Well, that becomes very confusing, actually. The fundamental problem for me is the question of whether "Intellectual Property" is property or if it is an artificial monopoly and fundamentally rent-seeking. My personal take is that it is very much rent-seeking. It gets tricky though because most economists essentially treat intellectual property as natural property and not inherently rent-seeking. It clearly meets a lot of the criteria, and it is literally insane to think that the way many Intellectual Property heavy industries like Pharma work with clearly abusive and rent seeking behavior like creating "patent thickets", etc. is not squarely in that realm. However, I am actually mostly alone in the woods on this. The majority view seems to be that intellectual property is like a natural property right. It's tricky, of course, because property rights are always artificial monopolies anyway.

In any case, intellectual property rights of the actors are only one of the questions at play there. They apply because the reality of many of the synthetic actors is that they are very often absolutely developed by sampling real actors (even if not done intentionally, that's how the AIs learn). It gets tricky of course, because that's how humans learn too. There's a lot of precedent for this of course: Betty Boop (based either on Esther Jones, or Helen Kane, who copied her, depending on point of view), Ariel (based on Alyssa Milano), Ursula (based on a drag queen named Divine), Mickey Mouse (a bit of an amalgam of Buster Keaton/Charlie Chaplin and black and white minstrel shows but also from copying Felix the Cat), Bugs Bunny (based on Clark Gable and specifically on one of his characters, along with some Groucho Marx, etc.), etc., etc. Performers have had their likenesses, characters, performances, etc. appropriated for a long time and without much success in demanding compensation early on. Now trademark law and a patchwork of other laws protect likeness and publicity rights. For better or for worse though, most economists, who are the ones who tend to define what is and isn't rent-seeking, view that more like natural property rights. Or, at least, they see it as one of Adam Smith's "necessary evils" and therefore not rent-seeking.

The meat of the issue though, is that this is really about a union dispute, which is fundamentally a business negotiation. The actors are providing value, and they are demanding compensation for the value they provide. One of the suggested compensation, is a cut of profits from AI actors. The potential rent-seeking complaint then is that they are demanding, in exchange for the value they are providing, a cut of revenue that they do not directly generate. For this, they would have a contract. Fundamentally, this does not seem much different from the example I provided earlier of landlords demanding not only a fixed rent, but a variable cut based on the revenue the merchant generates. That boils down to "they are demanding, in exchange for the value they are providing, a cut of revenue that they do not directly generate. For this, they would have a contract." You previously wrote, in regards to this example: "Whether it's proportionate to the the payments received, while that's a contract and that's between the two parties." The article you link here is about a contract negotiation, so it seems that the same principle should apply. If my original example wasn't rent-seeking, then why would this be?

Also, since you use the term "regulation", I am not sure if you are misreading the article or I am misreading you. Are you using "regulation" to mean something other than, for example, a rule from a regulatory agency?

As I understand it, the Line plans for a maglev train. The quoted speeds for end to end travel, for example (20 minutes) would be slightly faster than the faster passenger trains on record, which are maglevs. That was what I was envisioning for both the trains and the modules above. Sorry I wasn't more explicit. In that case, the "engine" would mostly be in the track itself. Even without maglev, neither the train or modules would use internal combustion engines. Electric motors, whether rotary or linear - in the case of a maglev - do experience an increase in efficiency as they get larger like ICE motors. However, that increase basically plateaus at a much smaller size than it does in ICE motors, so the motors themselves in the modules would have pretty much the same efficiency as a train. The other efficiency losses are from friction. There's rolling friction, however, the main reason for rolling friction differences between cars and trains is due to steel wheels on steel tracks vs. rubber wheels, but both the modules and the train, regardless of method (maglev or actual track) would use the same method. The other rolling resistance difference would be due to the far greater weight of a typical train compared to the contact area of the wheels (both to the track and the bearings). Part of that is still due to the steel wheels bearing more weight, but the weight itself plays a role, but this is passenger rail, which will be much lighter. There are also considerations around braking, but regenerative braking negates those. That just leaves air resistance, and I covered that with the modules being able to form temporary unlinked trains. So, overall, I think there would be very little efficiency difference.

