This is seriously, seriously wrong.

Why on earth would someone spend the effort to be a lawyer if they just get paid the same? How do you think exceptional employees would feel about carrying everyone else like that? Everyone's going to be HAPPY to be a carbon copy cog in the great machine? If everyone has the same disposable incomes... people would be fighting for the easy jobs. The unhappiness has only moved from feeling taken advantage of due to differences in wages to feeling taken advantage of due to the vast differences in job difficulty across the entire company's payroll for the same disposable income. Now, instead of occasionally remembering the injustice every paycheck or two... you're constantly reminded of the inequity of your workload vs. others. It'd be miserable.

This is literal communism... like, on a real commune. It 'works' on a commune because there's no real product besides the group survival (unless they're led by morally bankrupt a-holes who are taking advantage of the naive, which seems to happen a lot) and virtually all of the work is unskilled and interchangable. They usually regularly rotate positions and find ways to punish people who aren't pulling their weight.

You're valuing the COMPANY product according to market rates, but you're completely disregarding the individual skills and product of the employees. You can't combine those, they're not compatible.

A person, like a company, has a product or a set of products. How valuable the product is to others should be reflected somehow in how that person is paid. Personally, I'd rather have the assembly line guy who works twice as fast get paid twice as much. The sales guy who can sell twice as much should be paid twice as much. However, I recognize that this would put too much pressure on the average person... so a system much like we currently have where the compensation for performance is much more gradual is fine by me. The extreme performers can go their own way if they want to do better.

I do wish that pay for different jobs could be somehow magically rebalanced according to the actual worth of what the person does for society, though. Not 1:1, though... probably something like "1 + ln(relative_societal_value)".

Even Apple wouldn't make it in a world without copyright or patents. The only midsized or large tech companies that would make it longer than a year or two would be Foxconn and companies like it. They'd morph into copy houses, mass producing other people's designs at a massive scale.

Smaller companies would exist at the mercy of the large ones... as long as the products aren't TOO profitable or too similar to an existing design already being copied they'd survive.

I'm kind of assuming patents would be gone too here... it would not make much sense to drop copyright without dropping patents too.

There are people that benefit. I know a person who for a time was brainwashed to "reject negative thinking". This in fact effectively meant rejecting critical thinking. Since, "maybe this sugar water doesn't cure my ills, and the person selling it to me is a scumbag" is a negative thought. It leads to the most ridiculous things.

Luckily, she didn't seem totally committed to the concept... I can't imagine it's actually possible to live that way. She mostly just used it to justify what the said snake oil salesmen sold to her.

However, I think these are edge cases and it's much more just a general anti-science thing. America's taught a couple generations that their opinions are important... even entirely unfounded BS opinions. That supposed authority spouting 'facts' is really just another guy's opinion... so who's he to tell you what's right and wrong?

*sigh*

I sincerely hope you're right... I really and truly do.

Unfortunately, I fear that you aren't. As another reply said, the moderates were mostly driven out. I'm sitting in Houston listening to the craziest things from people all around me. I'm very afraid of the echo chambers and walled gardens that people seem to be retreating into. Right wing TV and radio will continue to press the paranoia and panic buttons as that seems to get ratings. Any attempt to argue against the paranoia is just met with more paranoia (usually in the form of self righteous condescending accusations of being a tool of the government or corporations).

Please... please be right.

State boards are doing a good enough job? What his definition of a bad job be, then?

He's from Texas, too. Wow.

I agree on the budgetary fault thing. In a better world, basic research would stand on it's own merits and be funded appropriately.

However, we appear to live in a world of ignorant perceptions. The perception is that NASA is up to 20% of the federal budget, and a sadly common thought is "why spend on rockets when there are staving people here on Earth?"

As you say, it is quite hard for most politicians to cut the military... although they have and will actually cut it from time to time. It appears to be cyclical... they've got a mostly free pass for a while, but that's going to be coming to an end. Relatively, at least.

So, it seems fairly reasonable to me (but sad) for things to have turned out like they have. An agency that is more immune to budgetary issues steps up to fill a void.

I also think that people have every right to object to military organisations and involvement of any kind. However, I'd very much hope it would be a well reasoned and principled objection... not just a blanket "don't sell your soul to the devil" rejection based on a paranoid fantasy like the "organization who is controlled by sociopaths bent on economic domination" comment demonstrates.

I think the pathetic thing here is the level of paranoia and mistrust towards DARPA, the military, and the government in general.

After all, "sole purpose is the destruction of life" != "The overarching objective of MENTOR is to develop and motivate a next generation cadre of system designers and manufacturing innovators by exposing them to the principles of foundry-style digital manufacturing through modern prize-based design challenges."

DARPA sponsors some great stuff. They're supplying a big chunk of much needed research funding in these difficult years. A lot of it, like this specific grant, is NOT specifically tailored towards a military application. They're trying to encourage young people to become interested in engineering... justifying it as in our national interest (which it undoubtedly is).

I don't see the military going off and doing crap on their own for their own purposes. They're still quite controlled by civilian authority. It was Bush's biases and prejudgements that led us into Iraq. While I'm sure there's a significant level of defense industry lobbying on our government leaders, they're hardly controlled by it.

The vast majority of the people that make up the military are really good people. Step outside your echo chamber sometime, it's not quite as dark outside as you think it is.

