law can make no distinction in principle between Joe A. Smallhomeowner and ReallyReallyBig Developers, Inc. (I'm not saying such a distinction can't exist in practise, but that's a matter for the citizens watching their elected officials like a hawk and holding them accountable every November.)
Well, first of all, I have to say I'm pretty troubled by the whole concept of "zoning." It definitely corrupts the concept of property rights. Basically, what the citizens were saying in your examples is: we won't pay for the price of that land, but through the force of the majority (i.e. the government), we're are going to tell other people who are willing to pay the costs of ownership what they can and can't do with the land.
I think this kind of sucks. Seems to me if you really want to make sure some piece of land is recreational, or wilderness, or whatever, then you the folks concerned should damn well put up the cash to buy the land and make sure it stays that way. This has been done. Boulder County, Colorado, passed a local sales tax umpty years ago, and they've used the money for 20-30 years to buy up land around the city and keep it wilderness. (They also put bike trails and stuff in.) This prevents development sprawl from Denver and keeps the "deal," as you put it, just the way it used to be forty years ago when the land was pristine and the mountains visible from everyone's front yard.
Well, fair enough. If citizens of a town want to tax themselves to pay the costs of ownership of some piece of land, so they can determine exactly how it's used, then I think that's fine. But I'm not so cool with using the mere power of government to force conditions on the use of the land without being willing to pay for the cost of ownership. That's asking for something for nothing. Garnering reward without being willing to shoulder the risks, just because you happen to be there first. To me, this is not much different, morals wise, from logging on public land: you come cut down all the trees, because you get there first, but you don't pay for the costs of ownership -- in this case, the costs of replanting and tending all the trees.
Now in terms of who pays for infrastructure: let's be clear on what we mean. If you mean telephone wires to each house, or sewers under the new development, or roads in the development itself, or really anything that is clearly wholly used by the new development only: hey, developers already do pay for that stuff, and it is passed on to the buyers. What we're talking about that the city has to pay for is stuff that's shared by everyone in town, like increased fire and police protection, improvements to city streets and highways demanded by the increased (or merely different) traffic patterns, or a new high schools to accomodate burgeoning enrollments.
Should that stuff be paid for by the new homeowners (vice the developer)? Well, in part, of course, it is, because they will certainly be paying any new taxes to pay off the bonds you mention are usually used to build roads, schools, et cetera. But should they pay more than their "fair share" because they are in some sense responsible for the costs going up in the first place? I'm doubtful. The moral accounting here seems pretty bogus. Why is it the homebuyers who are responsible? Why not, say, the companies that offered jobs that brought people in? Why not the state government that built the extension to the highway that made the town suddenly much more accessible to jobs in the city? Why not the Federal government that paid for the water project that made it possible to build in the desert? And so forth. Where are you going to draw a line and say this person is 'responsible' for the new costs but this other is not? Without being totally arbitrary, that is?
Besides, as I said, if all these new residents are to shoulder the costs of their moving in, then they only ought to get the benefits, and there are many that are shared by everyone. More residents usually means more and better local business. A competitor to the local supermarket that brings prices down, maybe a niche natural-foods store. A bike shop, because now there are enough people riding bikes locally to support one. Increased property values all around, especially nice for p
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Ha. And I say that as a theoretician.
The serious issue your joke illuminates is the possibility of people growing a clone for the purpose of "spare parts." No risk of rejection when you do the transplantation, see?
Evolution will tend to produce good solutions to problems, but it will hardly ever produce the best possible solution.
Not so. Unless the space of solutions is extremely unusual -- not simply connected, something like that -- natural selection will always find the optimum solution, given enough time. Deliberate engineering gets you to the optimum faster, that's all. But natural selection has got one hell of a head start on deliberate engineering as far as our bodies go, like maybe four million years' worth.
I think the main reason to favor regeneration over prosthetics is economy. See, the program to regenerate your leg already exists in your body. It's just a question of turning it on, and the signal is very likely to be the same for everyone. So once you can figure out how to do that -- and that will undoubtably be a monstrously expensive undertaking, yes -- then all you need to do to regenerate limbs is apply the signal. Say, you get a $50 injection from a nurse of a tailored virus, and, ding, you grow a new hand over the next four months. Don't need to stay in the hospital, have expensive technicians custom-build a prosthesis for you, learn to use it and take care of it. You just go home and eat a little extra protein every day, and the thing takes care of itself.
