The speaker was ill-prepared. A simple google search [google.com] reveals lots of applications of such alloys, especially in the medical/surgical domain.
That wasn't the point. My point was about losing the focus of research, which this researcher definitely did. On top of that, the search seems to prove my point. Those examples look like solutions in search of a problem. If someone had specficially researched those actual problems instead of forcefitting some university's mental masturbation to it, they would have more and better solutions.
This isn't meant to catch those that deliberately defrost the fish, but rather those that are too sloppy to keep it frozen all the time. Yes, the culprit could put a new piece of metal inside the package, re-shrinkwrap it, etc. But in the end it might be too cumbersome for him to bother (i.e. it would be easier to set up proper procedures to keep the fish frozen all the time).
So they're too lazy to replace a piece of metal and repackage, but NOT too lazy to replace a memory thermometer and repackage?
The same thing could be said about any signal transmission. What good is a TV remote? You have to press a button anyways, so why not press one that is on the TV itself?
No, the remote saves you from getting up. In the light-actuator example, the "use" of the technology was to turn on a light inside the machine to then signal another device. But whatever turns on the light could turn on the other device. There's no saving.
In the case of the medical device, it supposedly reacts to lights that comes from outside the human body.
That wasn't what the poster suggested, and even so, existing light sensors can do the same thing.
I'd venture to guess that ~50% of researchers have no clue what their technology would be used for, and even if they did, they would never be able to justify the research as saving money relative to pouring the research money into existing technology for those problems, like the fish example showed. But don't take my word for it: ask any researcher whose research has a non-obvious purpose and see if they can tell you what it would be useful for and how it would save money relative to existing technology, accounting for the cost of the research.
You're actually making a bigger, better point than even you might realize, because you've touched on a major issue that's affected the world of research today. The problem is that people forget that the purpose of research is to satisfy human desires. You may have a very roundabout way of doing that, but you should never forget that as a final goal. If you can't stop at any time and answer the question "How will this give people what they want?"... you're probably wasting valuable resources on the research.
Case in point: a professor was giving a guest lecture on a kind of metal that can "remember" a shape, and if the ambient temperature changes past a certain point, it will no longer take that shape. Wow, that must have cost a lot of money to develop! So what good is it, sir? "Um... you can... make sure fish were handled properly because if they were ever unfrozen, the metal would be out-of-shape." WOW! You mean, people aren't smart enough to put in a new piece of metal if they illegally defrost it? You can't use a... THERMOMETER for the same purpose???
Another example: a while back on slashdot, there was a story about a researcher who found a way for light to act as an actuator. The only application anyone could think of was to turn on a machine that resides in a human body. But whatever signal you use to turn on the light could turn on the machine itself!
These days, so many people are researching for the sake of solving tough problems rather than for the purpose of satisfying actual human desires. What you've mentioned is just one of the many cases.
Just a final example: I came up with an awesome idea for machine translation (which I won't reveal here because I want my name attached to it when it gets famous) and I explained it to a guy with a background in computer science. He kept suggesting all this stuff about artificial intelligence I would have to read to get it to work, and I had to stop him and ask how that would be necessary. I re-explained my idea to make sure he understood, and after I convinced him AI was unnecessary, his only objection to my approach was "... but that's no fun." I had to remind him that my goal is to make people speaking different languages communicate with each other, not have fun.
As does water seeping through clay, and gas spreading out into the atmosphere.
See below.
Specific individuals have taken large parts of the earth...
Look, as much as I'd like to tear you a new one regarding property theory, it's really getting off the main topic, which is whether we're really forgoing valuable opportunities by using landfills. If there were future alternate uses of this landfill space that actually satisfied human desires (including the desire to "save the earth"), there would be much more upward pressure on the price of landfill space, which would feed back to disposal costs and make people not want to throw so much away.
> The "metric communist" thing was a joke. Sheesh.
So were remarks regarding your ancestry. Sheesh yourself.
I took it as a joke. You did not take the communist comment as a joke.
> You totally missed the point about eliminating things because they're not > necessary: your argument justifies the extermination of anyone who causes an > "unnecessary" imposition.
It's about trying to eliminate that which is unecessary and harmful.
Many people are unnecesary and harmful! Okay, fine, so you want to cheat and exclude all people from your unnecessary/harmful category. Have you ever used a non-renewable resource that was not vital for your survival? You're excluding it from me. That's therefor unnecessary and harmful. You claim really doesn't hold up.
> Every landfill that can harvest methane, does. It's free money. Ditto for any > other chemicals that can be resold.
So how many do?
Every one that can sell it for more than the (trivial) cost of doing so. I don't have numbers, but look what you're really claiming here: that businesses are basically ignoring a chance to get free money. Now, you can claim corporations "only care about profit". Or you can claim they ignore profit opportunities to fuck up the environment, but you can't do both. You might as well claim that corporations regularly turn down donations from the public.
And if your health has suffered irreprably? How's the insurance help there? What if you're dead?
I don't want such a world either. I'd like some more responsibility from people and corporations, not state control - see, not a lefty. I didn't say ban the DVDs did I? I just said it was wrong. Balfour Beatty were fined £10 million today, a piss in the lake as far they're concerned, for not bothering to mend some rail track properly, resulting in... dead people....
Okay, I'll play your game. No one should do anything if it has a finite chance of resulting in someone's death, even if they held an insurance policy that paid the victim's estate, say $10 million. Congratulations: you've just explained why no product should ever be brough to market, and no one should ever drive. Okay, fine, I agree with you. Fuck cars. Let's use trains instead. Oops, same problem. So let's all go back to the days of walking everywhere we want to go (bikes risk death too). See where this goes?
And that was one of the few instances of a powerful group of people finally being held to account for the damage they've caused. Most of them get away with it.
If you believe specific individuals are able to dodge legal responsibility, hey, I'm behind you. But that wasn't your earlier argument!
I have studied arguments such as yours and decided not to learn them.
Not as revealed by your statements. You actually seemed to not be aware of the role of futures markets in intertemporally allocating goos before this thread. I think you still aren't. You didn't even know about the methane recycling, or the implications of your "only do what's necessary" argument. Seriously, it's one thing to "care"; it's another thing to research if your caring actually accomplishes anything.
What you don't seem to realize is that because it wasn't apparent enough, it would have been a waste of resources to do so. Government doesn't change that. It just causes wastes of resources to actually get funded. What you seem to be claiming that is that government guessed right when private industry didn't. Even if true, you would have to factor in the ratio of hits to misses, weighted by value. In that respect, the social rate of return in the private sector is higher; it's just a matter of making sure they pay the costs of any imposition on others. Therefore, had the war not happened, the production of consumer-satisfying goods would have been greater.
Wow, you really need to tone it down a bit. I know the whole moral indignation thing works on most people, but it really doesn't work on me. You think that just because you're a lefty, you have justice on your side. You don't.
Let me try to briefly go over your non-emotion based points:
My argument doesn't extend to plutonium because obviously the radiation spills over to other people's property.
