Education / training always has such a dual function...either train people how to do the task, or block them from doing the task if they can't be taught. So it is for all certifications.

As you point out, this is a problem in the US because washing people out means they can't drive and therefore can't function in many ways. We don't exactly have a universal legal right to drive in the US, but because we absolutely ignore all other modes of transportation, we effectively do...we have made driving required in order to participate in society, yet we haven't guaranteed the right to do so either. I'm surprised the courts have never ruled that car-centric transportation planning a violation of the 14th amendment, ADA, or something else.

What's puzzling is how in modern times our pace of deploying technology seems so much slower. As you mentioned in your post, completely new technologies seemed to go from impossible to widespread deployment in society in only a few short years. After Edison made a lightbulb, it seems like lightbulbs were everywhere only a few years later, and whole cities wired for electric and switched from gas to electric light. Yeah, there was a format war between AC and DC, but they even speedran the format war.

After they invented the steam engine, it was only a few decades before the country was crisscrossed by railways, a technology that didn't even exist before, an entirely new way to do transportation. Just think how many existing business models were crushed by that, but it was progress, so it thankfully happened anyway.

After they figured out heavier-than-air flight, as you pointed out, we had commercial aviation nearly immediately and were on the moon 70 years later.

Now, it seems to make 20 years for anything truly new to be adopted. If you invented a modern equivalent of a "steam engine" today, it would just be stuck in a patent vault for 20 years and deemed impossible to commercialize. If you invented something as pioneering as an "airplane", it would take the FAA a decade of committee meetings to get around to figuring out how to regulate it. If you invented antibiotics nowadays, they would cost $1200 per pill and be rationed out slowly to milk the maximum corporate profits, and that's if they didn't outright get banned because they infringed on some existing patent, or the company bought up by big pharma and shut down.

I'm not talking about small incremental advances like a better smartphone camera, I mean NEW, society-changing technologies that require doing things differently, just seem to be nearly impossible compared to the 20th century. I guess because our industrial capacity and market capability, defined in ability to get things done in society rather than ability to maximize internal profits, just seem like it was so much greater then.

When the government seizes and dominates the private industry, it's communism. When private industry seizes and dominates the government, it's fascism. Either way it's authoritarian shitbirds running things; just a matter of which faction won out in the early stages.

Actual beer breweries test their beer with mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs. They systematically detect arsenic, because arsenic is a persistent component in barley, and it's a natural part of the plant, and there's nothing you can do about, and nothing you need to do about it...the levels are just insignificant to health, but are easy to detect with lab equipment. The ethanol component of the beer is far and away the most unhealthy part of it.

So you could just as easily write an article "aresenic found in 100 of of 100 beers tested". And it would be so much fake news. So when I see an article saying they "detected" some kind of PFAS chemicals in beer, with no information about how much they detected or what kind of PFAS molecules or what amount of those chemicals are dangerous acutely or chronically...it's just as much fake news.

I actually care about PFAS pollution, that's why we need the media to do better so we can assess it seriously. When they publish slop, everyone just learns to ignore the issue.

Productivity completely aside, during hype bubbles, companies attract venture capital by appearing to be growing, so they will have a mandate to show gradually increase headcount simply to appear strong and get capital investment. They will hire people with nothing for them to do, the idea is eventually they will have something for them to do or maybe the floor will fall out and they never will, but regardless, you can't stop hiring because it looks bad. They will specifically hire certain quotas of Ph.Ds and so on.

Brewers have been doing this forever. For brewing and winemaking purposes, any region's water can be duplicated by mixing the right salts with distilled water. You can easily find recipes to do it.

In the case of water which is to be drunk directly, it's the same, except there's an additional requirement to get the dissolved oxygen and CO2 correct. Dissolved CO2 contributes to the water's acidity and both that and oxygen can impact the taste of drinking water. But between the mineral mixture and dissolved gases, you can easily make any water you want. You could make the equivalent of a Coke Zero machine to duplicate water from anywhere in the world. In certain cases, it may actually be cheaper to ship the water, though.

This seems to be a common dynamic in polymers in particular. Another example is official brand-name plastics like DuPont Delrin(R) versus generic POM, or genuine Lexan(R) vs. generic polycarbonate sheeting. The brand-name stuff is genuine POM homopolymer, the generic stuff is a variety of POM copolymers that are just as good for most applications, but you're never sure. So if you want to be sure what you are getting, you have to pay a 3X multiple for the genuine thing, all the while knowing that the generic option is probably 90% or 100% as good but you just can't be sure.

No, you don't understand. EVs simply don't work for Americans, and Americans just don't want them, which is why the American car industry needs to be protected by tariffs and import bans on foreign EVs.

I think this is on the right track but disagree about not reading, because reading is a great way to obtain comprehensible input.

