This is a great example of how a natural monopoly works. Patents were intended to give their owner a monopoly for a limited time to make back the R&D cost. This shows what I have always said. There are natural monopolies that exist when you do new things. First there is a time to see if the product will be successful in the market place and then more time to ramp up production to copy it. The beauty of a natural monopoly is that the time of the monopoly is proportional to the advancement of the idea. If it is something simple it gets copied quickly and easily. If it is radical it make take years. This is far better than our patent system which awards the same term to all patent classifications.
I am a mechanical engineer and i work for the government and I have had quite a few interns. The purpose of an internship as far as I am concerned is an extended interview. Before we hire someone I want to see what is their work ethic and how quickly and independently they learn. Being the government it is difficult to fire someone after they are hired full time. We do pay or interns but can make a good argument why I would not if I had my own company.
First every intern I have met had decreased the group productivity without exception. This is to be expected. They don't know anything yet. So they are constantly asking questions. When your work involves long periods of concentration interruptions are deadly. Also you cannot just hand them a project and expect them to do it. You have to do the planning and then spoon feed them in bites they can handle. Then you have to review each part they do. In all it takes more of your time to have them do it then do it yourself. So I contend even though they seem super busy they aren't adding anything to what the group can do and are most likely decreasing it. Basically they are there to learn while we get to see if they are someone we want to hire.
My second point is most of these college kids are paying around $10k per semester for 18 credits hours. This is about 300 hours of classroom instruction with about 20 to 50 other strudents. This means they are paying about $30/hr of group instruction which in my experience consisted mostly of reading the text and solving problems in front of the class.
In my office we have 4 engineers and 1 or 2 interns for 10 weeks. That is 400 hours of instructions with a student to teacher ratio of 1:2 to 1:4. And my instruction includes trying to solve real problems and designing hardware and building it in a machine shop.
So if doing an unpaid internship is BS then college is BS^2.
The problem is the idea of objective research. It is nearly impossible especially with something that has political consequences. What do politicians love above all? Power over other people. So public grants will tend to go to things that can lead to a justification for expanding politions power.
The way much of this climate research is done would never be allowed in medical trials. They have acknowledged researchers bias and have taken steps to blind researchers who are doing the analysis of the data.
I don't have experience with this type of software but I am familiar with how governments work. I've designed equipment to automate tasks that were done by government workers. If the software or equipment in any way threatens those jobs they stop you since their contracts give them that right. I've had to dumb down many systems because they were too efficient and required less people. One was designed to position a payload in a rocket. It used to take 20 something people with rulers hanging at the end of a platform calling out the distances. We replaced it with a system that used sensors to relay all of the information back to the control booth and had camera feeds from each location. It provided 10 times the accuracy as before. We couldn't get it approved since it eliminate so many man hours. Wht did we do to get it approved? We installed 20 emergency stop pendants so those people could still be required. By that time the project ran out of money and was canceled. And they kept doing it the old way.
I think the difference is how someone perceives learning something new. When I get a project at work where I am thinking how the hell am I supposed to do this? Those are the best ones. I love a challenge. If I have to dust off college text books great. When I find out what I'm trying to do isn't in any of my books even better.
After being told my selection for intern wasn't diverse enough I wrote a proposal for funding an engineering intern interview obstacle course. It would consist of a series of cubicles that the person would go through without me seeing them. When they were done I would go review their work to see if I wanted to hire them. I was told I would I be allowed to have interns anymore.
I always loved this part of John Galts Speech. It's like my geek anthem.
"You-who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings to the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators-it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.
"Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter-so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.
"For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket-by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason-we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed-we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime-while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by-blank-out.
"Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners-by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don't possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don't produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air-while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.
Most vice crimes fit that category as well. The main problems associated with gambling, drugs, and prostitution exist because they are illegal and don't have access to courts to settle disputes so people are force to take the law into their own hands.
I had what I think is a simple immigration plan. It is based on solving the following problems. We have to acknowledge that farms in the US need non seasonal labor and many people who want this work are from outside the US that don't want to be US citizens. We also want to make sure that if there are Americans that want this work that they get preference. Also we want to prevent the exploitation of people and allow them access to our courts and services and tax them to help them pay for these services. Also we want to prevent criminals from coming in. Finally those what want to be citizens should be given an easy open way to do so. I propose the following.
If you want to be a migrant worker there would be a few rules. Set up an instant background check like the FBI has for firearm purchases. If you clear this than you automatically get a green card. No quotas, proving you have a sponcer or anything like that. You can come and go as you want you just have to show you ID when you enter. If you get convicted of any felony you lose your green card for 10 years. Also you would have a special minimum wage that is 2X the federal one. This easily gives Americans job priority. You also pay a federal flat tax of 50% on all earnings while here and you pay state and local taxes as well.
