sure, I can tweak your model. you keep using "incentive" as if it is neutral in this game. It isn't. The profit motive is the problem with the US health care delivery system; it can't be part of the solution. Any model with profit still in it reduces to "How to profit off sick people." There is no successful model like that. Rework your model to remove profit. (Hint: there already is a successful model used by every developed nation on the planet except the US. It's called "single payer.")

What do scientists do when the math/physics doesn't work? They adjust the model in the *belief* that the adjustment will correct the error -- until the adjusted model is tested, it is still just a *belief*. You can't know if the adjusted model is going to work until you test it, but you have to convince your peers that the adjusted model is worth testing. That's where opinion enters into your scientific enterprise. You have to get the people that control the funding to *believe* that your new model is worth testing. A really smart guy wrote a book about this process. Please check it out.

*Belief* is an inextricable part of the scientific enterprise. NB: The difference between a scientific enterprise and a non-scientific enterprise lies in what you do after nature says your model is wrong. A scientist shrugs and finds a new model, everybody else cries "heresy!" to defend their continued belief in the old model.

The comparison to PT Barnum is apt. Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking could wear that label too. Anybody who has a vision has to be part showman to make it happen. But WVB was a Nazi war criminal who ordered the deaths (by hanging) of a dozen random workers at a forced labor camp named Dora to set an example for the other workers after production schedules for the V2 rocket parts being produced at Dora slipped. EM's labor relations are notoriously bad, but he hasn't resorted to stringing up his employees.

Energy policy in the US is preventing more widespread adoption of alternative energy sources, period.

1. Less than one percent of US energy is produced by oil, so while "oil company executives making energy policy" is an accurate statement, it is somewhat misleading when it comes to how US politics is influenced by the energy sector.

2. Thirty-two percent of energy production in the US is powered by natural gas. Another thirty percent is powered by coal. Yes, US energy policy at the national level is being set by an ex-petroleum industry person, but at the state and city level, energy policy is being influenced primarily by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a conservative political action group that focuses on getting legislation passed at the local level.

3. ALEC was created by Charles and David Koch decades ago, and is steadily funded by them and other conservative business people. The Koch brothers derive most of their wealth from --- you guessed it -- coal and natural gas. ALEC-backed legislation has killed or severely curtailed alternative energy initiatives in dozens of states and municipalities. For what it's worth, right here in sunny Az, a Koch-backed trio of people on the Az corporation commission effectively killed private roof-top solar in Arizona by drastically altering the rates at which Arizona utilities would pay for energy placed back on the grid by private citizens, going from full retail to less than half of wholesale. New roof-top solar installations by private citizens went from over 40 a month to zero that same month, April 2015.

All politics is local, and the Koch brothers know this. That is why they pour millions and millions of their private wealth into ALEC -- to get legislation passed locally that protects their business interests nationally.

...Musk is in trouble with the SEC because he lied, period. Markets have rules, and one of the rules here is "Don't misrepresent your intentions." With that said, your hagiographic defense of Musk is admirable, because we need forward thinkers and doers like him if we are going to think ourselves out of the crapsack world we are heading towards. But we don't want to cure the disease by killing the patient. Musk has some really good ideas, but he also has some really dated (read: flawed) ideas about the role of markets and of labor. fwiw, he seems to be adapting strategies that were successful for a class of entrepreneurs in the late 18th century that created the conditions that produced our current political-economic paradigm. Look up "robber baron" if you want some insight into Musk's style of disruption. We need to recognize and correct the errors in our current economic and political models, and it is going to take disruptors like Musk to keep those errors front and center -- to keep reminding everybody that the current paradigm is seriously flawed and in need of serious re-thinking.

In 2012, 75% of the 2 million farms in the US produced a paltry three percent of total revenue. In fact, their average annual income was less than $40k per farm, and most of that was from "non-farm" income, like subsidies, retirement income, etc.

John Deere couldn't care less about those farmers -- the money obviously lies elsewhere. Their real target for this action was the three percent of farms (classed "large" or "very large" by the US Dept of Agriculture) that accounted for a whopping 52 percent of all production and 66.4% of agricultural revenue in the US.

So -- John Deere isn't going to worry about a bunch of hayseeds hacking their tractors, not even 2.5 million of them -- they are not a significant revenue source now, and based on concentration trends in the US agriculture market, they are going to disappear entirely. With this action John Deere is sending a message to those three percent of farms that account for two-thirds of all farm revenue: John Deere will not tolerate competition from their own customers when it comes to fixing broke tractors.

Marx was right about one thing -- owning the means of production (he called it "tools"; we call it hardware, now) is one of the two keys to capitalist success, and in a largely mechanized and automated industry like agriculture, that means owning the firmware, and through it, the hardware. Ironically, killing competition is the other key, and John Deere has apparently grokked both keys rightly.

Note: this is a slightly updated version of a post I made a year and a half ago on a slashdot story about John Deer cracking down on farmers using Ukrainian firmware on their tractors to dodge John Deere's $240 + $130/hr fee to have a John Deer engineer "authorize" repairs.