For maintenance, if it's not maglev, I will grant you that could be a lot of maintenance. For maglev, though, it shouldn't be that different in terms of maintenance levels. Anyway, in either model, the modules exist, so have to be maintained, even if they get more mileage in a modules-only configuration.

Overall I would say that there's probably a little less efficiency and a little more maintenance in a modules only configuration vs. modules+train, but I don't think it's that much more. Plus, let's not forget the complications and maintenance (not to mention potential safety) issues in the docking/undocking from a train compenent and also with maintaining multiple systems. Neither of us can say for sure without extant systems to compare, of course. Ultimately, you could probably do either, I just feel the train might be a bit redundant.

That is true. It looks like they planned originally for 500 meters tall, so it's 340 times as long as it is tall. Depending on font, you could fit in the range of 500 characters on there. Might be a bit different for Arabic, but should definitely allow a nice long piece of text. Aside from being able to put graffiti on it, or use it as a billboard, I suppose sometimes you don't need a specific reason to build things to the artistic vision you want, even if it's not as practical. I mean, look at skyscrapers. We have skyscrapers now shaped like big Easter eggs, irregularly stacked blocks, and concave mirrors that focus the suns rays to scorch the puny humans who scamper below like so many ants! It's a logical extension of the "curtain" design of skyscrapers (all the heavy steel and concrete structural elements as an inner core with the glass fronted exterior being, more or less, a "curtain" functional facade on the outside) when they went from looking like concrete pillars to crystal towers. Despite that kind of basic construction making elaborate shapes easier, it still costs more to build them that way. Somewhere along the line, someone ends up paying tens or hundreds of millions extra to fulfill some architects artistic vision. So, if they want a big wall as a city, I suppose. Of course, if we are going to go by the rule of cool, I can think of things that are cooler (to me, anyway) than a giant wall.

Definitely. A lot depends on how open the space is. In a well enclosed space, the air moves with the walls, but there's a differential in speed between different "altitudes" that might lead to airflow, but probably mostly predictable. In open spaces it gets pretty complicated. I mentioned the weather problems in an O'Neill cylinder earlier which the classic design for includes a giant open space in the center. Basically, you have the air being stirred by the "ground" and at the ends, so that would induce the air to spin, but how would the spinning air interact with itself and how much affect would the spin have on the air at the center? There's no real gravity to speak of, so how air density would vary is up in the air. Heat rising is based on air pressure/density dropping as you go "up", so it is unclear how heat would move around the system, etc. What rules falling precipitation would follow are unclear because it's unclear what the motion of the clouds would be like relative to the "ground".

That also raises the question of how big the "tunnel" for the train needs to be. If it has transport modules that detach and connect to it with passengers, then it doesn't need a platform, but it does need at least one parallel track and then at least double that for both directions Probably more than double it to service more actual stops and to have trains with offset schedules since the train takes so long to get from one end to the other. Of course, if there are modules that sync up to and join the train, that means they can move independently as fast as the train. Then there's little point in having the train in the first place, except for dealing with wind resistance, and the modules can mostly handle that by forming dynamic unlinked trains out of modules heading in the same direction. The modules just go where they need to. Directly from point A to point B rather than getting on a train that needs to make stops, etc. The vehicles can still use some sort of "track" so they are not quite independent automobiles (though they should be able to switch tracks while in motion), and their travel is scheduled by a central traffic system.

However the transportation is managed, it's still far less efficient in many ways than clumping it all together. Consider all of the redundancy in materials inherent in all of that perimeter! Of course it could be done, but it is not clear what the benefit of building it like that would be.

Apparently they had some fun freefall competitions on SkyLab. Can't do the same on the ISS because it is so cramped by comparison. Even though Skylab is technically smaller, there was a much larger space in it because it was much wider and topographically closer to spherical (it was a cylinder, basically, but a fatter one than the ISS) whereas the ISS was mostly linear and stretched out... (and now I've worked back around the same issues as the Line again). On a rotating space station though, You wouldn't really drop "down" like on Earth. You would "fall" in a curved path that should hit a wall instead of the "floor" (unless it's a really wide conical section). Not to mention, in a section that "high" what would the air be doing? Of course, what you could do is fly in a big enough open space. Descend too "low" though, and you could pass a point of no return and end up "falling". I suppose there could be some interesting opportunities for extreme sports. Might have to unlearn a lot of things that are intuitive on Earth.