To become a citizen you would need to have a green card for 5 years and pay $10,000. That's it. No quotas.
This would allow any honest hardworking law-abiding person easy access to this country through legal channels. Therefore anyone sneaking across the border can be assumed to be a real criminals. Making life easier for good people let's them filter themselves away from the criminals and makes enforcement easier.
Of course the US is responsible for how WWI ended. It was fought to a standstill until we came in. If we had stayed out a more fair treaty would have been signed and Germany would not have been devastated.
Correct. The Tesla was sold to help offset R&D costs. What better way to get real world data than have people pay you $100k to be test drivers. If they really sold 1650 cars at 100k that is $165 million towards R&D.
All of the lessons learned are going into the sedan which will be priced to be profitable. We shall see what happens.
I assume you just randomly picked the hardest working culture in Europe as an example right?
One of the things to remember about Europe is they are small countries more comparable to US states. Germany has about 80 million people and that is the Most populous country. If anything you made a good argument for having a limited federal government where most taxes and services are handled by the states.
Taxation for the purpose of generating revenue is in no way theft. What is theft is targeting taxes or tax cuts to specific groups. Of course many of the biggest advances in the last few decades were government funded. The government has grown in size during that period. But you have to look back further. It was the private sector that has taken us from rural farmers through the industrial revolution. We had more advances in 100 years of being free than in all of human history. And while the big government funded advances this century may seem impressive most of the ones that benefit your life were created by free people.
In case you haven't noticed but the Chinese inflate their money worse than we do. It makes sense. The communist government uses inflation as a way to keep it's people poor whilemmaking the government rich.
It's not the rate of froth that is the problem. The problem is that is is centrally planned growth. That never works out because it always leads to mal investment. Remember a f years ago in the US people were saying house are a great investment. Yeah only when you are pumping trillions into an economy to pay for a war without raising taxes. And what happened? Almost all people were convinced the housing market was real. He'll even today you hear talking heads asking when housing is going to return. IT WAS A BUBBLE!!!!! It will never return in real value. Sure they might cause massive inflation which will drive everything up in price.
So what I am saying is that a central planned economy will ALWAYS suffer from mal investment. And when it is finally realized you get ghost towns and abandoned factories and miserable people. Kind of like the US right now. The only solution is for the central planners to go away. This has about a 20% chance of happening in the US in the next election. It has a 0% chance in China.
The reason the US has had such high standards of living was because the government was set up to protect people's liberty and private property. This allows people to build capital. Real capital equipment that makes you more productive. You are right a government is needed. It has to protect these two things. This allows people to try new ideas and if they are successful it means people like those ideas and they are imitated. In most countries on earth you cannot accumulate capital because it will be stolen by thugs or the government. In these places the per capita GDP never gets much above what a person can produce with hand tools or hand held power equipment. In the US a farmer can own a harvester combine which allows him to do the work of 100 people. He can then be 100 times more productive. In many countries the leaders are so dumb they think a harvester combine is bad because it eliminates jobs. Those countries will never be wealthy.
It amazing to watch all of the people saying China is going to take over the world. It is like they have been asleep for the last 20 years. All centrally planned economies go broke including ours. China will be a basket case in the next 20 years.
The phrase "good for the economy" is political BS. The economy is just a term to describe how people trade with each other. Frederick Batist had an interesting point. The argument was against protectionism but it applies here.
What is the goal for most people. It is to be able to have whatever they want with the minimum of discomfort. But in the real world nature barely gives us enough to survive. So we have to labor to transform natural resources into things we want. Basically people want goods to be in abundance at a low cost.
But what do producers want? They want to make lots of money so they can buy stuff they want. They would like competitors to be minimal and prices to be maximum. At least for what they sell.
This lead to a very easy way to see if a policy is good for people. If it creates abundance of goods people want at a low price it's good if it creates artificial scarcity it's bad.
So where does military spending fit in? Using this criteria it is easy to see that unless you are protecting the material wealth of this country it is a waste. It would be much better for those people to be working to build things people want. Jobs are not necessarily good for the people of this country. Only jobs that add things people want do that. It would be much better to have people be landscapers than soldiers or weapons manfacuters.
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This is a great example of how a natural monopoly works. Patents were intended to give their owner a monopoly for a limited time to make back the R&D cost. This shows what I have always said. There are natural monopolies that exist when you do new things. First there is a time to see if the product will be successful in the market place and then more time to ramp up production to copy it. The beauty of a natural monopoly is that the time of the monopoly is proportional to the advancement of the idea. If it is something simple it gets copied quickly and easily. If it is radical it make take years. This is far better than our patent system which awards the same term to all patent classifications.