"We" do not own the earth. Specific individuals own specific parts of the earth, unless you're okay with me barging into your place and taking stuff you don't need.
The "metric communist" thing was a joke. Sheesh.
You totally missed the point about eliminating things because they're not necessary: your argument justifies the extermination of anyone who causes an "unnecessary" imposition.
Every landfill that can harvest methane, does. It's free money. Ditto for any other chemicals that can be resold.
Insurance does fix the damages. They have to pay for the cleanup of everything they damage. Again, I don't think you want a world where nobody is allowed to do anything on the off chance it might hurt someone, even if they're fully capable of compensating that damage, because that would justify zero products ever being brought to market.
It seems you've never actually learned the arguments of the people you disagree with, so you have to respond emotionally. That's also a sign you don't know where you really stand. Please remedy this, and try to make your case without naked appeal to emotion.
Okay, setting aside your bizarre point about "monopolies are good because sometimes monopoly profits fund good things", I'm going to tell you what I told and continue to tell every history buff who tries to argue economics:
Your examples prove exactly nothing. You must establish that what would have happened in the alternative would have been worse. And you don't even seem to be arguing against my point: I never denied that R&D is good. My claim was that government R&D to get to the moon helps people less that R&D directly aimed at helping people, because in the former case the spillovers are necessarily coincidental and not justified by the social rate of return.
In the 1960's, a space program was regarded as a waste by people who would spend their own money on. When government funded it, it didn't change that. It just made it get funded, irrespective of the waste, by people other than the ones who wanted it. Until you integrate the econonomic insights into your knowledge of history, you can't establish anything.
Okay, the same points, keep coming up throughout your post, so let me see if I can summarize:
First, let's understand the nature of the space program. The goal was to get to the moon. Full stop. If they could do that without researching computers, composites, insulation, etc., they would have. The spillover to humans is therefore necessarily coincidedantal, because that is not the goal, while the benefits to humans in for-profit research cannot be coincidental because that was the goal.
It would make much more since to just research things as they are relevant to humans, not research for some abstract goal and claim the things that as coincidence help humans as a "benefit". Every argument that the space program "produced tech" is deeply flawed because, among other things, 1) that wasn't the main goal, and tech useful for humans could have obviously been developed more efficiently simply researching them without regard for the moon; and 2) they diverted resources from real entrepreneurs who had identified real human needs they were satsifying.
Second, you're making an arbitrary distincion between government "setting the basis" and funding development. How does the government know what theoretical research to engage in? If entrepreneurs didn't regard it as a good use of scarce resources, government's entrance doesn't change that; it merely causes this waste to actually happen, on someone else's dollar. And contrary to what you claim, people do buy 20-year futures, which shows they are thinking at least that far ahead. Btw, are you willing to discount the returns to government research by the interest rate and the failure rate? It looks pretty dismal then.
As for the productive efficiency of government research, all I have to say is $500 toilet seats and $80 hammers. Imagine how much they overspend on things for which there is no comparable market!
Finally, learn the difference between direct and indirect. If you research a way to get to the moon and stumble up GPS, that's indirect. if you research a positioning system and get GPS, that's direct.
Okay, let's go over the meaning of pollution. Now, if I throw trash all over my living room, is that pollution? I don't think so. Pollution is when you impose environmental degradation on other people or their property. So does burying trash in a landfill count? No. It's one person's property. He bought out all future users of that property. If using that underground space as a landfill would forgo some great opportunity, specualtors would make that reflected in the price. In reality, it doesn't, because you can dig so deep to bury the trash and not affect the land above it.
Regarding potential for pollution bleeding into groundwater and such, do you really know how landfills work? They have to put a bottom layer of clay 8+ feet thick. (That's more than 2 meters if you're a communist.) They have to obey all kinds of regulations to insure the pollution doesn't bleed out. They generally hold insurance policies against liability in case it does, in which case the damage is paid out. (Fun fact: landfills extract the methane from degradation of garbage and use it to heat homes. So in one sense stuff you throw away already is recycled.) Source: again, the Penn and Teller show which can probably easily be verified. If you really want to oppose "unnecessary" product use on the grounds that it may (and is extremely unlikely to) pollute outside a landfill and not get cleaned up, you should advocate the extermination of "unnecessary" people who may commit crimes and be unable to compensate the victims.
The proof of the fact I gave at the end is simple: imagine your car's pollution for one day dispersed over a city. No measurement would detect it. This is not to say car polluters shouldn't pay; they should. What it does prove is that the marginal impact of one car is small, so even if they did pay for that, behavior wouldn't change behavior much. There are a lot of good arguments against cars, but claiming they would fall out of use if people had to pay for their pollution... just ain't one of 'em.
Yeah, it's basically an arms race that the P2Pers are winning. For every new strategy that the industry puts out, someone comes up with a better counterstrategy.
First, I'm not assuming free markets work perfectly. I'm not even arguing that's true (depending on how you define perfectly of course). I'm claiming that follows from more basic, reasonable assumptions (like action revealing preference, coercion leaving people worse off, investors in aggregate having better information that central agencies, etc.).
But about your other point: I understand what you're saying, but look at it this way: while some of those theoretical types of research yield high returns, most don't. What's the rate of return, discounting the failures? And discounting the lag until it satisfies actual human desires? Remember, by researching now, we are forgoing satisfactions now. The research isn't free. And if the returns, discounted by failure rate and time lag, fall below a person's time preference, it really doesn't satisfy human desires, because it causes people to forgo things they prefer.
That's why it makes much more sense for theoretical research to wait until someone sees how it would actually satisfy some human desire. But in that case, someone will fund it without the government!
Your whole argument is based on these 'human desires' yet you haven't defined them anywhere.
I defined it as much as it *can* be defined: it's what people want. Peoples desires vary greatly, so I can't be any more specific. However, entrepreneurs, in markets, attempt to satsify those desires. In markets, people don't just say, "I want X, Y, and Z"; they reveal through their actions what they actually want, and they improve their situation, else they would not make the trades.
The fact is that on the whole human beings have always had an appetite for exploration and pursuing new knowledge, pushing new frontiers and things like that. The space program directly satisfies that.
Okay, but if you're going to argue that the space program was a good idea because of the (unexcludable) benefit to Americans of knowing that there's a man on the moon, that's a separate argument . Please, folks, say what you mean. Don't say "The space program was a good idea because it gave us more and better tech than would have otherwise gotten" because it didn't. Instead say "The space program was a good idea because the benefits to the people who wanted a man on the moon far exceeded the costs to those who didn't want it" or something like that. And please, understand the difference.
More importantly though human beings have an undeniable desire for more natural resources to provide for their material needs and wants. Mining asteroids might be decades away still but it is essential since we simply don't have enough mineral reserves on earth for long term use by +6 billlion people. The space program directly meets this need too.
