mech998877

HMS is his majesty's service. IIRC that designation is for navy ships only.

I find it funny that it changes between his and her depending on the reigning monarch at the time.

I think there's a few things that are true at the same time: 1. For the average person, getting a university degree is a much more reliable way to learn a subject than trying to learn it by yourself. 2. There are other ways that college adds value to your life other than the stuff they teach in class. 3. For highly motivated people, they are increasingly able to teach themselves a subject quickly and efficiently without having to deal with all the extra crap university makes you wait through. 4. The market value of a university degree is decreasing (the wage premium) and for some degrees the wage premium is not worth the investment from a strictly financial perspective.

Is there any way that smart rings outperform smart watches in terms of data collected? I've generally assumed there isn't any biometric data you can get from a finger that you can't get from a wrist.

Gorton does strike me as very similar to Century Gothic which is the default font for a lot of CAD software I've used (Creo, maybe others).

fair enough. I'm probably still in disagreement with the friends I mentioned earlier!

I woulda thought they learned from their great great granddaddies warning them about the tulip bubble!

Your concluding example doesn't make sense to me but I think that it's because we have different definitions for what friction means here. It's also kind of hard to define in context.

I would say that, within the Wright Brothers example, working with a battered, worn-out screwdriver is an example of friction (or, perhaps having to use a bit and brace instead of a power drill), but the act of building a new unsuccessful airplane iteration is not friction. Every build is asking physics for feedback on the design; every airplane build is just the same as running your code through the compiler. I wish I had a good word to distinguish this from friction. The closest thing I can imagine is how waste is defined in Lean Manufacturing, but keeping in mind that what you are manufacturing is Ideas and Software.

I disagree with this, and I've been spending time thinking about it because some of my friends had a similar conversation.

The friction itself does not add value. The time spent thinking on the problem does. Friction should be minimized beyond the absolute bare minimum. Programming is a discipline where your workstation is already streamlined, and it is easy to forget where the friction is. Programming is done in a world of pure though, in a sense, so most of the friction already lives in your head, and it is difficult to distinguish effort wasted fighting friction from effort making real progress.

Consider the Wright brothers. They worked iteratively. When they wanted to design an airplane they moved from Ohio to a windy place with lots of loose sand (NC outer banks). Why? So that they could do test runs with good wind conditions (for an airplane that is barely able to fly this matters a lot) and crash with the least amount of damage. They rebuilt the airplane dozens and dozens of times and had a workshop tuned to their needs on location. They reduced friction wherever they could so that they got the most work done that they could with the least amount of distraction.

I wonder how much teflon wears off the die into the spaghetti on pasta extrusion machines.

Reminds me of 'I don't think a computer will ever beat a human at chess'.

So if you buy a lawnmower and use it for your business to cut your neighbor's grass (instead of tearing it apart by hand), that should be illegal? You've used a capital investment to increase your productivity. Your productivity gains have driven anyone using a less efficient method out of the market.

What if it's a robot lawnmower instead of a push mower?

What if you and your neighbors pooled in some money to buy the robot lawnmowers?

What level of indirect management is unethical?

Robots (and other tools) are capital. A way I think of it:

if you formed a co-op of sorts, with let's say 20 people, starting with no land ownership and hardly any tools, they could try to make a business. Whatever they end up starting would be a fairly low-productivity business- washing windows, janitorial services, lawn service, etc. The more tools and land a co-op has to work with, the more productive they can be. With a few million dollars up-front they could have built a factory instead.

The increased productivity generated can be attributed to the capital share of income.

History has shown that having a multitude of roughly-equal competing powers results in more per-capita death from war than when there is 1 or two dominant nations. The 1800's and early 1900's were bloody. Post WWII has had less death from war.

>But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures...

That's an enormous claim and I really doubt it.

Look at GDP growth in the US vs EU over the last 10 years or so if you want to talk about innovation. Europe has been stagnating economically and real productivity growth is critical to a modern economy. The large hadron collider does some impressive research, but it doesn't move the sort of innovation in practical machinery and infrastructure that powers a modern economy.