Then why do you pay a college? Going to college is a lot of work and you actually pay for it.
I am a mechanical engineer and i work for the government and I have had quite a few interns. The purpose of an internship as far as I am concerned is an extended interview. Before we hire someone I want to see what is their work ethic and how quickly and independently they learn. Being the government it is difficult to fire someone after they are hired full time. We do pay or interns but can make a good argument why I would not if I had my own company.
First every intern I have met had decreased the group productivity without exception. This is to be expected. They don't know anything yet. So they are constantly asking questions. When your work involves long periods of concentration interruptions are deadly. Also you cannot just hand them a project and expect them to do it. You have to do the planning and then spoon feed them in bites they can handle. Then you have to review each part they do. In all it takes more of your time to have them do it then do it yourself. So I contend even though they seem super busy they aren't adding anything to what the group can do and are most likely decreasing it. Basically they are there to learn while we get to see if they are someone we want to hire.
My second point is most of these college kids are paying around $10k per semester for 18 credits hours. This is about 300 hours of classroom instruction with about 20 to 50 other strudents. This means they are paying about $30/hr of group instruction which in my experience consisted mostly of reading the text and solving problems in front of the class.
In my office we have 4 engineers and 1 or 2 interns for 10 weeks. That is 400 hours of instructions with a student to teacher ratio of 1:2 to 1:4. And my instruction includes trying to solve real problems and designing hardware and building it in a machine shop.
So if doing an unpaid internship is BS then college is BS^2.
The problem is the idea of objective research. It is nearly impossible especially with something that has political consequences. What do politicians love above all? Power over other people. So public grants will tend to go to things that can lead to a justification for expanding politions power.
The way much of this climate research is done would never be allowed in medical trials. They have acknowledged researchers bias and have taken steps to blind researchers who are doing the analysis of the data.
Good idea. But the government would have to write one set of requirements and not change them.
Did this city have public unions where your software was threatening their jobs?
I don't have experience with this type of software but I am familiar with how governments work.
I've designed equipment to automate tasks that were done by government workers. If the software or equipment in any way threatens those jobs they stop you since their contracts give them that right. I've had to dumb down many systems because they were too efficient and required less people. One was designed to position a payload in a rocket. It used to take 20 something people with rulers hanging at the end of a platform calling out the distances. We replaced it with a system that used sensors to relay all of the information back to the control booth and had camera feeds from each location. It provided 10 times the accuracy as before. We couldn't get it approved since it eliminate so many man hours. Wht did we do to get it approved? We installed 20 emergency stop pendants so those people could still be required. By that time the project ran out of money and was canceled. And they kept doing it the old way.
I think the difference is how someone perceives learning something new. When I get a project at work where I am thinking how the hell am I supposed to do this? Those are the best ones. I love a challenge. If I have to dust off college text books great. When I find out what I'm trying to do isn't in any of my books even better.
After being told my selection for intern wasn't diverse enough I wrote a proposal for funding an engineering intern interview obstacle course. It would consist of a series of cubicles that the person would go through without me seeing them. When they were done I would go review their work to see if I wanted to hire them. I was told I would I be allowed to have interns anymore.
I always loved this part of John Galts Speech. It's like my geek anthem.
"You-who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings to the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators-it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.
"Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter-so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.
"For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket-by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason-we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed-we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime-while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by-blank-out.
"Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners-by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don't possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don't produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air-while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.
You are missing the point. The Tesla WAS the R&D.
Most vice crimes fit that category as well. The main problems associated with gambling, drugs, and prostitution exist because they are illegal and don't have access to courts to settle disputes so people are force to take the law into their own hands.
I had what I think is a simple immigration plan. It is based on solving the following problems. We have to acknowledge that farms in the US need non seasonal labor and many people who want this work are from outside the US that don't want to be US citizens. We also want to make sure that if there are Americans that want this work that they get preference. Also we want to prevent the exploitation of people and allow them access to our courts and services and tax them to help them pay for these services. Also we want to prevent criminals from coming in. Finally those what want to be citizens should be given an easy open way to do so. I propose the following.
If you want to be a migrant worker there would be a few rules. Set up an instant background check like the FBI has for firearm purchases. If you clear this than you automatically get a green card. No quotas, proving you have a sponcer or anything like that. You can come and go as you want you just have to show you ID when you enter. If you get convicted of any felony you lose your green card for 10 years. Also you would have a special minimum wage that is 2X the federal one. This easily gives Americans job priority. You also pay a federal flat tax of 50% on all earnings while here and you pay state and local taxes as well.