Do you know what a futures market is? It's this cool deal where profit-seeking investors intertemporally allocate goods so that they're never consumed too quickly, depriving future generations. They make it so that if goods are really in danger of running out, we'll know 20-30 years in advance, in which case it will be profitable for someone to go mine an asteroid. Remember, governement doesn't *create* resources; it redirects them. If it would be a loss for the private sector to harvest some resource, it will be for the government as well; the only difference is that rather than investors putting their own money on the line, government officials put everyone else's money on the line.
Anyway all the inventions and technological improvements developed during space programs or war or whatever were developed to satisfy human desires too. The improvements in computers made during the space program were directed at satisfying human desires. NASA has the same need for computers as businesses and the wider population do - to allow automation and rapidly crunch through complex calculations. Or for example the improvements in insulation made necessary by the extremes in temperature in space have found use for exactly the same purpose in the wider world - for example using 'space blankets' to keep body heat in extreme conditions.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. NASA was pursuing the end of getting to the moon. Any benefit to real, actual people not trying to get to the moon was coincidental. Again, say what you mean. If you think the space program was a good idea because it produced aweseome blankets, then you should just advocate government funding of awesome blankets! Don't cloak endorsement of satsifaction of human non-desires (beating the Ruskies) in endorsement of awesome blankets.
Almost all research funding is directed by practical considerations, wether that be to make money (the most common), preserve national pride or develop weapons for war. If the research didn't meet human needs then we wouldn't have any of the technologies we do today.
Wrong again, the research satisfied human needs by *coincidence*. That's far less efficient that researching to directly satisfy human desires.
If you want the government to fund research specifically intended to help people, say so. Don't advocate research that helps them by coincidence.
Is no one paying attention to my post? I just explained it to someone else.
Yes, war technology trickles into the general populace. But (for the third time), it's not enough to show war technology helps. You must show it helps more than what would have happened without it. Let's see if this example is easier to understand.
Imagine a company of say 1000 people working on a cool new kind of TV. Then a war starts, and that's no longer profitable, so they have to go into researching war technology. The develop a new missile targeting system. And then let's say the only civilian application of this technology is for a kind of toy set for 5-year olds. Then the war ends.
Given the war, the civilian community got a toy for five year olds. Had it not happened, the research would have gone into the new high-res, high-quality TV that far more people would have wanted. Space program spinoff defenders focus on saying how good this cool new toy for children is. They never acknowledge, because they're not even aware, of the technologies more beneficial to more people had the war not happened.
To be sure, most examples aren't as clear cut as this. The war technologies sometimes lead to really awesome tech for the populace. But since the non-war technology was directly for satisfying consumer desires, and the war technology does it only by coincidence, the non-war technology is necessarily more beneficial.
Now, you can claim that civilians are incapable of this level of research (which we can never verify because of the degree to which government crowds it out), but that's not the argument space program proponents use! They merely say "hey, the technology was good, so obviously it was better than all of the other alternatives"... which is a really weak argument when you think about it.
Wow. I've never seen anyone totally miss the point I was trying to make until now.
Yes, research during WWII, the Cold War, and space program led to good stuff. I specifically agreed to that in my post. But it's not enough to establish that, which you (pointlessly) went to great lengths to show in your post. You must also show that what would have happened in their absence would be worse. Showing that good stuff happened during program X proves NOTHING. Listing one by one the benefits of the space program proves NOTHING. Imagine if I took $100 from you, bought a candy bar, and gave it to you. By your logic I could say, "How dare you doubt the utility of the Theft-Candy Program? The TCP has resulted in your acquisition of a candy bar! Sure, you can play revisionist historian and claim you would have gotten a candy bar without it, but let's face it: you would have just stayed at home. And I know you can wave your hands and make the tired old 'I could have gotten a candy bar without TCP for under $100' game or even the 'I preferred my leisure and keeping the $100' game, but that's just voodoo economics."
In my post, I specifically showed how the spinoff arguments don't hold up to logic. At the beginning of the space program, entrepreneurs were researching better ways to satisfy human desires. Then the government diverted resources from this activity to another activity, which indirectly led to the satisfaction of some human desires. You're claiming that this diversion *from* satisfying human desires... *helped* satisfy human desires?
The difference, in case you're wondering, between auto-racing research and space program research is that the auto research itself satisfies the desires of auto-racing fanatics, and the spinoffs to Ford Escorts are icing. In the space program, the goal does not actually satisfy human desires, and if it does, it's coincidental.
And no serious researcher takes your "job creation" or "boosts the economy" argument seriously. It's just the broken window fallacy reloaded (google it). Sure, we could start a government program paying people to dig holes and fill them up. That would create jobs. Or we could smash windows, burn down homes, evacuate cities and destroy them, etc. That would certainly create jobs in reconstruction! But it wouldn't prove the destructive acts were beneficial. What's important is whether human activity is directed at satisfying human desires or not. When you divert entrepreneurial activity to sticking it to the Ruskies, you take away from that.
It seems your courseload was heavy on the history, light on the economics. And you can't draw conclusions from history without a basis in the underlying economics. So you can spare me the indignance about all the great stuff from the space program, because it proves exactly nothing.
I agree with you, just as long as you don't start applying this to the "spin-offs" of the space program to ridicule people who oppose it. I mean, yeah, it's great all the advances of the space program, but what was the space program? It was basically a program where the government said:
"Hey, all you entrepreneurs working on technologies to satisfy actual human desires: STOP. Give us money so we can show the Ruskies where it's it."
Then later:
"Hey, some of what we did can, coincidentally, satisfy human desires outside of getting to the moon. Hey consumers! Look at all the goodies we produced for you. Please TOTALLY IGNORE what the entrepreneurs, who were trying to directly satisfy your desires, rather than satisfying them by mere coincidence, accomplished. Just focus on what we did, not what could have happened."
Then later, their court intellectuals say:
"If you opposed the space program, you must oppose insulated lunchboxes. Luddite."
He did talk about pollution, that's why I brought it up. If he's willing to make DVD manufacturers pay exhorbitant costs for polluting, he should be willing to pay the same per-mass-pollutant cost of his car's pollution. The fact is, neither his car nor DVD production is very polluting. So my point was that the issue is a red herring.
The people who would buy the single use DVD's don't think it's a dumb idea. Maybe they are dumb. Or perhaps they just have different values than you do. They might not want to have to return the DVD or risk late fees. Or maybe they like going to the store rather than waiting ~2 days for the DVD to come in the mail through Netflix (I think that's a low estimate). That's assuming the rental costs are under $3, of course, which with monthly fees it may not be.
See my other posts in this thread regarding the disposability issue.
You talk repeatedly about the "unnecessary waste" involved, but I think I didn't make my point clear. "Waste" implies forgone opportunities. Landfill space is really not a forgone opportunity, not of the magnitude you're talking about. If there were really valuable (i.e., that people *value*) opportunities forgone through the use of landfill space, investors would speculate in the market, driving up the price to the point that throwing things away would be prohibitively expensive. Do you know what a futures market is? It's a really neat deal where investors - in pursuing profit - intertemporally allocate goods so that no generation overuses them. That landfill space is not bid up in price is evidence that waste in any meaninful sense of the term - forgone opportunities - isn't occurring with single-use DVD's.