That would save large amounts of medical costs. Not to mention revolutionizing the treatment of all kinds of injuries and diseases. Aggressive gangrene or flesh-eating bacteria in a wound? Arm half bitten off by a shark? No need for expensive microsurgery -- just lop off the thing and grow it back clean and whole.
Or perhaps the nation has a much greater duty to help young men and women who have volunteered to put their lives on the line to defend us, and who have lost a limb in the process.
It's not quite clear the nation owes the same consideration to J. Random Citizen who gets himself racked up on the highway, say, by drinking and driving, or even through plain bad luck.
Eh...I'd have to disagree with that. What's important to realize is that science is, by and large, a process of finding what works by systematically trying everything that doesn't work first. That's one reason it's enormously expensive and takes so much time.
In hindsight you can often recognize the tender little shoot of the Right Idea growing, and, yes, it is often growing in some neglected garden with very little fertilizer (a.k.a. money). You'd naturally think that "all" you have to do to be much more efficient is "just" identify that shoot a little earlier, and pour your resources into it.
Alas, in the first place it's typically impossible to identify the right idea except in hindsight. And in the second, the vast sterile fields of weeds surrounding the right idea are not wasted effort. They serve the very important purpose of demonstrating what does not work. This is important, because people are so enthusiastic about their theories that only concrete demonstrations of their failure will convince folks to abandon false theories and look around for better.
Another way to put it is: without the vast bitter harvest of Wrong, we would not be motivated enough to search out the rare fruit of Right. Senator Mikulski notwithstanding, it isn't logically possible to make scientific advance more efficient. Its inefficiency is part of what makes it work.
You probably want to address Madison or Jefferson, not Washington.
I think the point is to be able to generate electricity much more efficiently. This is not a replacement for a gasoline engine in your car. It's a replacement for a laptop battery for a traveling salesman or satellite-phone battery for a USMC lieutenant in the field.
As such, it's a big win. Batteries are an environmental disaster, since they often need nasty heavy metals (e.g. lead or mercury), and they don't last very long. Furthermore, you waste a lot of transportation energy transporting around the mass of batteries in something that's supposed to be portable. Finally, the process of generating and distributing the electricity you need to use to recharge the batteries is itself not very efficient at all. Generation losses, transmission losses, the fact that you can't store the stuff easily and have to have it running all the time for the intermittent occasions you need to recharge your batteries, et cetera.
This way, you generate your electricity on the spot, very efficiently (hence fewer emissions). And you don't need a heavy battery containing noxious metals.
we only get a very small percentage of the generated energy.
Oh no, we get enormous quantities of it. Far more than we could easily use. I'd say the problem is that it rains down in the form of high-energy photons which are difficult to collect and store.
Just you wait, sonny. When you turn 55 or so, your other choice is to have the doc stick a fat periscope up there to take a look, screen you for bowel cancer. Bring on the robots, I say.
The only problem with this propulsion method is that you need an awful number of photons...
Hmmm, I'd always thought the major problem with matter-annihilation drives was the lack of antimatter deposits in the Earth's crust from which the fuel could be mined...
Yah, it's a Bose-Einstein gas. And all gases, quantum or no, exert a pressure when they're confined*. The simplest argument for why relies on the Second Law: any gas must inevitably tend to spread out, because filling the universe uniformly is the state of maximum entropy. It clearly takes an inward force to prevent the spreading out. Hence, the gas exerts a pressure.
-------------
* For quantum pedants: I'm assuming the gas is not in a coherent state, OK? Ergodicity applies. Very reasonable when the apparatus is at room temperature.
If the Chinese were hungry, what would they do with Russian tundra and permafrost?
Drill for oil, mostly. China now imports more than 30% of its oil and demand is growing spectacularly.
From the article:
Despite the fact that China has repeatedly asked to participate in the International Space Station, the US has always refused. Some have argued this is because of a reluctance to share technologies that might be co-opted for military purposes, but others say it is simply down to politics, with space the last bastion of Cold War thinking.
If so, I wonder if it's really the US that blackballs the Chinese. The country with the most to fear from China is actually Russia. They share an enormous common border. On the Russian side you've got endless empty taiga, natural resources galore...a paltry 140 million citizens...on the Chinese side, a billion hungry peasants. What's the Chinese for Lebensraum, I wonder?
Me, I'm totally OK with a strictly competitive stance vis-a-vis the Chinese in space. Much more gets done in that brisk atmosphere than in the suffocating 'cooperation in space' fug through which the ISS drifts, poor thing.
