kirrent
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
Notably, one of the reasons that the military industrial complex can be hard to unwind is that it works well for capital and workers. Consider all the programs you've heard of which boast about providing jobs in every single state. Whether these different equilibria are better or worse for labour (or fractions of labour giving you your diverging K-shape) is a separate question and potentially changes over time.
One historical event you could model as a change in equilibria was the industrial revolution. Instead of elites consuming economic surpluses, the economy change into a mode where those surpluses could be reinvested in productive capital, new technology, and manufacturing in a self-reinforcing cycle (of course these avenues didn't really exist before). Famously, within this new equilibria, labour did not do well at first; awful conditions in factories with terrible life expectancies. But those workers' grandchildren lived lives of relative prosperity as a result.
All of which is to say, the existence and description of multiple equilibria in economies is a different question from how labour and capital fare in those equilibria.
As much as you may want to move from the low to high equilibrium, it would be pretty hard in an ancient society. In the modern world, with enough exuberance, it seems much easier.
In the meantime, I use butter because it's tastier and for me that's worth it. I don't understand why that's not enough for some people.
1. Modern margarine is healthier than butter.
2. Seed oils are generally healthier than animal fats.
3. PUFAs are healthier than saturated fats.
4. In this case the industrial processed spread is healthier than the more natural less-processed spread.
An albatross might be able to go days flying without a single wing flap and no vertical sources of lift by using dynamic soaring in the wind gradient at the surface of the ocean. Perhaps that's something only birds can do. Except the glider pilot Ingo Renner once found an amazing shear layer at 300m altitude and stayed there with dynamic soaring. Remote control gliders use the lee of ridgelines to approach Mach 1 with dynamic soaring.
Perhaps what defines a bird that flies as opposed to a plane is that a bird produces thrust by flapping its wings? Even an Albatross must flap its wings if it has to take-off from water. Maybe we could add that the flapping is driven by animal muscles? But then is the human powered ornithopter Snowbird a bird that flies as opposed to a plane?
Of course this is all ridiculous because everyone knows what you mean when you refer to a bird or plane. We have other ways to definitively identify the difference rather than their mode of flight. It's trickier when I'm asked if an AI is conscious. There is no definitive base-line to fall back on to decide if this is a conscious or conscious-less thinker.
The idea that Silver somehow 'hit' in 2012 when he correctly predicted all states and 'missed' in 2016 is so juvenile I get second hand embarrassment whenever I see it.
As far as the Grover speedup goes, it's already optimal. Requiring O(sqrt(N)) queries is the proven lower bound for unstructured search.
I guess an additional advantage in this design is that the weight of the batteries is in the fuselage rather than the wing, so additional strengthening of some type may be necessary in either scenario.