The exact same argument applies to the "waste" in the materials involved in making a DVD.
Regarding pollution, I understand that it also imposes costs on others. And polluters - including small scale polluters - should pay for costs they impose on others. My point was that even if they did, that would not significantly alter the fact that it would not be wasteful. Everything's a tradeoff. The pollution involved in DVD's is small enough to be worth the tradeoff, even if paid for.
That ties in with the final point I was trying to make about the tradeoffs involved in making products with a lifetime less than infinity. Yes, it would be nice if every product lasted forever. But often that's not cost justified. Many people don't want to pay $20 for an infinite DVD, but they would gladly pay $3 for a single-use. The lack of such a market is a deadweight loss: those who would buy the single use DVD miss out, and so do the people that would sell them. No one wins!
Products are generally not made to last forever, because then they would be too expensive. Now you may reply that the limitations on a DVD are "artifical" while the limitations on say, how many times you can use a wheelbarrow is "inherent" or "natural". But in both cases, the limitation on usages is necessary for the product to be brought to the market in the first place. In the wheelbarrow case, it's because an infinite use wheelbarrow would be too expensive for the ordinary persons. In the DVD case, it's because the infinite use DVD would be too expensive for ordinary persons.
This is not to say I don't feel the same emotional response at the "unnecessary waste"; in fact, I feel the same way. But this is instinctual, or emotional, the result of humans historically living in times of extreme scarcity. In reality, the single-use DVD's are not a waste because if they were, it would already be prohibitively expensive.
Garbage companies bear the full costs of using landfills. If we were running out of landfill space, that would be reflected in the cost of garbage disposal. As it stands, however, even accounting for costs of the landfill space, it's only $50/ton to dispose of garbage. And then the land above it is converted into some park, golf course, or nature preserve. We're not running out of landfill space. You could put all the trash in the US for the next 1000 years (accounting for population gain) in a 35 mile by 35 mile by 200 ft high (not unreasonable for landfills) landfill. Source: Penn & Teller's program Bull****!; I'm sure you can verify it. That's a tiny blip in Nebraska.
Regarding pollution, I don't know how much pollution is created in forming and stamping a DVD, but I'd venture it's a lot less than you regularly spew out of your car every day. So let's make DVD manufacturers bear the full cost of their pollution, causing the collapse of the DVD industry because they'd now have to pay 3.1 cents instead of 3 cents to make a DVD.
Oh, and if you're against producing stuff with a limited life, are you also against paper plate manufacturers for making a product that doesn't last forever? Durability issues are always considered when producing for consumers; sometimes, it's really not cost justified. The single-use DVD was an attempt to capture the "deadweight loss" (look up on Wikipedia) of people who would pay $3 for a single use, but not $20 for infinite use. It would satisfy a real consumer demand. But like "usury" in the Middle Ages and international trade today, people's emotional reactions on economic issues causes them to kill a process that ultimately benefits consumers.
They send out a press release with plausible deniability to see how their PR would suffer or improve if they took a certain action. Now they know it's a bad idea, and they don't have to go through the trouble of sticking their necks out, too. Politicians do this all the time.
It's a shame really. The single-use DVD merely gives people an additional option. You can buy the DVD for $20, or buy it for a single use for $3. All those who would pay $3 for a single use but not $20 for the full DVD now suffer, and those who buy normal DVD's are unaffected.
You're actually making a bigger, better point than even you might realize, because you've touched on a major issue that's affected the world of research today. The problem is that people forget that the purpose of research is to satisfy human desires. You may have a very roundabout way of doing that, but you should never forget that as a final goal. If you can't stop at any time and answer the question "How will this give people what they want?"... you're probably wasting valuable resources on the research.
Case in point: a professor was giving a guest lecture on a kind of metal that can "remember" a shape, and if the ambient temperature changes past a certain point, it will no longer take that shape. Wow, that must have cost a lot of money to develop! So what good is it, sir? "Um... you can... make sure fish were handled properly because if they were ever unfrozen, the metal would be out-of-shape." WOW! You mean, people aren't smart enough to put in a new piece of metal if they illegally defrost it? You can't use a... THERMOMETER for the same purpose???
Another example: a while back on slashdot, there was a story about a researcher who found a way for light to act as an actuator. The only application anyone could think of was to turn on a machine that resides in a human body. But whatever signal you use to turn on the light could turn on the machine itself!
These days, so many people are researching for the sake of solving tough problems rather than for the purpose of satisfying actual human desires. What you've mentioned is just one of the many cases.
Just a final example: I came up with an awesome idea for machine translation (which I won't reveal here because I want my name attached to it when it gets famous) and I explained it to a guy with a background in computer science. He kept suggesting all this stuff about artificial intelligence I would have to read to get it to work, and I had to stop him and ask how that would be necessary. I re-explained my idea to make sure he understood, and after I convinced him AI was unnecessary, his only objection to my approach was "... but that's no fun." I had to remind him that my goal is to make people speaking different languages communicate with each other, not have fun.
You're actually making a bigger, better point than even you might realize, because you've touched on a major issue that's affected the world of research today. The problem is that people forget that the purpose of research is to satisfy human desires. You may have a very roundabout way of doing that, but you should never forget that as a final goal. If you can't stop at any time and answer the question "How will this give people what they want?"... you're probably wasting valuable resources on the research.
Case in point: a professor was giving a guest lecture on a kind of metal that can "remember" a shape, and if the ambient temperature changes past a certain point, it will no longer take that shape. Wow, that must have cost a lot of money to develop! So what good is it, sir? "Um... you can... make sure fish were handled properly because if they were ever unfrozen, the metal would be out-of-shape." WOW! You mean, people aren't smart enough to put in a new piece of metal if they illegally defrost it? You can't use a... THERMOMETER for the same purpose???
Another example: a while back on slashdot, there was a story about a researcher who found a way for light to act as an actuator. The only application anyone could think of was to turn on a machine that resides in a human body. But whatever signal you use to turn on the light could turn on the machine itself!
These days, so many people are researching for the sake of solving tough problems rather than for the purpose of satisfying actual human desires. What you've mentioned is just one of the many cases.
Just a final example: I came up with an awesome idea for machine translation (which I won't reveal here because I want my name attached to it when it gets famous) and I explained it to a guy with a background in computer science. He kept suggesting all this stuff about artificial intelligence I would have to read to get it to work, and I had to stop him and ask how that would be necessary. I re-explained my idea to make sure he understood, and after I convinced him AI was unnecessary, his only objection to my approach was "... but that's no fun." I had to remind him that my goal is to make people speaking different languages communicate with each other, not have fun.
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The speaker was ill-prepared. A simple google search [google.com] reveals lots of applications of such alloys, especially in the medical/surgical domain.
That wasn't the point. My point was about losing the focus of research, which this researcher definitely did. On top of that, the search seems to prove my point. Those examples look like solutions in search of a problem. If someone had specficially researched those actual problems instead of forcefitting some university's mental masturbation to it, they would have more and better solutions.