Well...fair enough, but I'd probably trade places with you in a New York minute. Not worry about whether I've given the daughter the right kind of guidance as she begins high school. Be able to re-make the decision of who to marry and get it right this time. Be able to move anywhere I like, take any job I want, change the career in any direction I please, because it's just me (and maybe a young partner) and we could work 80-hour weeks and eat out of cans while I came up to speed. Not to mention be (I assume) about twenty years younger and not have my back hurt every God-damned morning when I get up, or need a separate pair of glasses to make out the print on the computer screen.
Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, huh? Sheesh. What a world.
WhyTF would you not take $900M?! Power? Money IS power.
Alas, no. It's certainly the next best thing, and can often be turned into power with judicious and wise use, but money is not synonymous with power. Just ask, oh, say Martha Stewart or Ken Lay.
He could....[insert random business plan here]...
No doubt. But what makes you think your plan would work? For every 100,000 "brilliant" ideas to make a bazillion dollars that one can think up, you'd be unbelievably lucky to find even one that actually works out in the real world.
That's the problem. He knows that this idea works (so far, at least). He doesn't know if he has, or will ever have, another idea that will work. Yes it would be nice to have half a billion dollars. But it would be very sad to have the experience of working out your (only!) good idea begun and ended before you turn 25.
I dunno about this:
Software makers couldn't just make one version of their application and run it on all platforms...so they only supported certain UNIX versions. And in the end, they got tired of the proprietary mess that was UNIX and abandoned it altogether, and only supported Windows because at least it was consistent.
I'm not a developer, but I was a heavy user of Unix hardware in the 80s and 90s, and I don't remember it this way at all. First of all, most any ordinary simple application you wanted came with the OS and the hardware. In those days the hardware was $50,000 or so for a workstation, the OS license another $1000. Any ordinary modest application -- mail user agent, debugger -- was at most a few extra hundred dollars, less than the sales tax on the machine. You got this stuff more or less thrown in. I don't get the impression it was all that complicated for the vendors to produce, either. They had a fairly captive market who were willing to pay what by modern standards are princely sums for applications, so the cost of porting something to their particular brand of Unix wasn't to steep to handle. Or so it seems. In any event, you tended to end up with a lot of vertical integration in your software, as I recall. If you were an IBM shop, you bought IBM hardware, used AIX and IBM's own compiler, IBM's own user application suite, and so forth.
Nor do I think software makers "switched" from Unix to Windows, and even less so because it was consistent. First of all, I can hardly think of any application that ran on Unix big iron that people imagined ought to be crammed onto a desktop with a 486 and 64 Mb of RAM. Desktop was for e-mail and your secretary to type your manuscripts. The Unix workstation or minicomputer was for doing serious work. Not much overlap in the applications needed, at least until the mid 90s when desktop hardware finally closed the performance gap with the workstation.
And that last is actually why I think people started making more serious software for the desktop: just because the hardware got so good you could use a cheap PC for fairly serious work. Then they made it for Windows merely because Windows had the dominant place on the desktop. I don't think there was much advantage in Windows in terms of consistency. As I said, I'm not a developer, but my impression is that getting things straight with the different varieties of Windows (Win 3.3, Win 95, Win NT) was at least as much trouble as getting things straight between, say, AIX and SunOS. But I speak under correction.
Also worth noting is that the cost of hardware so dominated the cost of computing at that time that it was not uncommon to write your own code in-house, except for very complicated applications for which you were anyway going to spend big bucks. You needed hackers to run the hardware anyway, and paying them to write some code too wasn't a big deal. The present era, when hardware is dirt cheap and the competition among sellers of even small applications is keen, seems like a very different market.
Well...first of all, he's not going to get the whole 900 megabucks. He doesn't own the entire company, only a majority of its stock. The deal may not be strictly cash, too -- it may well involve quantities of Yahoo stock valued at their trading price on the day of the acquisition.
Secondly, the guy is already fairly rich. Going from being a millionaire to a half-billionaire (say) is nice in many ways, but it's going from riches to more riches, not rags to riches.
Third, one suspects he actually gets more out of the power and glory of running a successful company. It doesn't sound like his Main Goal is to have lots of money. It sounds like he enjoys more the constructive pleasures of building a massively successful venture. Who wouldn't? I mean, unless you're a total slacker, then being successful, admired, influential and seeing your ideas come to fruition exactly as you'd want them to is much more rewarding than the next million (once you already have a few million in the bank already).
What happens if he sells the company? Sure, he's got a lot of dough, but he's no longer in sole control of the company. He's working for Yahoo. He's got a boss. Not likely he's going to enjoy that very much.
