I work at a pretty representative tech company. I plan and control the budget for these types of activities. I think I would know.
And in the following sentence you indicate you don't
We're not talking about you hacking away in your mom's garage...
The "moonshot" is not just a thing that "pretty representative tech companies", that happen to be in the developed world, do.
That's what's important to you? Not having a country of happy people, healthy people, educated people, or good opportunity for all classes?
The odd thing here is that all of the examples given by AC were of countries with increasingly wealthier, happier, and better educated people. Maybe this issue isn't as important to you as you claim.
Each leap forward has generally resulted in more medium income jobs being replaced by low income ones than high income ones. Each wave has resulted in a increased standard of living for a smaller and smaller percentage of the population.
I really get annoyed with how many slashdotters there are complaining about this without even a rudimentary acknowledgement of the centuries of contrary history. You could at least claim that somehow it'll be different this time.
They are cutting themselves out of market reach by excluding consumers. Their success or failure depends entirely upon whether organizations, wealthy individuals, or municipalities will order large lots. People with deep pockets don't spend on impulse, and they're just as likely to create their own solution as invest in this one.
I don't know whether these guys are cutting themselves off from the market. But I do know that the deepest pockets, the Feds do buy on impulse. There's vast sums of money available for disaster recovery and piddling amounts available for disaster preparation (aside from terrorism, which does seem to consume an inordinate amount of disaster preparedness money). If these guys can store a large number of these units and ship them for a large scale disaster, then they could get a piece of that action, which might generate a profit.
But how often do Katrina scale disasters happen in the wealthier parts of the world? I'm not really seeing the need here.
100 years is relatively recent.
Last month is genuinely recent. That's when ISIS burned around 45 people. Then they stuck it on YouTube. They've also are in the process of committing genocide and allegedly selling human organs on the black market.
No where in the world is a bastion of righteousness.
What was the point of making that observation? I find it interesting how people are more concerned about a light case of hypocrisy in the US than a vile organization like ISIS. It's a pretty remarkable case of moral blindness.
What makes your people more relevant than those other people?
What are "my people"?
A tool that isn't working isn't what I would call a useful tool.
I don't throw away tools just because they're imperfect.
it takes $25K for one single mid level engineer to just write some code for a few weeks, see if he can break through the most likely failure points.
No, it doesn't.
With voter turnout this epically low, we are at the point where all the eligible voters who don't vote could band together and elect a president and VP who aren't even on the ticket. Whether or not mandatory voting would help is unclear, but voter disenfranchisement doesn't help anyone and neither do all the various voter suppression methods that we see in each election cycle. Something should be done to push back.
I disagree. I find voter disfranchisement, which just means allowing the clueless to stay away from the voting booth, is very compelling as a useful tool of democracy. There's no reason to push back when the system is working just fine. It's worth noting here that Obama was elected in large part by such clueless voters, so of course, it's in the interests of his political interests and belief system to force these people to vote.
but tell that to people who, on the basis of Facebook posts by other people of the licensees page, have to defend their license at licensing board hearing.
I don't know. Will that take a long time or not?
Experts aren't evidence!
Note that all of your examples have experts on all sides of the argument. If evidence doesn't matter, then there's enough expert testimony to back that cigarettes aren't harmful for your health and that vaccines cause autism. Because experts.
Your example disagreements have definite conclusions, because there was copious evidence supporting one side of the argument. For example, there was a three orders of magnitude drop in US measles cases right after the introduction of the measles vaccine. And similar drops can be seen in other countries as respective vaccines are introduced. And the side effects of these diseases can be just as dire as autism, the alleged side effect of vaccination. There is a very straightforward argument to be made for continuing vaccination, even if it did cause autism due to the people whose lives are saved from these diseases.
Similarly, there is very strong evidence over large numbers of people that smoking harms people, both the smokers and people who are exposed to high levels of second hand smoke.
The special features of these debates is that one doesn't need to listen to the experts. One can study the evidence directly.
What I think is dishonest here is the assertion that the evidence for the claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is just as strong as the two examples you gave and just as easy to examine to confirm. It isn't. After all, we don't measure directly any weather or climate phenomena before about 150 years ago. Every is estimated via paleoclimate proxies. And these estimates are very subjective, dependent on how they are manipulated. For example, the first reconstruction of global mean temperature over the past millenium which eliminated the Medieval Warm Period, the "Hockey Stick", by Mann and Jones, turned out to have a serious statistical error, which conveniently caused even random noise to be transformed to the desired "hockey stick" shape, most of the millennium being nearly flat except for a sharp rise in temperature at the end in the Industrial Age. What is particularly interesting is that after this research was called into question, within a few years, supposedly independent research had been released showing the same shape.
Where else in science, would scientists work so hard to recover a broken result? I'd say economics which has long been held captive by a variety of special interests. In most fields, bad research would be a warning sign to look hard at the problem and carefully reevaluate the original claim, rather than rush through new analyses to back the original claim.
And then we have the second tenuous claim, that it is catastrophic. The evidence for this is laughable. A particular notorious example are the claims of extreme weather. They come in two variants. The first are claims that various special cases of weather are due to global warming. These are inherently dishonest both because it is nearly impossible to show that any single incident of weather was made worse by global warming. One shows correlation by looking at lots of data. Even the instrument period of the past 150 years often doesn't have enough data to back these claims.
The second approach is to study the models and make predictions from those, though not couched as such. So it is claimed that say, tornadoes are 33% stronger in terms of damage inflicted than they used to be, or there are more hurricanes, when what is really meant is that the researcher is extrapolating from a model, rather than reality, and no one has a clue yet whether the hypothesized effect occurs because the necessary data isn't yet present.
My view is that in climate research, we have a real life demonstration that experts are not evidence.
that would cover one engineer for long enough to set up his dev environment
And sometimes that is all you need.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