This isn't meant to catch those that deliberately defrost the fish, but rather those that are too sloppy to keep it frozen all the time. Yes, the culprit could put a new piece of metal inside the package, re-shrinkwrap it, etc. But in the end it might be too cumbersome for him to bother (i.e. it would be easier to set up proper procedures to keep the fish frozen all the time).
So they're too lazy to replace a piece of metal and repackage, but NOT too lazy to replace a memory thermometer and repackage?
The same thing could be said about any signal transmission. What good is a TV remote? You have to press a button anyways, so why not press one that is on the TV itself?
No, the remote saves you from getting up. In the light-actuator example, the "use" of the technology was to turn on a light inside the machine to then signal another device. But whatever turns on the light could turn on the other device. There's no saving.
In the case of the medical device, it supposedly reacts to lights that comes from outside the human body.
That wasn't what the poster suggested, and even so, existing light sensors can do the same thing.
I'd venture to guess that ~50% of researchers have no clue what their technology would be used for, and even if they did, they would never be able to justify the research as saving money relative to pouring the research money into existing technology for those problems, like the fish example showed. But don't take my word for it: ask any researcher whose research has a non-obvious purpose and see if they can tell you what it would be useful for and how it would save money relative to existing technology, accounting for the cost of the research.
You're actually making a bigger, better point than even you might realize, because you've touched on a major issue that's affected the world of research today. The problem is that people forget that the purpose of research is to satisfy human desires. You may have a very roundabout way of doing that, but you should never forget that as a final goal. If you can't stop at any time and answer the question "How will this give people what they want?" ... you're probably wasting valuable resources on the research.
... THERMOMETER for the same purpose???
Case in point: a professor was giving a guest lecture on a kind of metal that can "remember" a shape, and if the ambient temperature changes past a certain point, it will no longer take that shape. Wow, that must have cost a lot of money to develop! So what good is it, sir? "Um... you can... make sure fish were handled properly because if they were ever unfrozen, the metal would be out-of-shape." WOW! You mean, people aren't smart enough to put in a new piece of metal if they illegally defrost it? You can't use a
Another example: a while back on slashdot, there was a story about a researcher who found a way for light to act as an actuator. The only application anyone could think of was to turn on a machine that resides in a human body. But whatever signal you use to turn on the light could turn on the machine itself!
These days, so many people are researching for the sake of solving tough problems rather than for the purpose of satisfying actual human desires. What you've mentioned is just one of the many cases.
Just a final example: I came up with an awesome idea for machine translation (which I won't reveal here because I want my name attached to it when it gets famous) and I explained it to a guy with a background in computer science. He kept suggesting all this stuff about artificial intelligence I would have to read to get it to work, and I had to stop him and ask how that would be necessary. I re-explained my idea to make sure he understood, and after I convinced him AI was unnecessary, his only objection to my approach was "... but that's no fun." I had to remind him that my goal is to make people speaking different languages communicate with each other, not have fun.
*sigh*
R&D departments should hire more people like you.
As does water seeping through clay, and gas spreading out into the atmosphere.
...
... dead people. ...
See below.
Specific individuals have taken large parts of the earth
Look, as much as I'd like to tear you a new one regarding property theory, it's really getting off the main topic, which is whether we're really forgoing valuable opportunities by using landfills. If there were future alternate uses of this landfill space that actually satisfied human desires (including the desire to "save the earth"), there would be much more upward pressure on the price of landfill space, which would feed back to disposal costs and make people not want to throw so much away.
> The "metric communist" thing was a joke. Sheesh.
So were remarks regarding your ancestry. Sheesh yourself.
I took it as a joke. You did not take the communist comment as a joke.
> You totally missed the point about eliminating things because they're not
> necessary: your argument justifies the extermination of anyone who causes an
> "unnecessary" imposition.
It's about trying to eliminate that which is unecessary and harmful.
Many people are unnecesary and harmful! Okay, fine, so you want to cheat and exclude all people from your unnecessary/harmful category. Have you ever used a non-renewable resource that was not vital for your survival? You're excluding it from me. That's therefor unnecessary and harmful. You claim really doesn't hold up.
> Every landfill that can harvest methane, does. It's free money. Ditto for any > other chemicals that can be resold.
So how many do?
Every one that can sell it for more than the (trivial) cost of doing so. I don't have numbers, but look what you're really claiming here: that businesses are basically ignoring a chance to get free money. Now, you can claim corporations "only care about profit". Or you can claim they ignore profit opportunities to fuck up the environment, but you can't do both. You might as well claim that corporations regularly turn down donations from the public.
And if your health has suffered irreprably? How's the insurance help there? What if you're dead?
I don't want such a world either. I'd like some more responsibility from people and corporations, not state control - see, not a lefty. I didn't say ban the DVDs did I? I just said it was wrong. Balfour Beatty were fined £10 million today, a piss in the lake as far they're concerned, for not bothering to mend some rail track properly, resulting in
Okay, I'll play your game. No one should do anything if it has a finite chance of resulting in someone's death, even if they held an insurance policy that paid the victim's estate, say $10 million. Congratulations: you've just explained why no product should ever be brough to market, and no one should ever drive. Okay, fine, I agree with you. Fuck cars. Let's use trains instead. Oops, same problem. So let's all go back to the days of walking everywhere we want to go (bikes risk death too). See where this goes?
And that was one of the few instances of a powerful group of people finally being held to account for the damage they've caused. Most of them get away with it.
If you believe specific individuals are able to dodge legal responsibility, hey, I'm behind you. But that wasn't your earlier argument!
I have studied arguments such as yours and decided not to learn them.
Not as revealed by your statements. You actually seemed to not be aware of the role of futures markets in intertemporally allocating goos before this thread. I think you still aren't. You didn't even know about the methane recycling, or the implications of your "only do what's necessary" argument. Seriously, it's one thing to "care"; it's another thing to research if your caring actually accomplishes anything.
Your primary
What you don't seem to realize is that because it wasn't apparent enough, it would have been a waste of resources to do so. Government doesn't change that. It just causes wastes of resources to actually get funded. What you seem to be claiming that is that government guessed right when private industry didn't. Even if true, you would have to factor in the ratio of hits to misses, weighted by value. In that respect, the social rate of return in the private sector is higher; it's just a matter of making sure they pay the costs of any imposition on others. Therefore, had the war not happened, the production of consumer-satisfying goods would have been greater.
Wow, you really need to tone it down a bit. I know the whole moral indignation thing works on most people, but it really doesn't work on me. You think that just because you're a lefty, you have justice on your side. You don't.
Let me try to briefly go over your non-emotion based points:
My argument doesn't extend to plutonium because obviously the radiation spills over to other people's property.
"We" do not own the earth. Specific individuals own specific parts of the earth, unless you're okay with me barging into your place and taking stuff you don't need.
The "metric communist" thing was a joke. Sheesh.
You totally missed the point about eliminating things because they're not necessary: your argument justifies the extermination of anyone who causes an "unnecessary" imposition.