He could take his big chunk o' change and his fame and go start another copmany. But no doubt the deal would include a non-compete clause, so it can't be the same type of company. Got to be a totally new venture. What are the odds lightning will strike twice? That the next "brilliant" idea he has about a company is going to work out as well? He's going to be worrying about that.
If he had run the company for 10 years already and had had all the fun there was to have in it, I think he'd sell. But he's only run it for a very short time. On the other hand, he also knows what the commenters here are saying, which is that this is probably his best golden opportunity. I'd say the guy's in a bit of a bind.
My friend, it's a perfectly plausible argument, and I'm perfectly willing to agree that in this situation you are probably dead right. The problem I have is that whether you are right or not is a pretty complicated logical question. To be absolutely sure -- and we would need to be, since when we talk property values we're often talking about the bulk of a person's life's savings -- I say, to be absolutely sure you're right, we'd need to have access to all the facts of the case, and we'd need to be very just and wise in our reasoning.
Now, I might be willing to accept that you personally can do all those things in this situation. And maybe I might be willing to agree that a few other people in my acquaintance are. But am I generally willing to grant that kind of power to any random elected official? To, more or less, any member of the species who is capable of wearing a tie and knowing to defecate in private (because that's about the only minimum qualification for being elected to the town council)? The answer is emphatically no. I'm not. There is just too much potential for horrible abuse.
This is the generic problem with social engineering, of which zoning is one example. It requires a level of unselfish wisdom and objectivity in human beings that they generally don't demonstrate. It would probably work just fine with a different species, but for H. sapiens it tends not to.
That said, I do appreciate your point, and I am not saying zoning is something I would abolish were I made God Emperor tomorrow. Frankly, I just don't know. Like I said, the concept troubles me, and vide supra I generally hate the idea of allowing the majority power over the individual allegedly for the greater good, but I do recognize some degree of oversight of private transactions seems to be necessary.
I'm not a politician, so I can't say exactly what that oversight should be. I restrict my participation to being extremely skeptical of what the lawyers and legislators propose. I figure I'm a useful counter-weight to the socialist enthusiasts out there who would like to use the power of the majority to force everyone to not only work the right jobs and build the right kind of houses, but no doubt think the right kind of thoughts, too.
Thank you for the insightful and courteous exchange.
Well, for all the coolness of the hardware, it's the work of people such as yourself that made (and still makes) the USAF and USN an effective national defense.
So, you know, thanks.
I've seen the F-22 fly, at the Edwards Open House a few years ago. Very impressive.
By the way, for anyone in SoCal, the Edwards Open House (late October this year) is the place to see the world's most amazing aircraft engineering, both old and new. Worth the trip.
I dunno. The USSR was always going to catch up and pass us in the next 5 years, too. Every five years they said that, from about 1960 right through to 1991, when the house of cards came tumblin' down. For that matter, we were told Japan, Inc. was going to become the world dominant economic power from about 1975 through 1995, when it finally became clear that, well, they weren't.
Plus, my modest experience with the Chinese government and their statistics is that they lie unbelievably. Just for example, I know from direct experience that they routinely falsify the standardized test scores of their graduating science and tech students. On paper they have the most amazing graduating classes. But it doesn't hold up if you look closer, get to know the students in person. (I'm not saying they don't have good science and tech students -- they do. Just not nearly as many as the government says they do. And certainly on a per-capita basis fewer than the United States.)
Multiple time-step molecular dynamics (see J. Phys. Chem. 98, 6885 (1994)).
Uh...so far as I know, the big developer isn't treated in principle any different from you the little guy developer. If you have to pay to have the sewer extended to your front door, he does too. I've never heard of a community offering to pay for services that are only used by the development, unless the community really wants to encourage new development. And if that's what the citizens are up to, well that's their free choice. You can't logically offer to subsidize development and then complain that it's costing you money.
But anyway, I thought the costs we were talking about were costs that were not only used by the development. For example, you get a lot more traffic on a county access road that leads to the development, so the county decides it needs to widen the road and install some traffic signals. That's not usually paid for by developers, of course, but by the citizens. (Actually a lot of it is paid by the state, and there's another can of worms: why should the citizens of one part of the state -- which may be in a recession -- pay for the infrastructure in another part of the state that's booming?)
Er...well, fine. But if you've got the votes to require them to pay for infrastructure costs, then you've got the votes to prevent any such silly things as subsidies and tax incentives, don't you?
I mean, if the citizens have already voted to subsidize development, it seems a little schizophrenic for them to then turn around and complain that development is costing them money.