The data and experts agreed that essentially the only factory that matters in language acquisition is the total quantity of comprehensible input you receive. Wherever and however you get it, what matters is the total amount. All language learning methods or resources are valuable only to the extent that they facilitate you getting more comprehensible input in the target language. It's true that language production, speaking, and writing don't really have an impact on learning speed, so all the "start speaking REAL X today!" products are just stupid and possibly counterproductive.

But reading is a great way to get comprehensible input, so not learning how to read is a bad strategy. French is easy to learn to read, and after learning to read, I can spend hours browsing the internet, reading books, reading the news, ebooks, walking down the street in France and reading all the signs, reading all the product labels in French, even in the US (and noticing the hilarious mistranslations), I even switched my phone to French for a while. All of that would be impossible if I didn't learn to read. I've learned untold amounts of vocabulary from reading French; in fact probably a big fraction of my English vocabulary was obtained exclusively through reading English content, especially online, so why would I want to turn down that source of input, when learning to read is so easy? And since French spelling is reasonably readable, so I can pronounce it all just fine.

The calculus changes a lot for languages that are hard to learn to read, like Japanese or Chinese. You can definitely make the case that rather than spend the X hundred hours you need to learn the characters, it's better to initially spend those X hundred hours getting more comprehensible input in the language. But for most global languages, learning the script is a tiny effort compared to the additional avenues of comprehensible input that it opens up.

The planes drive customers to their financial services.

This is exactly how Japanese train companies, which are all private companies, work. They are actually real estate companies that operate billions of dollars worth of high-value space in all of their stations that brings in megadollars in leases every year. The trains are important, but they aren't making their money selling tickets. Ticket revenue could never keep them afloat and if they increased ticket costs they would lose money, because they really make their money on real estate. Without without the trains, they wouldn't have millions of people per day walking through their properties. This is actually how US train companies worked during the private era as well. They would build train lines specifically to drive up the value of their real estate holdings, which is where they actually made money. Sun Valley Resort is a good example.

Not only would this benefit the current game/sport, it would also allow us to understand how the game evolves over time. I want to see the Tour de France done with the same steel bikes and 5-speed hubs they were using in 1985, and see how the modern athlete's times compare. Maybe they'd be way worse. Maybe they'd be better, but then we'd know it was the athletes getting better and not the bikes.

Imagine trying to do baseball stats if the distance between the bases was constantly changed over time.

This is why the hope for the future is not communism, but Georgism. Retains the capitalism / market framework (actually, reinforces it), but easy to implement with basic tax policy shifts. No revolution necessary.

This right here. I don't understand why high speed charging isn't taking the exact same model that works for gas stations. It's even better than gas pumps...even fast EV chargers have to hang around for 20-30 minutes, so even more time to sell them shit they don't need.

I've seen a few Tesla Supercharger stations. Impressive. But it's just a bunch of chargers stuck in a parking lot somewhere. Desolate as hell. Who would do that with gas pumps? Nobody would. The gas pumps are at the service station, underneath the protective roof, next to the "free" windshield washers, where there's also hot coffee, snacks, and cigarettes. No wonder nobody wants to drive an electric car, if they have to stand alone in a dark parking lot for 30 minutes to charge their car instead.

Some companies like Buc-ees are installing chargers in their existing service stations and that makes so much sense, as does putting chargers at Walmart, but all these stand-alone DC charging stations are just like, stupid as hell.

Railroads were funded by the federal government through land grants.

Unix was developed at Bell Labs, which was a regulated monopoly that was incentivised by the federal government to spend large amounts of money on research and development, because the more money they spent on R&D, the more money they could make. They were literally banned from raising rates or making more profits until and unless they spent more money on R&D, and guess what happen? They invented the fax machines, the fucking transistor, lasers...it's a huge list.

Given the success of these business models, you have to wonder why did we stop doing it? Why don't we take the big social media companies, make them regulated monopolies like we did Bell, and force them to spend X% on R&D? Why don't we take some of the millions of acres of federal land, grant some tiny strips of it to railroad companies, and have them build us a high-speed rail system at no cost to the US government?

I brew beer. All the steel bottle-caps have a plastic coating on the bottom both to seal the bottle, and to protect the steel cap from corroding, which wouldn't be healthy either. It's this plastic coating that is putting in the microplastics, no surprise.

Any kind of screw-cap is going to be made of steel and need a plastic liner too. Any kind of plastic screw-cap is well, plastic, and even if it doesn't have a separate sealing surface, it has to be evaluated anyway. A cap made of ceramic or stainless steel or Titanium wouldn't seal...you need some kind of elastomeric material to make the seal anyway.

The quick fix is probably to engineer a better plastic coating, and just require NSF-approved bottle caps to have the good plastic.

For beer, cork doesn't work. But you can find those flip-top beer bottles that have a ceramic bung and a rubber washer. You are back to making sure the rubber washer is safe, but it seems like there are a lot of options out there for food-safe rubber washers, compared to cheap plastic coatings that have to be sprayed or rolled onto thin coatings of steel beer caps and not cost more than a fraction of a cent.