Psych 101, man. Fan is short for "fanatic," after all. In cognitive neuroscience, we use scales that assess subjects' attitudes that allow us to rank, rate, and partition their behaviors. You can google Celebrity Attitude Scale for one of the more prevalent scales we use when assessing obsession. People with higher scores on the scale possess a well-defined spectrum of cognitive and social dysfunctions. They will, with a probability approaching unity, have negative body image, poor interpersonal boundaries, epistemic closure and cognitive rigidity. You can google Dunning-Kruger Effect for more about cognitive rigidity and epistemic closure. the Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, explains *a lot* about obsessive Trump fans. Obsessive fans exhibit well defined psycho-pathologies like dissociation, addiction, stalking behavior, and compulsive spending/purchasing. Highly obsessive individuals tend to score low on mental health assessments, be clinically depressed, and exhibit anxiety and broad social dysfunction. There is no correlation (yet) between these documented behaviors and Axis I and II psychiatric disorders in the DSM, but I think it is only a matter of time before they are established and incorporated. The data are out there and we are shoring up our models with them.

hmmm. Niels, is that you? Let's call this the Copenhagen Haiku -- clever, but not quite right. :)

How about...

Quantum mechanics
The order does not matter
nor does classical

One universe, one set of rules, eh?

Just...no. Let's do this by the numbers.

The homicide rate (deaths per 100,000) has declined in the US from over 10 in 1980 to less than 5 as of 2017. Don't feel bad, Trump made the same erroneous claim during and after the election. Overall, violent crime is actually down in this country. Your assertion that there is an increased level of threat (you said, "massively more likely to commit homicide") is not supportable.

You assert that proliferation of firearms is not a problem. I respectfully disagree. In case anybody reading this has any doubt, we do have a prolific supply of guns in the US -- nearly 250 million guns. That stat alone is stunning, but if we "dig deeper," as you put it, we find that only seven million US adults account for half of those guns. That stat is just terrifying. That is the real problem -- the 2nd Amendment is protecting access to guns for less than two percent of the nation.

Owning a gun is one thing, and it is not necessarily a bad thing, and for the time being, it is protected by the 2nd Amendment. But there is a very real difference between owning a gun, and having access to one. The real problem in the US is that anybody who wants a gun one can get one, thanks to the 2nd Amendment. Remember, arguments supporting ownership are pointless if the person acquiring a gun wants only to shoot somebody.

Indeed. As a certain SF author pithily put it, "You live and you learn, or you don't live long."

More philosophically, progress (in anything) is not about moving towards some goal as much as it is about moving away from error. Our models and theories can't account for everything we observe, but we can (and do) adjust them when nature tells us that we are barking up the wrong tree.

The actual fuel efficiency ratio is on the order 4:1, not 17:1. You have factored in the number of passengers twice, for some reason, creating the erroneous 17:1 ratio. Fuel cost can be off-set by an increase in the number of passengers, which in turn is enabled by the increase in the number of routes that can be flown, which is what this project is all about. The only routes that the Concorde could fly at Mach or above had to be over water, which limited the number of potential routes, which in turn severely constrained the number of potential passengers. The lack of routes killed Concorde and nothing else.

The fifty year old Concorde had a max speed just north of Mach 2. Assuming no increase in performance in the last half century (unreasonable, I know, but I'm deliberately low-balling to make a point) imagine the demand if a route to Moscow from London opened up with a flight time of one hour. To Dubai in under three hours? or to Beijing in four? Bicoastal elites in the US are a huge potential market. LAX or SFO to JFK in less than two hours instead of nearly six? LAX to JFK is the third busiest air route in the US. London to Dubai is the fourth busiest air route in Europe. Each of these two routes had more passengers in 2015 than the Concorde flew in it's entire 34 year operational history. I hope you are beginning to get the big picture. Even if maintenance costs were as high as you assert (they aren't, but again, I'm being deliberately pessimistic to prove a point) the increased passenger base would still insure a more than healthy profit margin and a quick ROI.

...change the detected shape of the face.

In a bucket, FR algorithms calculate the distance between eyes, chin, nose, mouth and cheeks and then create a digraph hash based on a linear combination of these measurements, in exactly the same manner fingerprint or retinal scanner algorithms create a digraph hash of the loops and swirls of fingerprints or of branching retinal arteries.

Juggalo paint, or cosmetics in general, can create enough uncertainty in some of those measurements to defeat the algorithm, but only if the sensor is using visible light. IR and UV sensors will not be fooled by pigments that do not reflect those wavelengths. What will work, however, is to alter the contours of the face. A wad of cotton tucked into the check pouches and/or between lips and gums works, as does a prosthetic applied to the bridge of the nose or forehead.

There is a three-part mantra that project managers learn at the enterprise level:

1. If you want it good and fast, it will not be cheap.
2. If you want it good and cheap, it will not be fast.
3. if you want it fast and cheap, it will not be good.

This project fell to the third part.

The cracks in the SM are getting too large to ignore. The LHC cannot now, nor can it ever, probe at the scales we need to correct the serious gaps in the SM. Throwing a billion dollars at it is not a good use of our wealth. If you want to throw money at something, spend it on upgrading LIGO or getting LISA off the ground sooner, which are two tools that can open new windows on the universe right now. The SM needs to be corrected, and the LHC cannot help with that.

Bullshit. Look up snake oil salesman. Right-to-try is a push by pharma to get drugs into the market faster, so they can start recovering costs and making profits. Right-to-try simply opens up a new path to the market that bypasses regulatory control for drugs that haven't been proven to be safe with humans. It was crafted to allow desperately ill people to be exploited, period.

There is already a method in place to allow people to volunteer for unsanctioned therapies, and it protects them against weaponized snake oil. It's called the Expanded Access Program, and it is administered by the FDA.