To become a citizen you would need to have a green card for 5 years and pay $10,000. That's it. No quotas.
This would allow any honest hardworking law-abiding person easy access to this country through legal channels. Therefore anyone sneaking across the border can be assumed to be a real criminals. Making life easier for good people let's them filter themselves away from the criminals and makes enforcement easier.
Of course the US is responsible for how WWI ended. It was fought to a standstill until we came in. If we had stayed out a more fair treaty would have been signed and Germany would not have been devastated.
You can only have a true monopoly with government backing. Otherwise a leaner meaner competitor can always come along and take your market share.
Correct. The Tesla was sold to help offset R&D costs. What better way to get real world data than have people pay you $100k to be test drivers. If they really sold 1650 cars at 100k that is $165 million towards R&D.
All of the lessons learned are going into the sedan which will be priced to be profitable. We shall see what happens.
Except for the Israelis. They launch to the west in a retrograde orbit because they don't want to drop launch debris on enemy countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavit
I assume you just randomly picked the hardest working culture in Europe as an example right?
One of the things to remember about Europe is they are small countries more comparable to US states. Germany has about 80 million people and that is the Most populous country. If anything you made a good argument for having a limited federal government where most taxes and services are handled by the states.
Taxation for the purpose of generating revenue is in no way theft. What is theft is targeting taxes or tax cuts to specific groups. Of course many of the biggest advances in the last few decades were government funded. The government has grown in size during that period. But you have to look back further. It was the private sector that has taken us from rural farmers through the industrial revolution. We had more advances in 100 years of being free than in all of human history. And while the big government funded advances this century may seem impressive most of the ones that benefit your life were created by free people.
In case you haven't noticed but the Chinese inflate their money worse than we do. It makes sense. The communist government uses inflation as a way to keep it's people poor whilemmaking the government rich.
It's not the rate of froth that is the problem. The problem is that is is centrally planned growth. That never works out because it always leads to mal investment. Remember a f years ago in the US people were saying house are a great investment. Yeah only when you are pumping trillions into an economy to pay for a war without raising taxes. And what happened? Almost all people were convinced the housing market was real. He'll even today you hear talking heads asking when housing is going to return. IT WAS A BUBBLE!!!!! It will never return in real value. Sure they might cause massive inflation which will drive everything up in price.
So what I am saying is that a central planned economy will ALWAYS suffer from mal investment. And when it is finally realized you get ghost towns and abandoned factories and miserable people. Kind of like the US right now. The only solution is for the central planners to go away. This has about a 20% chance of happening in the US in the next election. It has a 0% chance in China.
The reason the US has had such high standards of living was because the government was set up to protect people's liberty and private property. This allows people to build capital. Real capital equipment that makes you more productive. You are right a government is needed. It has to protect these two things. This allows people to try new ideas and if they are successful it means people like those ideas and they are imitated. In most countries on earth you cannot accumulate capital because it will be stolen by thugs or the government. In these places the per capita GDP never gets much above what a person can produce with hand tools or hand held power equipment. In the US a farmer can own a harvester combine which allows him to do the work of 100 people. He can then be 100 times more productive. In many countries the leaders are so dumb they think a harvester combine is bad because it eliminates jobs. Those countries will never be wealthy.
It amazing to watch all of the people saying China is going to take over the world. It is like they have been asleep for the last 20 years. All centrally planned economies go broke including ours. China will be a basket case in the next 20 years.
Can they program these robots to steal the old persons valuables too?
The phrase "good for the economy" is political BS. The economy is just a term to describe how people trade with each other. Frederick Batist had an interesting point. The argument was against protectionism but it applies here.
What is the goal for most people. It is to be able to have whatever they want with the minimum of discomfort. But in the real world nature barely gives us enough to survive. So we have to labor to transform natural resources into things we want. Basically people want goods to be in abundance at a low cost.
But what do producers want? They want to make lots of money so they can buy stuff they want. They would like competitors to be minimal and prices to be maximum. At least for what they sell.
This lead to a very easy way to see if a policy is good for people. If it creates abundance of goods people want at a low price it's good if it creates artificial scarcity it's bad.
So where does military spending fit in? Using this criteria it is easy to see that unless you are protecting the material wealth of this country it is a waste. It would be much better for those people to be working to build things people want. Jobs are not necessarily good for the people of this country. Only jobs that add things people want do that. It would be much better to have people be landscapers than soldiers or weapons manfacuters.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDkhzHQO7jY