Then, there's also what you could do if you brought a motorcycle and there were a track inside a torus space station. Let's say it goes at 2 RPM (about the right spin for virtually anyone to adjust, but not slow enough to make the station garguantuan... well, even more gargantuan. That means it has to be about 450 meters across and about 1.4 km around. So, that means that the tangential speed of the torus is about 168 kph/104 mph. You can hit that on a motorcyle. Go one way and you hit two G's. Go the other way and you take off.

Well, going through the whole thread, the only "content" I can find from you is a brief mention of the NASA Engineering and Safety Center and root cause analysis. So, you could have contributed more. So I wonder why you didn't. I certainly don't think I have written anything that isn't factual. Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of opinion. With the same evidence at hand, we seem to have come to different opinions. You think NASA has made a major turnaround in safety culture, I think it is mostly just window dressing. We will just have to have differing opinions.

Fair enough. I was mostly just trying to be funny. Germany does more than just concatenation to make new words, of course, but it's really just stuff that happens in most languages. I have several favorites, best illustrated by some examples:

-- I believe I am paraphrasing this from Calvin and Hobbes

-- Not sure of the actual origin of this one.

Have you ever heard of Germany?

Sigh, is this the only way you can discuss anything? Continously coming up with excuses for how the other person is supposedly not acting in good faith. I am not moving the goal posts. My position has not changed since the start of this thread.

It wasn't that old an idea, and you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I was saying anyway. Basically the theory was simply that homo sapiens essentially evolved from the hominid diaspora that originated in Africa, then Homo Sapiens gradually became the dominant hominid species. The main difference is that the evidence seems to show that the evolution of Homo Sapiens from that hominid diaspora happened entirely in Africa. Quite frankly, as I already stated, we're still building an authoritative theory from scant evidence in the first place. If you consider the time scales we are talking about, every variant of human would be able to move through the entire contiguous land of Africa and Eurasia many times over at the rate of a mile per year or less (not in terms of individuals, but rather their DNA through generations). So moving out of or into a region is basically all statistical. As I said, "all of this is based on what we can reconstruct, and it is also generalized". So, that probably makes me doubly wrong for trying to correct you in the first place.

Although I did actually genuinely just think that you meant to say Homo Erectus, since they did come out of Africa first.

Anyway, as I said, mea culpa on the dominant theory of precisely where Homo Sapiens evolved. The rest of the stuff about descent where you were just repeating what I had already written about human ancestry was a bit of a waste of time though. You could have just said 'No I really meant Homo Sapiens, here's a reference". Much less typing in the long run.

Yet you turned my short:

Into a pointlessly long thread with vulgar insults and pointless "corrections" to everything but the one error I made. I mean, look at the above. The "Huh?" might seem rhetorical to you, but that's actually a genuine question. I was asking you to clarify.

Gentrification, which you are describing, is widely considered to involve rent-seeking, along with other issues. I specifically referenced an economist and the "rent gap" issue further up the thread. I should note that my part in the thread came when you essentially implied in your post that it is impossible for a landlord to ever be a rent-seeker. As it went on, it became clear that you seem to only be able to see government action as rent seeking, and that you apply the concept to government action that is not normally seen as rent-seeking.

Obvious attempt to cast my position as an unreasoning emotional reaction is obvious. I will note at this point only that you skipped the opportunity to actually make some sort of point from the reference you provided without comment.

Ah, now I understand what you're saying. It appears that current theory appears to support that. Fair enough. That was actually educational. When I learned this stuff, the recent African origin theory in question was around, but not widely accepted, or at least not by any of my professors that I am aware of. It looks like I just defaulted to the older theory that I was taught.

Word of advice, learn to read and respond intelligently to comments at the start. Then you can avoid big, long, pointless arguments. What you do, you see, is provide your reference right at the start, rather than saying weird things like:

When I literally quoted your last line (which was also your only line about this). If you had put in the basic effort to understand, you could have just made that reference there and we could have saved all this typing.

Yes. That level of discourse seems more like your intellectual speed. Congratulations on realizing it.

Jebus, first line of the article:

I have realized something though. It is possible that, with your terrible reading comprehension, you missed some critical things like the "et al." from the excerpt from your post that I quoted in my first response to you on this thread. Maybe that was where you lost the thread? Anyway, not really relevant now since you've decided that throwing a temper tantrum is a better use of your time.