Every landfill that can harvest methane, does. It's free money. Ditto for any other chemicals that can be resold.
Insurance does fix the damages. They have to pay for the cleanup of everything they damage. Again, I don't think you want a world where nobody is allowed to do anything on the off chance it might hurt someone, even if they're fully capable of compensating that damage, because that would justify zero products ever being brought to market.
It seems you've never actually learned the arguments of the people you disagree with, so you have to respond emotionally. That's also a sign you don't know where you really stand. Please remedy this, and try to make your case without naked appeal to emotion.
Okay, setting aside your bizarre point about "monopolies are good because sometimes monopoly profits fund good things", I'm going to tell you what I told and continue to tell every history buff who tries to argue economics:
Your examples prove exactly nothing. You must establish that what would have happened in the alternative would have been worse. And you don't even seem to be arguing against my point: I never denied that R&D is good. My claim was that government R&D to get to the moon helps people less that R&D directly aimed at helping people, because in the former case the spillovers are necessarily coincidental and not justified by the social rate of return.
In the 1960's, a space program was regarded as a waste by people who would spend their own money on. When government funded it, it didn't change that. It just made it get funded, irrespective of the waste, by people other than the ones who wanted it. Until you integrate the econonomic insights into your knowledge of history, you can't establish anything.
Okay, the same points, keep coming up throughout your post, so let me see if I can summarize:
First, let's understand the nature of the space program. The goal was to get to the moon. Full stop. If they could do that without researching computers, composites, insulation, etc., they would have. The spillover to humans is therefore necessarily coincidedantal, because that is not the goal, while the benefits to humans in for-profit research cannot be coincidental because that was the goal.
It would make much more since to just research things as they are relevant to humans, not research for some abstract goal and claim the things that as coincidence help humans as a "benefit". Every argument that the space program "produced tech" is deeply flawed because, among other things, 1) that wasn't the main goal, and tech useful for humans could have obviously been developed more efficiently simply researching them without regard for the moon; and 2) they diverted resources from real entrepreneurs who had identified real human needs they were satsifying.
Second, you're making an arbitrary distincion between government "setting the basis" and funding development. How does the government know what theoretical research to engage in? If entrepreneurs didn't regard it as a good use of scarce resources, government's entrance doesn't change that; it merely causes this waste to actually happen, on someone else's dollar. And contrary to what you claim, people do buy 20-year futures, which shows they are thinking at least that far ahead. Btw, are you willing to discount the returns to government research by the interest rate and the failure rate? It looks pretty dismal then.
As for the productive efficiency of government research, all I have to say is $500 toilet seats and $80 hammers. Imagine how much they overspend on things for which there is no comparable market!
Finally, learn the difference between direct and indirect. If you research a way to get to the moon and stumble up GPS, that's indirect. if you research a positioning system and get GPS, that's direct.
Okay, let's go over the meaning of pollution. Now, if I throw trash all over my living room, is that pollution? I don't think so. Pollution is when you impose environmental degradation on other people or their property. So does burying trash in a landfill count? No. It's one person's property. He bought out all future users of that property. If using that underground space as a landfill would forgo some great opportunity, specualtors would make that reflected in the price. In reality, it doesn't, because you can dig so deep to bury the trash and not affect the land above it.
Regarding potential for pollution bleeding into groundwater and such, do you really know how landfills work? They have to put a bottom layer of clay 8+ feet thick. (That's more than 2 meters if you're a communist.) They have to obey all kinds of regulations to insure the pollution doesn't bleed out. They generally hold insurance policies against liability in case it does, in which case the damage is paid out. (Fun fact: landfills extract the methane from degradation of garbage and use it to heat homes. So in one sense stuff you throw away already is recycled.) Source: again, the Penn and Teller show which can probably easily be verified. If you really want to oppose "unnecessary" product use on the grounds that it may (and is extremely unlikely to) pollute outside a landfill and not get cleaned up, you should advocate the extermination of "unnecessary" people who may commit crimes and be unable to compensate the victims.
The proof of the fact I gave at the end is simple: imagine your car's pollution for one day dispersed over a city. No measurement would detect it. This is not to say car polluters shouldn't pay; they should. What it does prove is that the marginal impact of one car is small, so even if they did pay for that, behavior wouldn't change behavior much. There are a lot of good arguments against cars, but claiming they would fall out of use if people had to pay for their pollution... just ain't one of 'em.
Yeah, it's basically an arms race that the P2Pers are winning. For every new strategy that the industry puts out, someone comes up with a better counterstrategy.
Was that exposure worth ~1/3 of GDP? Private enterprise couldn't have achieved the same exposure on that kind of funding?
First, I'm not assuming free markets work perfectly. I'm not even arguing that's true (depending on how you define perfectly of course). I'm claiming that follows from more basic, reasonable assumptions (like action revealing preference, coercion leaving people worse off, investors in aggregate having better information that central agencies, etc.).
But about your other point: I understand what you're saying, but look at it this way: while some of those theoretical types of research yield high returns, most don't. What's the rate of return, discounting the failures? And discounting the lag until it satisfies actual human desires? Remember, by researching now, we are forgoing satisfactions now. The research isn't free. And if the returns, discounted by failure rate and time lag, fall below a person's time preference, it really doesn't satisfy human desires, because it causes people to forgo things they prefer.
That's why it makes much more sense for theoretical research to wait until someone sees how it would actually satisfy some human desire. But in that case, someone will fund it without the government!
Your whole argument is based on these 'human desires' yet you haven't defined them anywhere.
I defined it as much as it *can* be defined: it's what people want. Peoples desires vary greatly, so I can't be any more specific. However, entrepreneurs, in markets, attempt to satsify those desires. In markets, people don't just say, "I want X, Y, and Z"; they reveal through their actions what they actually want, and they improve their situation, else they would not make the trades.
The fact is that on the whole human beings have always had an appetite for exploration and pursuing new knowledge, pushing new frontiers and things like that. The space program directly satisfies that.
Okay, but if you're going to argue that the space program was a good idea because of the (unexcludable) benefit to Americans of knowing that there's a man on the moon, that's a separate argument . Please, folks, say what you mean. Don't say "The space program was a good idea because it gave us more and better tech than would have otherwise gotten" because it didn't. Instead say "The space program was a good idea because the benefits to the people who wanted a man on the moon far exceeded the costs to those who didn't want it" or something like that. And please, understand the difference.
More importantly though human beings have an undeniable desire for more natural resources to provide for their material needs and wants. Mining asteroids might be decades away still but it is essential since we simply don't have enough mineral reserves on earth for long term use by +6 billlion people. The space program directly meets this need too.
Do you know what a futures market is? It's this cool deal where profit-seeking investors intertemporally allocate goods so that they're never consumed too quickly, depriving future generations. They make it so that if goods are really in danger of running out, we'll know 20-30 years in advance, in which case it will be profitable for someone to go mine an asteroid. Remember, governement doesn't *create* resources; it redirects them. If it would be a loss for the private sector to harvest some resource, it will be for the government as well; the only difference is that rather than investors putting their own money on the line, government officials put everyone else's money on the line.
