Professor Science wrote:
Just throw half the budget at the NSF and keep the grants coming and everything will more or less work out for the better, an excess of scientists is better for a society than an excess of bankers and investors.
Agreed. Bankers and investors historically leech more of society and civilization than scientists and engineers- by a significant factor.
Msimon wrote:
Well you know how it is. We have a lot of engineers here. Engineers tend to drift to the conservative side of politics because they have to deal with the
real world with real money riding on their choices. Not to mention the amount of havoc they can cause if they make a really bad choice.
The real world is a bitch and it is most unforgiving of even the best of intentions. It is not enough to want your designs to work.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Might I add that engineering is the art of leveraged power, derived mostly from the natural world. But this is an idealistic, conceptual definition. Real World engineering, as you describe, involves kissing the asses of the plutocratic elite. Since after all, we live in a plutocracy not a rightful technocracy (and I'm not being pejorative- I'm an unabashed technocrat).
...But really. There is nothing progressive about destroying an economy. Polywell depends on the wealth the economy generates. We can't learn new
things at the rate we would like if we don't profit from what we already have. The more profit the faster we can learn and change.
That's according to the tradional zero-sum model, No? Fusion would posit an open-system economy, contrary to that model- one where new energy enables real progress.
Without bankers and investment capital, there'd be no internet, no computers as we know them, not to mention cell phones, power grids, modern medicine, pretty much all of our food supply, clothing, autos, transportation infrastructure, communications...
Don't know about you - but it seems like a symbiotic relationship to me...
When opinion and reality conflict - guess which one is going to win in the long run.
Internet was originally put together by DARPA I believe. Some guy named Gore was involved in pushing for funding.
Rural electrification was also pushed through by big gov.
Perhaps the earliest electronic computers were used in WWII to destroy th e U-Boat threat. Again big gov. Apollo moon launch. Examples abound. Big government can be a problem. But a well run government can do things which otherwise would never be possible.
Funding basic research is a legitimate gov't function, partly because (as with the Internet) much of it is military research.
OTOH, government is extremely bad at functioning as a replacement for the free market.
Bankers and investors historically leech more of society and civilization than scientists and engineers- by a significant factor.
The Soviet Union promoted the one and outlawed the other. It didn't work very well.
If you're a scientist or an engineer with a great idea, you need venture capital to make it happen and free markets to judge whether your idea is useful. The Internet would be little more than a curiosity without Intel, Cisco, Google, etc.
OTOH, we may have had the internet two generations earlier if big gov hadn't mandated Ma-Bell.
Soviet Joke:
Q: What is the most dangerous occupation in the Soviet Union?
A: Historian, because it is impossible to predict the past!
Trying to predict what MIGHT have been is as much a mugs game as trying to predict what will be, but not a profitable if by luck you turn out to be right!
We would have had the internet before electronic computers? With cans and string perhaps? Well, what am I saying. Content would have been provided by telegraph operators on steroids. Except there weren't any steriods. Maybe they could have gotten by on caffeine, or the amphetamines favored by Hitler and the newly formed right wing, corporatist fringe of the democrat party.
jgarry wrote:We would have had the internet before electronic computers? With cans and string perhaps? Well, what am I saying. Content would have been provided by telegraph operators on steroids. Except there weren't any steriods. Maybe they could have gotten by on caffeine, or the amphetamines favored by Hitler and the newly formed right wing, corporatist fringe of the democrat party.
Again, you are assuming computers would have taken that long to show up. Without the cut-throat competition between electronic communications companies, the computers had to wait for a war. But would they have in the other situation?
Observe the engineers of formula one. Possibly no one deals with more rules and strictures than they do. Yet they innovate all the time.
This season for instance a number of new rules were passed. The Brawn team, a backmarker last season, spent their time preparing for this season. The rules forced teams to shrink their rear wings. They invented a nifty rear diffuser, and they're killing the competition.
But this misses the point. Financial regulation does not restrict competition. Far from it. The wizards of wall street invent nothing but increasingly complex schemes to abscond with a disproportionate share of the wealth. They do not invent anything of value. I challenge you to point at a single innovation that these folk have produced which really benefited mankind. The invention of the corporation is the only thing that comes to mind for me. Insurance perhaps?