Also, what makes development profits "obscene," anyway? They charge all the market will bear, surely. And what's wrong with that? Do you volunteer to get paid less than the prevailing wage for your skill set? Why would you? Let's say you've owned a house in town for 8 years, and because of whatever's driving development -- surely a skyrocketing real estate market -- you're now in a position to quadruple your money. Are you going to turn all that money down, sell your house for a nice, non-obscene profit of only 20%? Why?
No one's forcing anyone to buy the houses. If the developer puts up crappy shacks that cost him $2 each to raise, and crazies come in and buy them for half a mil, why is the developer being evil? I mean, if you offer to sell your collection of Barry Manilow 45s on eBay and some oddball buys it for $5,000, is that your fault?
I appreciate the urge to stick it to someone who's changing the terms of what you thought was a life-time deal, especially someone big and faceless with a lot of pocket change. But I'd stop and wonder whether the principle of the thing is a good idea. Once you start saying it's cool for the majority to stick it to big mass developers, munging up the concept of property rights in the process, where will it stop? Think government is just going to let that power lie around unused when there's no big boys to beat up? Think again. Power once put into the hands of government is never allowed to gather dust. Then one day when you find yourself on the other side of the deal -- think Susette Kelo -- you could seriously regret your previous support for an erosion of the ability of the private owner to defy the will of the majority. You have to bear in mind that the law can make no distinction in principle between Joe A. Smallhomeowner and ReallyReallyBig Developers, Inc. (I'm not saying such a distinction can't exist in practise, but that's a matter for the citizens watching their elected officials like a hawk and holding them accountable every November.)
Well, first of all, I have to say I'm pretty troubled by the whole concept of "zoning." It definitely corrupts the concept of property rights. Basically, what the citizens were saying in your examples is: we won't pay for the price of that land, but through the force of the majority (i.e. the government), we're are going to tell other people who are willing to pay the costs of ownership what they can and can't do with the land.
I think this kind of sucks. Seems to me if you really want to make sure some piece of land is recreational, or wilderness, or whatever, then you the folks concerned should damn well put up the cash to buy the land and make sure it stays that way. This has been done. Boulder County, Colorado, passed a local sales tax umpty years ago, and they've used the money for 20-30 years to buy up land around the city and keep it wilderness. (They also put bike trails and stuff in.) This prevents development sprawl from Denver and keeps the "deal," as you put it, just the way it used to be forty years ago when the land was pristine and the mountains visible from everyone's front yard.
Well, fair enough. If citizens of a town want to tax themselves to pay the costs of ownership of some piece of land, so they can determine exactly how it's used, then I think that's fine. But I'm not so cool with using the mere power of government to force conditions on the use of the land without being willing to pay for the cost of ownership. That's asking for something for nothing. Garnering reward without being willing to shoulder the risks, just because you happen to be there first. To me, this is not much different, morals wise, from logging on public land: you come cut down all the trees, because you get there first, but you don't pay for the costs of ownership -- in this case, the costs of replanting and tending all the trees.
Now in terms of who pays for infrastructure: let's be clear on what we mean. If you mean telephone wires to each house, or sewers under the new development, or roads in the development itself, or really anything that is clearly wholly used by the new development only: hey, developers already do pay for that stuff, and it is passed on to the buyers. What we're talking about that the city has to pay for is stuff that's shared by everyone in town, like increased fire and police protection, improvements to city streets and highways demanded by the increased (or merely different) traffic patterns, or a new high schools to accomodate burgeoning enrollments.
Should that stuff be paid for by the new homeowners (vice the developer)? Well, in part, of course, it is, because they will certainly be paying any new taxes to pay off the bonds you mention are usually used to build roads, schools, et cetera. But should they pay more than their "fair share" because they are in some sense responsible for the costs going up in the first place? I'm doubtful. The moral accounting here seems pretty bogus. Why is it the homebuyers who are responsible? Why not, say, the companies that offered jobs that brought people in? Why not the state government that built the extension to the highway that made the town suddenly much more accessible to jobs in the city? Why not the Federal government that paid for the water project that made it possible to build in the desert? And so forth. Where are you going to draw a line and say this person is 'responsible' for the new costs but this other is not? Without being totally arbitrary, that is?
Besides, as I said, if all these new residents are to shoulder the costs of their moving in, then they only ought to get the benefits, and there are many that are shared by everyone. More residents usually means more and better local business. A competitor to the local supermarket that brings prices down, maybe a niche natural-foods store. A bike shop, because now there are enough people riding bikes locally to support one. Increased property values all around, especially nice for p