Anyway all the inventions and technological improvements developed during space programs or war or whatever were developed to satisfy human desires too. The improvements in computers made during the space program were directed at satisfying human desires. NASA has the same need for computers as businesses and the wider population do - to allow automation and rapidly crunch through complex calculations. Or for example the improvements in insulation made necessary by the extremes in temperature in space have found use for exactly the same purpose in the wider world - for example using 'space blankets' to keep body heat in extreme conditions.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. NASA was pursuing the end of getting to the moon. Any benefit to real, actual people not trying to get to the moon was coincidental. Again, say what you mean. If you think the space program was a good idea because it produced aweseome blankets, then you should just advocate government funding of awesome blankets! Don't cloak endorsement of satsifaction of human non-desires (beating the Ruskies) in endorsement of awesome blankets.
Almost all research funding is directed by practical considerations, wether that be to make money (the most common), preserve national pride or develop weapons for war. If the research didn't meet human needs then we wouldn't have any of the technologies we do today.
Wrong again, the research satisfied human needs by *coincidence*. That's far less efficient that researching to directly satisfy human desires.
If you want the government to fund research specifically intended to help people, say so. Don't advocate research that helps them by coincidence.
Oh, cool. I did. Read my posts again. Your turn. (Hint: read the part about diverting the efforts of entrepreneurs satsifying human desires.)
Is no one paying attention to my post? I just explained it to someone else.
Yes, war technology trickles into the general populace. But (for the third time), it's not enough to show war technology helps. You must show it helps more than what would have happened without it. Let's see if this example is easier to understand.
Imagine a company of say 1000 people working on a cool new kind of TV. Then a war starts, and that's no longer profitable, so they have to go into researching war technology. The develop a new missile targeting system. And then let's say the only civilian application of this technology is for a kind of toy set for 5-year olds. Then the war ends.
Given the war, the civilian community got a toy for five year olds. Had it not happened, the research would have gone into the new high-res, high-quality TV that far more people would have wanted. Space program spinoff defenders focus on saying how good this cool new toy for children is. They never acknowledge, because they're not even aware, of the technologies more beneficial to more people had the war not happened.
To be sure, most examples aren't as clear cut as this. The war technologies sometimes lead to really awesome tech for the populace. But since the non-war technology was directly for satisfying consumer desires, and the war technology does it only by coincidence, the non-war technology is necessarily more beneficial.
Now, you can claim that civilians are incapable of this level of research (which we can never verify because of the degree to which government crowds it out), but that's not the argument space program proponents use! They merely say "hey, the technology was good, so obviously it was better than all of the other alternatives"... which is a really weak argument when you think about it.
Wow. I've never seen anyone totally miss the point I was trying to make until now.
... *helped* satisfy human desires?
Yes, research during WWII, the Cold War, and space program led to good stuff. I specifically agreed to that in my post. But it's not enough to establish that, which you (pointlessly) went to great lengths to show in your post. You must also show that what would have happened in their absence would be worse. Showing that good stuff happened during program X proves NOTHING. Listing one by one the benefits of the space program proves NOTHING. Imagine if I took $100 from you, bought a candy bar, and gave it to you. By your logic I could say, "How dare you doubt the utility of the Theft-Candy Program? The TCP has resulted in your acquisition of a candy bar! Sure, you can play revisionist historian and claim you would have gotten a candy bar without it, but let's face it: you would have just stayed at home. And I know you can wave your hands and make the tired old 'I could have gotten a candy bar without TCP for under $100' game or even the 'I preferred my leisure and keeping the $100' game, but that's just voodoo economics."
In my post, I specifically showed how the spinoff arguments don't hold up to logic. At the beginning of the space program, entrepreneurs were researching better ways to satisfy human desires. Then the government diverted resources from this activity to another activity, which indirectly led to the satisfaction of some human desires. You're claiming that this diversion *from* satisfying human desires
The difference, in case you're wondering, between auto-racing research and space program research is that the auto research itself satisfies the desires of auto-racing fanatics, and the spinoffs to Ford Escorts are icing. In the space program, the goal does not actually satisfy human desires, and if it does, it's coincidental.
And no serious researcher takes your "job creation" or "boosts the economy" argument seriously. It's just the broken window fallacy reloaded (google it). Sure, we could start a government program paying people to dig holes and fill them up. That would create jobs. Or we could smash windows, burn down homes, evacuate cities and destroy them, etc. That would certainly create jobs in reconstruction! But it wouldn't prove the destructive acts were beneficial. What's important is whether human activity is directed at satisfying human desires or not. When you divert entrepreneurial activity to sticking it to the Ruskies, you take away from that.
It seems your courseload was heavy on the history, light on the economics. And you can't draw conclusions from history without a basis in the underlying economics. So you can spare me the indignance about all the great stuff from the space program, because it proves exactly nothing.
I agree with you, just as long as you don't start applying this to the "spin-offs" of the space program to ridicule people who oppose it. I mean, yeah, it's great all the advances of the space program, but what was the space program? It was basically a program where the government said:
"Hey, all you entrepreneurs working on technologies to satisfy actual human desires: STOP. Give us money so we can show the Ruskies where it's it."
Then later:
"Hey, some of what we did can, coincidentally, satisfy human desires outside of getting to the moon. Hey consumers! Look at all the goodies we produced for you. Please TOTALLY IGNORE what the entrepreneurs, who were trying to directly satisfy your desires, rather than satisfying them by mere coincidence, accomplished. Just focus on what we did, not what could have happened."
Then later, their court intellectuals say:
"If you opposed the space program, you must oppose insulated lunchboxes. Luddite."
He did talk about pollution, that's why I brought it up. If he's willing to make DVD manufacturers pay exhorbitant costs for polluting, he should be willing to pay the same per-mass-pollutant cost of his car's pollution. The fact is, neither his car nor DVD production is very polluting. So my point was that the issue is a red herring.
The people who would buy the single use DVD's don't think it's a dumb idea. Maybe they are dumb. Or perhaps they just have different values than you do. They might not want to have to return the DVD or risk late fees. Or maybe they like going to the store rather than waiting ~2 days for the DVD to come in the mail through Netflix (I think that's a low estimate). That's assuming the rental costs are under $3, of course, which with monthly fees it may not be.
See my other posts in this thread regarding the disposability issue.
You talk repeatedly about the "unnecessary waste" involved, but I think I didn't make my point clear. "Waste" implies forgone opportunities. Landfill space is really not a forgone opportunity, not of the magnitude you're talking about. If there were really valuable (i.e., that people *value*) opportunities forgone through the use of landfill space, investors would speculate in the market, driving up the price to the point that throwing things away would be prohibitively expensive. Do you know what a futures market is? It's a really neat deal where investors - in pursuing profit - intertemporally allocate goods so that no generation overuses them. That landfill space is not bid up in price is evidence that waste in any meaninful sense of the term - forgone opportunities - isn't occurring with single-use DVD's.