There's no new information in the snopes article and we've covered all of that already. I think it's pretty clear which of us is more capable of coherent though and argument. If you would like to delude yourself into thinking it's you, go ahead.

I am not sure how many ways I have to say it. I am referencing those documents and the mistakes of the past to demonstrate that the same issues that seem to have been identified in the past. Specifically "normalization of deviance". That appears to be exactly what is going on in TFA with regards to the heat shield that is experience unexpected damage. Are you even thinking here?

I quite clearly did not miss that sentence.

Wow. You didn't even read that either? TL;DRPBP again? If you had, I would have thought you would have recognized the first of those hypotheticals as a modified version of the issue Boeing/spirit had with a door plug blowing off mid flight. I altered it so that a problem with missing bolts became something discovered before the plug blew off mid flight with a "what would you do?" question.

The second hypothetical was a direct analogy to the heat shield with a part that is expected to wear, but is expected to wear a certain way under known conditions, but is wearing much more than it should. Once again with a "what would you do"?.

At least, even if you didn't bother with the details of the hypotheticals, you at least came up with basically the right answer. Inspect, determine the scope, determine the cause, figure out if it can be fixed or managed in a controllable, reproducible way and, if it can't be fixed or managed in a controllable, reproducible way, ground it until it either can be, or it is replaced. NASA, with this issue, does not appear to be doing that. It's possible that they have done an analysis and determined that it will take too much time or not even be possible to fix. If they have actually found a distinct cause and solution, they certainly have not publicized it. What they have done, is make a clear determination that they will fly anyway, with an anomalous issue that may kill people, but they're just going to roll the dice. Hence why I don't think their safety culture has really changed in the way that they claim.

I know you weren't talking about Homo Erectus migrating out of Africa. You wrote:

So you were talking about migrations of Homo Sapiens out of Africa. Except that Homo Sapiens never migrated out of Africa. Our ancestors did. Specifically our ancestors Homo Erectus. Try to follow along.

OK. You're not getting this. So I will try to use an easy analogy. I said that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens are descendants of Homo Erectus. Try to think of this in terms of an actual family tree. Let's we have two siblins: Homer Sapiens and Nee Anderthal. Homer and Nee have a parent. That parent's name is Homer Heidelberg. Homer, as it happens. also has a parent. That parent is Homer Erectus. Now there's this thing called the transitive property. Can you say transitive property? I knew you could! The way that the transitive property works for things like ancestry is that if your immediate ancestor also has an ancestor, that ancestor is also your ancestor. So, the immediate ancestor of Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis can be Homo Heidelbergensis and the ancestor of Homo Heidelbergensis can be Homo Erectus and not only can Homo Erectus stil be the ancestor of Homo Sapiens, but the two prior relationships actually require it! Amazing, right? It turns out that you can have more than one ancestor, from different generations, and they can still be your ancestor!

Yes. Parent was. Very good. Now, bonus points! Was I asserting that? That's right! I wasn't asserting that. I was just commenting on you saying that Homo Sapiens came out of Africa. Very good. You might get a gold star.

Now, I did do some additional musing on the actual competence of Homo Sapiens. However my view did not actually align precisely with that of the original poster. You can re-read the post if you like. I will not summarize it here.

I did comment on this. No disagreement on the tool part. However, it is worth noting that I pointed out that Neanderthals also went places that Homo Sapiens never did during the time that Neanderthals lived. They had an overlapping range, and then both lived outside that overlapping range in areas where the other didn't.

I should note as a caveat, of course, that all of this is based on what we can reconstruct, and it is also generalized. We might say that Neanderthals lived in area X and not Homo Erectus. However, all we can really tell (and even then without super high certainty) is that the numbers of Home Erectus in area X were low enough that we've found no trace. It's possible number in question is zero, but it could be higher and we just wouldn't know. But our best working hypothesis is that they didn't live there.

Actually, it's pretty obvious to anyone with basic literacy skills and reasonable intelligence. Still neither of those skills are absolutely fixed. If you really try at it, you might be able to improve.

