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Comment hotter than sun isn't hard to do (Score 1) 124

Things like laser plasmas , ion beans and even ultrasonic cavitation produce temperatures hotter than sun in micro environments.

If your deposition process uses such extremes it's plausible it creates adhesions beyond normal coatings and thus perhaps more durable. The latter of course isn't assured

Comment Acid rain? (Score 1) 27

I recall from the 1970s discussions of projects requiring large numbers of rocket launches. The killer problem then was that each launch was seeding huge amounts of undesired chemicals into to upper atmosphere and calculations showed significant impacts.

Did rocket propellants change enough that this isn't an issue any more?

Comment Bully pulpit (Score 1) 148

The term bully pulpit is a superlative not a pejorative. It's the right and perhaps obligation of people in positions of prominence to advocate for causes. Moreover it's something expected of politicians not something they are supposed to avoid. So it's quite normal

Now one can ask if it goes beyond advocacy to coercive. We've seen that in a past administration where like a mafia don the advocacy would be "nice bussiness you have there, shame if the government messes it up for you".
In this case I don't see a problem. The requests seem All in the public interest and even when imperfect in hindsight not intended for political or personal gain. There's nothing wrong with advocating for caution in speech as it isn't taking away your right to speak.

Comment I am Spartacus (Score 1) 46

Im also satoshi.

I've never seen a great application for big coin other than 2:

1. If we had set up phone calls, emails, and text from the beginning so that a sender pays a dime for each message -- refundable by a whitelist of the receiver--- we'd have no spam and very few scams and a lot less phishing.

It seems like a bitcoin lightning or etherium with a low process cost would have made the protocol universal across providers and nations.

And once such a high volume protocol was established actually using it as cryptocurrency would probably have been less risky and more ubiquitous.

But that boat got missed....

2. Moving money across national borders when a totalitarian govt restricts it. This includes the use of this to prevent a rogue government from native inflating its currency. So better controls on the govt and dictators.

Otherwise I can't think of any use thAt isn't done more efficiently by a trusted central authorized server. Like ach or Visa. This includes inventory tracking. There's just no use case where distributed bookkeeping is superior in the real world

Comment Re:It's about monopolism (Score 1) 49

Okay. This will take a little economic theory to understand so I hope you appreciate I'm taking your question seriously and not passing it off as snark.

You probably have heard of Nash equilibria? These are points on a multi-player economic manifold in which no party can make a move to improve their outcome. The surprising aspect of these is that they are often not the optimal or pessimal points of operation. The prisoners dilemma is a classic illustration of rational behaviors driving them to the pessimal outcome when they could also both win in the optimal outcome.

that's usually as far as most introductory classes go but there's much more to explore here.

Keynes argues that when recessions occur, everyone is getting less and so spending less which leads to getting less. It's a stable Nash equilibrium . But theres another stable point too. Every spends more, and makes more money. The problem is you ccan't get the system to move from one stable point to the other more desirable one by the players own actions. He reasoned that an outside force could temporarily cut a channel in the manifold coinnecting the two points in a way everyone would move to the better point. his prescription was to borrow on the future higher productivity and inject spending into the system. Whether you agree with his prescription is a good solution isn;t the point. The point is about an. Outside force being able to cut channels.

That only works when the outside force has a strong enough market power to literally change the economic manifold itself. In the case of a bussiness when it has enough monopoly it can do this. And that's considered a hazard.

How a bussiness wields that strategy and whether it helps or hurts is immaterial to observing the existence of it. So for example, we very often see governments spending into recessions as Keynes advised but then forgetting about paying back the borrowed money as Keynes also advised. (Politicians not Keynes are to blame for the imperfect application of his strategy).

So while we don't know why amazon does what it does, we do know it can do this kind of market shaping. The fact that they lower the whole market is evidence of this. How it benefits amazon one can only speculate on. (For example, the reason target lowers prices is presumably to acquire more regular customers at amazons expense. They are in effect purchasing a customer base. Amazon can defeat that purchase and profit later from the retained customer base after target reaches the end of its finical gambit. But the why doesn't matter here. The point is amazon has enough power that it alone can determine if target succeeds.

It's the flip side where we get back to the manifolds. How then does amazon walk from the Nash equilibrium at the low price back to the Nash equilibrium at the high price? A small bussiness can't do it. That's the whole point of a Nash equilibrium. YOu can't induce the other players actions to favor you.

But amazon was testing ways to do just that using its market size. And it works.

Thus it is able to literally alter the market manifold. This is considered a bad sign of monopoly practices even if nothing bad happened in a particular case.

Comment It's about monopolism (Score 2) 49

Here's the thing. Normal bussiness activity isn't considered normal when a party is a market maker. This is recognized in law. Things you can do when your activities are insufficient to really move the market ae not allowed when your actions literally change the market. That's the issue. And that's the part you are missing, causing your confusion. The actions amazon is taking aren't bad ones in and of themselves. They are just bad ones when you add in the fact that amazon controls so much of the market.

Comment Amoral decisions in public policy objectives (Score 1, Interesting) 276

You understandably ridicule a post with a naive understanding of reality but rather than simply attacking the speaker let's discuss the real matter here. First it's not really about fairness but public objectives and the policies to implement them. We can all disagree on what the objectives should be but once you have an objective the next question is how to achieve it. Let's say for example you notice that rising rents are driving a crucial social strata and workforce out of your village ( say the next generation to work the farm) or city ( entry level office workers) and the market place design is exacerbating this. You don't want to reengineer your capitalist society because you mostly like it but you can implement some social policy to correct defects that are abbetation in the market. One approach is some complex set of regulations and a large group of public employees to monitor, adjudicate and enforce these with scalpel precision and long range planning. Another approach is simply to give a tax break or cash incentive for a general behaviour like say building low income housing. Not precise but much less government infrastructure. This is sometimes the better way. Not always. But sometimes. People complain when companies pay no taxes because of loopholes but if they are getting those by implementing public policy goals that's good. The problem of course is when corrupt politicians slide useless loopholes in or loopholes live beyond their design lifetime.

Many things like that happen. For example needle exchanges or maintainence doses of narcotics freely given out to addicts can have huge benefits to societies in terms but people have moral feelings about these that make them fight against sensible policies for sensible objectives. Sure would be nice to straighten out every addict but you can't do that even at the level of supervision found on a navy ship or prison so one needs to consider other policies that oversight so we can get the benefits to society from reducing the harm of addiction that society bears.

One can consider universal basic income in the same way. What's the objective? One objective that's worth noting is that productivity in many countries isaffected by high opportunity costs. People can't take risks to move to a new job because 20% of families have a member with a preexisting condition that is uninsurable without some alternate access to insurance such as employer provided insurance. ( that in fact is the real benefit of Obama care to society-- workforce mobility with less insurance concern) . People are reluctant to start bussinesses if they don't have the ability to bridge gaps in cash flow. If you go to cities in Europe you see thriving small single person shops not mega chain stores because people can take risks with their incomes and still have medical care, a future pension and maybe eat. It's not that you are subsidizing unprofitable byssinessss it's that you got better productivity and more entrepreneurship by more energetic oeole by taking risk out of the equations with a social safety net. These societies are in many ways more entreneurial than one's based solely on large capital accumulations directing market decisions.

So if one can look at things from the point of view of objectives not fairness or morality many things like helicopter money or scholarships for poor people make a lot of sense. You could administrate the money or you could just hand it out. Which method is better depends on the situation. But worrying that someone might waste the money may be not useful. A lot of money is wasted on regulatory agencies trying to prevent waste.

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