The exact same argument applies to the "waste" in the materials involved in making a DVD.
Regarding pollution, I understand that it also imposes costs on others. And polluters - including small scale polluters - should pay for costs they impose on others. My point was that even if they did, that would not significantly alter the fact that it would not be wasteful. Everything's a tradeoff. The pollution involved in DVD's is small enough to be worth the tradeoff, even if paid for.
That ties in with the final point I was trying to make about the tradeoffs involved in making products with a lifetime less than infinity. Yes, it would be nice if every product lasted forever. But often that's not cost justified. Many people don't want to pay $20 for an infinite DVD, but they would gladly pay $3 for a single-use. The lack of such a market is a deadweight loss: those who would buy the single use DVD miss out, and so do the people that would sell them. No one wins!
Products are generally not made to last forever, because then they would be too expensive. Now you may reply that the limitations on a DVD are "artifical" while the limitations on say, how many times you can use a wheelbarrow is "inherent" or "natural". But in both cases, the limitation on usages is necessary for the product to be brought to the market in the first place. In the wheelbarrow case, it's because an infinite use wheelbarrow would be too expensive for the ordinary persons. In the DVD case, it's because the infinite use DVD would be too expensive for ordinary persons.
This is not to say I don't feel the same emotional response at the "unnecessary waste"; in fact, I feel the same way. But this is instinctual, or emotional, the result of humans historically living in times of extreme scarcity. In reality, the single-use DVD's are not a waste because if they were, it would already be prohibitively expensive.
Not that anyone's still watching, but:
Garbage companies bear the full costs of using landfills. If we were running out of landfill space, that would be reflected in the cost of garbage disposal. As it stands, however, even accounting for costs of the landfill space, it's only $50/ton to dispose of garbage. And then the land above it is converted into some park, golf course, or nature preserve. We're not running out of landfill space. You could put all the trash in the US for the next 1000 years (accounting for population gain) in a 35 mile by 35 mile by 200 ft high (not unreasonable for landfills) landfill. Source: Penn & Teller's program Bull****!; I'm sure you can verify it. That's a tiny blip in Nebraska.
Regarding pollution, I don't know how much pollution is created in forming and stamping a DVD, but I'd venture it's a lot less than you regularly spew out of your car every day. So let's make DVD manufacturers bear the full cost of their pollution, causing the collapse of the DVD industry because they'd now have to pay 3.1 cents instead of 3 cents to make a DVD.
Oh, and if you're against producing stuff with a limited life, are you also against paper plate manufacturers for making a product that doesn't last forever? Durability issues are always considered when producing for consumers; sometimes, it's really not cost justified. The single-use DVD was an attempt to capture the "deadweight loss" (look up on Wikipedia) of people who would pay $3 for a single use, but not $20 for infinite use. It would satisfy a real consumer demand. But like "usury" in the Middle Ages and international trade today, people's emotional reactions on economic issues causes them to kill a process that ultimately benefits consumers.
Yeah, it's called a trial balloon. Look it up. Let me make it easier for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon
They send out a press release with plausible deniability to see how their PR would suffer or improve if they took a certain action. Now they know it's a bad idea, and they don't have to go through the trouble of sticking their necks out, too. Politicians do this all the time.
It's a shame really. The single-use DVD merely gives people an additional option. You can buy the DVD for $20, or buy it for a single use for $3. All those who would pay $3 for a single use but not $20 for the full DVD now suffer, and those who buy normal DVD's are unaffected.
Good job guys.
You're actually making a bigger, better point than even you might realize, because you've touched on a major issue that's affected the world of research today. The problem is that people forget that the purpose of research is to satisfy human desires. You may have a very roundabout way of doing that, but you should never forget that as a final goal. If you can't stop at any time and answer the question "How will this give people what they want?" ... you're probably wasting valuable resources on the research.
... THERMOMETER for the same purpose???
Case in point: a professor was giving a guest lecture on a kind of metal that can "remember" a shape, and if the ambient temperature changes past a certain point, it will no longer take that shape. Wow, that must have cost a lot of money to develop! So what good is it, sir? "Um... you can... make sure fish were handled properly because if they were ever unfrozen, the metal would be out-of-shape." WOW! You mean, people aren't smart enough to put in a new piece of metal if they illegally defrost it? You can't use a
Another example: a while back on slashdot, there was a story about a researcher who found a way for light to act as an actuator. The only application anyone could think of was to turn on a machine that resides in a human body. But whatever signal you use to turn on the light could turn on the machine itself!
These days, so many people are researching for the sake of solving tough problems rather than for the purpose of satisfying actual human desires. What you've mentioned is just one of the many cases.
Just a final example: I came up with an awesome idea for machine translation (which I won't reveal here because I want my name attached to it when it gets famous) and I explained it to a guy with a background in computer science. He kept suggesting all this stuff about artificial intelligence I would have to read to get it to work, and I had to stop him and ask how that would be necessary. I re-explained my idea to make sure he understood, and after I convinced him AI was unnecessary, his only objection to my approach was "... but that's no fun." I had to remind him that my goal is to make people speaking different languages communicate with each other, not have fun.
*sigh*
R&D departments should hire more people like you.
If everyone did that, it would never get off the ground.
You're saying they don't have the right to sell you the kinds of products they want to sell you? No one's making you buy their stuff.
You're actually making a bigger, better point than even you might realize, because you've touched on a major issue that's affected the world of research today. The problem is that people forget that the purpose of research is to satisfy human desires. You may have a very roundabout way of doing that, but you should never forget that as a final goal. If you can't stop at any time and answer the question "How will this give people what they want?" ... you're probably wasting valuable resources on the research.
... THERMOMETER for the same purpose???
Case in point: a professor was giving a guest lecture on a kind of metal that can "remember" a shape, and if the ambient temperature changes past a certain point, it will no longer take that shape. Wow, that must have cost a lot of money to develop! So what good is it, sir? "Um... you can... make sure fish were handled properly because if they were ever unfrozen, the metal would be out-of-shape." WOW! You mean, people aren't smart enough to put in a new piece of metal if they illegally defrost it? You can't use a
Another example: a while back on slashdot, there was a story about a researcher who found a way for light to act as an actuator. The only application anyone could think of was to turn on a machine that resides in a human body. But whatever signal you use to turn on the light could turn on the machine itself!
These days, so many people are researching for the sake of solving tough problems rather than for the purpose of satisfying actual human desires. What you've mentioned is just one of the many cases.
Just a final example: I came up with an awesome idea for machine translation (which I won't reveal here because I want my name attached to it when it gets famous) and I explained it to a guy with a background in computer science. He kept suggesting all this stuff about artificial intelligence I would have to read to get it to work, and I had to stop him and ask how that would be necessary. I re-explained my idea to make sure he understood, and after I convinced him AI was unnecessary, his only objection to my approach was "... but that's no fun." I had to remind him that my goal is to make people speaking different languages communicate with each other, not have fun.
*sigh*
R&D departments should hire more people like you.