Their job isn't to innovate. Their job is largely to facilitate the means whereby we engineers can innovate. They need to be regulated and kept from bollixing our economies.
jgarry wrote:Of course. What is someone expounding the need for the US to go to a Soviet system?
The Democrat Party has pretty consistently advocated moving that way for quite a while (not that the GOP has been a lot better). Nationalized health care, vast expansions of the welfare state... the private sector is getting smaller and smaller.
The wizards of wall street invent nothing but increasingly complex schemes to abscond with a disproportionate share of the wealth.
Where do you think mortgages came from? Car loans? Personal credit cards? How do you think every technological revolution from electricity to the Internet was paid for?
That is a much better description of the government, which seizes wealth, as opposed to Wall Street, which can only obtain it via consensual transactions.
jgarry wrote:We would have had the internet before electronic computers? With cans and string perhaps? Well, what am I saying. Content would have been provided by telegraph operators on steroids. Except there weren't any steriods. Maybe they could have gotten by on caffeine, or the amphetamines favored by Hitler and the newly formed right wing, corporatist fringe of the democrat party.
Again, you are assuming computers would have taken that long to show up. Without the cut-throat competition between electronic communications companies, the computers had to wait for a war. But would they have in the other situation?
Electronic computers before the advent of the transistor (integrated circuit really) did not have enough MTBF (a few hours with tubes and not many of them - less than 2,000) to run a coms network. Which is why all switches were mechanical and why long distance was the last part of the system automated. It required another layer of switches. I do miss those old stepping relays. Real marvels they were.
Where we missed out was that the FET was invented in 1925. Why didn't any one invest in it? No one had a clue - it seemed impossible. And on top of that material purity was not good enough for reliable production.
There was the real road not traveled. And no one saw it. Not bankers, not scientists, not engineers, not the military. No one. And it was not some secret. The patent was issued in 1925.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
jgarry wrote:Observe the engineers of formula one. Possibly no one deals with more rules and strictures than they do. Yet they innovate all the time.
This season for instance a number of new rules were passed. The Brawn team, a backmarker last season, spent their time preparing for this season. The rules forced teams to shrink their rear wings. They invented a nifty rear diffuser, and they're killing the competition.
But this misses the point. Financial regulation does not restrict competition. Far from it. The wizards of wall street invent nothing but increasingly complex schemes to abscond with a disproportionate share of the wealth. They do not invent anything of value. I challenge you to point at a single innovation that these folk have produced which really benefited mankind. The invention of the corporation is the only thing that comes to mind for me. Insurance perhaps?
Their job isn't to innovate. Their job is largely to facilitate the means whereby we engineers can innovate. They need to be regulated and kept from bollixing our economies.
Dude - the fewer the constraints the easier the design process and the cheaper. Easier and cheaper = more tries. More tries = better final product (from which company no one knows).
Suppose we had a rule limiting aircraft engine intakes and exhaust (say 300 sq in total for both). Divide them how you like. And only allowing corn oil as fuel (you can grow it).
Now design me a 747-400 or equivalent. And the fuel system to support it.
So what happens - a place with fewer and more rational constraints gets the design and mfg. business. Your job just went to India or China.
And all this might make some sense if we had a Congress of engineers. We don't. We have lawyers. And companies working day and night to figure out how to write laws to advance their interests and destroy the competition. Corpratism. Or as it used to be referred to: fascism. A variant of socialism.
Military procurement. Where they go to great lengths to prevent waste fraud and abuse. This causes costs to double. If we allowed 5% more waste fraud and abuse we could reduce prices for military eqpt by 40% or more.
But you know - the cost of doubled prices is much less than the cost of one scandal.
We have Sarbanes-Oxley to prevent further Enrons. It is also preventing the most effective deployment of venture capital. That will bite. But the bite will be mostly invisible. While Enron makes headlines.
The money will go offshore. And you will complain to Congress about Chinamen eating your lunch. Unfair competition you say. And you are right. And you asked for it.
You can't design a lossless economic system. Second law of economics or something.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.