Yeah. In my case, dropping out gave me an advantage... I came out with time to climb ranks a little before the 2001 tech burst. If I'd stayed in, I'd have come out right in the middle of that.

Once you have some good work on your resume, it just doesn't matter. When it DOES matter, and the resume has lots of good stuff on it otherwise... it probably means you don't want to work there.

Uh, no... it's a jammer... it's screwing up everything in the entire band and probably beyond it. It's the difference between a single person talking into a tube pointed at someone else listening with a tube (roughly equivalent to the limited channel use and directionality modern cellphones and towers have with phase array antennas) and someone screaming "F YOU F YOU F YOU F YOU" so loud nobody in the room can hear at all.

Cell phones are required to demonstrate they do not interfere with other equipment on licensed bands. Unlicensed band products (like Part 15 devices) MAY be affected, but that's rare. This is probably due to the fact that those are relatively narrow bands compared to the entire spectrum of licensed frequencies and if the phones are not interfering with any of the licensed bands it's very likely they're not interfering with the unlicensed ones either.

An illegal device like a jammer is not tested, and could EASILY inject harmful noise broadly over wide parts of the spectrum. It's very unlikely the device was designed and constructed by someone competent enough to do it correctly.

It's EASY to construct a device that makes horribly loud screeches to prevent anyone from talking. It's much harder to construct a device to silence just people speaking at a certain pitch without harming anyone else's conversation.

Oh yeah... turning on a jamming device that probably interferes with devices well outside your immediate area, has likely unpredictable effects on other wireless equipment, and is produced by an unscrupulous person with questionable skills to get it right is SO considerate.

Why not just go with an EMP cannon? "Stoopid iPhone guy, I'll show you for bothering me with your... conversation with someone else. Oh, sorry pops... didn't know you had a pacemaker"

"occasionally screws up" was right in the quote.

I'm fairly sure there's more than a handful of FDA drugs on the market. Percentage-wise, it's mostly working. Half a dozen or even a couple dozen bad drugs out of thousands of generally good drugs isn't that bad a record, given how hard it is to get that stuff right. Are mistakes sometimes made? Yes. Are some of those mistakes exasperated due to corruption? Sure. Step back and get a little perspective, though. It's way better than virtually no testing at all, which is what you'd get if drug companies didn't HAVE to pay for it.

You'd seriously advocate sending 95% of the population back to the age of snake oil salesmen because you think you could do better for yourself? "F*ck the weak and the stupid. Darwinism for the win!" ? :)

Well, we've been there before. It sucked.

Fraud is -really- hard to prove. "I really thought this cobra venom cured my back pain, your honor. I was just offering my discovery to others for a small fee to cover my expenses."

Even liability is really weak. "You can't prove my horse adrenaline caused the heart attack. People have heart attacks all the time."

Without some large (perhaps governmental?) organization tracking such things, you'd never figure out what DID work.

Drug testing generally works. It's slow, it's bureaucratic, it occasionally screws up... but it works.

You CAN'T KNOW what the side effects in a real human population are until you've tried it in a decent sized trial. Before you do that, you'd better try a small test segment. Before that, you'd be highly irresponsible not to test it pretty thoroughly in analogues like animals first. Doing it responsibly takes a painful amount of time and money.

Sure, it really sucks when a lifesaving drug COULD have been given if it was known to be safe ahead of time... but you have to wait for the results. "You HAD the drug, my daughter DIED and your drug was available the next day!"...

I hope that's never me, but the alternative is worse.

The point is, people with all the tools in the world to find information on what works and what doesn't aren't going to use it correctly.

Selling black rocks to make fools feel better around cell phones is frustrating but it isn't that big a problem. Selling black rocks as an alternative treatment for cancer, or memory water for diabetes... that's a problem worth regulating.

If you throw out the FDA, you're effectively throwing out testing. What corp would spend even 1% of what they do now to test drugs if they weren't absolutely forced to follow the process to the bitter end?

Civil liability is nowhere near a large enough deterrent. Can you imagine trying to prove your son died due to snake oil salesman #1's special mango juice, vs. some other natural causes?

Really? That' s ORDERS of magnitude more manageable.

I'd MUCH rather have government's barely competent management of medical science tell me (and the people I care about) what's safe. It's a big enough target for people to actually monitor and watchdog to some degree. Is it going to make the correct, unbiased decision for every person? Of course not, probably far from it. That doesn't mean we should throw it out and let anyone with an idea and a slick web site inject something into Grandma. Care to try to manage THAT? What possible criteria would you have, if "let's test it and see what happens first" is too much government interference for you?

Caveat emptor?

I can't actually believe I'm having this argument. After all.. Why trust the government with guns? Let's break all this shit down and get rid of all the police, firefighters, teachers, etc. I'm sure we could do SO much better with neighbourhood militias, bucket brigades, and home schooling with that nice Intelligent Design lady down the street.

... because desperate people will do desperate things.

Sure, things could be a lot better... but it's a big assumption that people will (a) make informed decisions and (b) not get totally taken advantage of.

The second one person out of a hundred has a positive outcome on some test drug, all known dangers are totally ignored and everyone wants it. The corp selling the drug starts to suspect there's a problem, but they are making a lot of money so they wait for more conclusive proof. Two years later, everyone's dead of kidney failure.

People are not rational. Even otherwise quite rational people given desperate choices will take wild gambles and will blindly trust anyone saying they can help.