I. Am. Not. Gaslighting!
I am also not lying, and I am not making up "falsehoods". If you can't stand that someone has a different take on a situation than you, then it's too bad for you. But I know what was said, and I know what the situation was and I have lied about nothing, and I am not distorting reality in any way. You are the one who, when I spend a great deal of effort to lay things out so that we can reach a common understanding of what the other means, simply ignores what I write and won't answer questions.

And you're claiming that _I_ am gaslighting? The actual definition of deplorable is "deserving strong condemnation". The wording varies, but that is pretty much the heart of what it means. Meanwhile, you're claiming that 50% of the country think that, for one example, racism is a good thing? That is absolute nonsense. The percentage of people who will actually explicitly say that racism is a good thing is generally down around 5%. It is virtually universally accepted (even among racists, who generally claim that they are racists, or are not "real" racists, etc.) that racism is bad and that, indeed, being racist is deserving of strong condemnation.

If you want to play some game where it's all just subjective and, as long as some percentage of the population doesn't think that X is deplorable, then it isn't, then that means that murder is not deplorable. By the same token rape is not deplorable. X can be all sorts of things: corruption, child rape, illegal immigration, torture, ripping the tags of mattresses, scraping your fingernails along a chalkboard in a crowded classroom, microwaving blue cheese and coffee together in an office kitchen. To repeat myself from earlier. This is just post-structuralist nonsense. Denying that anything even has meaning in the first place.

Of course, having written that, I realize that I have fallen into a trap, because you've fixated on the term deplorable, and I have responded. But it isn't about any specific meaning of deplorable. It is about whether the collection of human scum and the people willing to stand with them at the rally are "very fine people" or not.

OK. You are not remotely trying to be nice, or fair, or reasonable. So I will not be either. I'm getting pretty sick of your abuse. You are clearly acting like an illiterate moron on this thread. On my last post, I listed quotes with the references to all the times on this thread I have referenced those involved. Since you are acting like too much of an idiot to summarize them yourself, I will do the easy work for you, as one would for a whiny child who wants someone else to do his work: (neo-nazis), (white supremacists), (basket of deplorables), (three-percenters), (klansmen), (various other white supremacist groups), (neo nazi adjacent groups), (and their ilk), (etc.). Does that simplify things enough for you to absorb.

As for a "Clintonian definition", did you miss the "you name it" at the end? A term meant to encompass all sorts of people who fit the quite standard version of the term "deplorable". No special Clinton version required, no need for the ones from the rally that I name to be exclusively from that list, to manifest every property on that list, or for them to even have any property on that list for them to potentially be "deplorable" or, once again, not to get tangled in the weeds, to not be "very fine people". You are just trying to use obtuseness and (hopefully) feigned stupidity as a rhetorical technique.

You know perfectly well that there was no redefinition and no false assertion, you lying piece of garbage. You also know perfectly well that the term "deplorable" is irrelevant. It was just one of many descriptions I used to refer to that crowd. The only material point is whether any of them were "very fine people".

OK. So your definitive answer is that they can simultaneously be "deplorable as fuck" and also "very fine people"? That's your final answer? OK. At this point, I would say that you have reached peak stupid, but I am betting you can still surprise me. Often, I like to be surprised by people's intellectual achievements, but I think I would rather skip that one.

Oh look. It thinks it's intelligent. Also that it's non-partisan and that I am, in relation, partisan. Wow. It's almost like having a conversation with an LLM, but I think an LLM may actually be smarter.

Ah, sweet Jebus!!! The pain! It's been a while since I had my nose in an actual economics textbook. I mean, I know that math in economics tends to have no use for geometric constants like the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter so it's technically free to use, but still! Pi as a variable! It just seems so wrong!

In any case. I am not sure why you thought that reading that would bring me around to your view. That lecture is quite clear that using market power to pursue monopoly rents is rent-seeking behavior. That is exactly what we are talking about. It does also talk about the form of rent seeking where political power rather than market power is used and goes on about it extensively. Nowhere at all does it agree with your example of excise taxes, fees, etc. being rent-seeking in and of themselves unless they specifically benefit some group at the expense of everyone else. Maybe there's more useful information in the videos that won't play.

In any case, just posting a whole lecture from an economic class doesn't seem to be very productive. If you want to make an argument from that material, you need to make it and use quotes, etc. from the lecture to support it.