jbay

That could be part of it. But I think survivor bias generally gets much more credit as an explanation than it deserves, and I strongly doubt that older generations of tools would have been designed like modern tools even if, say, simulation software had been available then.

It could be just relentless pressure to reduce costs, after the people who knew why it should be done a certain way had all retired, and a customer base that changed into one that either didn't know how to recognize quality, or valued it less.

Maybe we can do without heat-treating the surface? Maybe just give a quick grind instead of hand scraping the ways? Maybe outsource the castings instead of doing them in-house using the process we'd honed over decades?

How many R&D engineering hours do you think the extra 1m of piping equals in cost?

I'm actually surprised they didn't go and put a column there, too, just in case.

A rock the size of a human head (or, say, a container of seawater) has just as many electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and other particles going about their business and doing their little dance, following the same equations of motion as our brains do. They're certainly doing it in different ways, but if you're just looking for complexity, there's no shortage of it. The rock might lack some macroscopic structural change over human timescales, but definitely not the seawater.

I think if you take the perspective that the human brain is conscious but not a brain-sized container of seawater, you need to then look carefully for distinctions between them. "Information processing" or "response to environment" is probably not good enough; the seawater is actually doing all of those, with a unique reaction to any possible input, so you'd have to be more specific.

Probably the only recourse you could look for to make the distinction is to say the brain embeds particular mathematical patterns that the seawater doesn't, such as a compact, stored representation of its environment (or its history of inputs), or a future-looking planning algorithm, or both. I personally take this view (I think of qualia, like "the appearance of a red apple", is just precisely what it feels like to read from the buffered [R,G,B] memory array in my head, filtered through image-recognition networks).

But then if you put your hopes on consciousness originating from those mathematical functions, you have to admit that any analogous expression of those functions in other systems would also be conscious, such as animals and robots.

And worse, once you start thinking about math and how flexible it is, how information is in the eye of the beholder and almost any system that follows certain rules can embed almost any mathematical computation, just like illegible scratches to me are information-rich writing to you, you might have to circle back and that there could be very analogous computations going on inside rocks and seawater. And that brings us back full-circle.

Not sure it's a fair analogy. Even while they were being deceitful, the Soviet Union seems to have at least invested a serious effort into tackling the problem head-on.

That sounds good. =) By the way, and not to put too fine a point on it, is there a reason why you don't call them Republic-of-Chinese friends?

Yes, but that also comes with the notion that a wealthy family can become poor by moving to a higher-cost area, or a poor family can become wealthy by moving to a lower-cost area; ie, someone can sell a small house in the Bay area and buy a manor estate in the countryside.

There's nothing wrong with that notion, but some will find it odd that, before that transaction happens, a family owning an upscale countryside home is wealthier than a family owning a cramped Bay area home, but after that move happens, the family that moved in from the Bay area is now the wealthier one.

It means that merely having the option to sell your home and buy a countryside manor doesn't make you wealthy until you actually follow through with it.

There's so many times that an ostensibly international website has rejected me because I don't have a US-formatted numerical zip code. Even when they have a country field.

I don't have any dislike for the fact that the ROC is an independent country, whether my government diplomatically recognizes them as such or not. I'm just pointing out that, if a Taiwanese family invites you to dinner, they're going to be weirded out by you continually saying "Republic of China" throughout the conversation.

Do you tell your friends about your summer trip to the Republic of Korea? Or were you visiting the Kingdom of Belgium that year? Do those friends invite you to visit their hometowns in the French Republic, or the Federal Republic of Germany? Maybe you can stop at the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg along the way from one to the other?

Common names are common for a reason!

Every one of the many Taiwanese people I know refer to it as Taiwan, too. It's very rare to hear anyone refer to it as the ROC, unless in the context of specifically making a distinction from the PRC, or in a formal document.

Even for Latin, apparently Ecclesiastical (Church) Latin, which is more familiar to most people today, differs in pronunciation from Classical Latin. For example, Ecclesiastical Latin uses a soft 'c', where the ancient Romans would have used a hard 'c' -- Cicero's name would have been pronounced like "keekero" in his day, whereas most people now think of him as "Sissero". Although the Roman empire was large and diverse enough that Latin probably had quite a variety of dialects and maybe Ecclesiastical Latin was one of them.

Hebrew is an unusual case because, like Latin, it was mostly a dead language that for centuries only continued to be used in religious and a few other contexts. It was revived in the 19th century. Because of its long period of cryostasis the parts that were preserved probably haven't changed that much, although necessarily it's expanded greatly into a living language.

Practically, the fastest and easiest way would be to turn a good cylinder and measure the diameter at several points (or roll on a surface plane) to make sure it's not tapered, because the face will sit square to the sides even if the axis cutting the face is concave.

More fundamentally though, you can use a similar method -- start with a surface plate, and make three almost-90-degree right angles. Label them A, B, and C.

Scrape A and B so they perfectly mate with each other while they sit flat on the surface plate. They might be something like 89 degrees and 91 degrees, so scrape C to be a copy of B, and then mate it with B. From that you can tell if they're both acute or obtuse, do the correction, and repeat.

It wasn't nearly so easy. Dan hand-scraped in several surfaces on the lathe; for example the headstock, to get the axis parallel to the ways, and so on.

Fast-forward to 2016 to see how much the technology has changed:

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2016/09/meet-bob-pmls-...

The grandparent's label of "central planning" seems to encompass almost any possible policy that deviates from a completely free market. I don't think any mainstream economics, other than caricatures, supports the idea that any possible economic policy that isn't a completely free market doesn't work.

You sound very certain about this. Where does that certainty come from?

Wait, who was proposing or even talking about central planning in this thread? I think you're the first. I was going to propose we allocate resources by sacrificing goats to the thirteen forgotten gods of the underworld, and then interpret their bones for wisdom.

I just wanted to clarify that when you said higher prices discourage those with lower needs, what you really meant is that it discourages those with lower means-weighted-needs. Which is to say, it discourages the desperate-but-poor, rebalancing demand toward the less-desperate-but-more-wealthy.

The higher price discourages hoarders or others with lower needs.

Others with lower means, you meant?

Demand at the old price from people who bought them to resell at the new price?

Why do the design in the US? Chinese engineers are doing great designs themselves, and for less than American salaries... And they can visit right there on the factory floor, talking to the manufacturers directly about how to make their designs, in the same time zone and the same language...

Are US engineers imagining the same ideas about being irreplaceable that an earlier generation of American machinists, tool-and-die experts, and manufacturing workers also did?

I'm not sure why this concept is such a challenge for me to convey. I'm probably not doing a very good job of it.

The investors aren't particularly concerned about small positive externalities such as the increase in surrounding property values. (If the positive externalities are very large, they would probably attempt to capture them somehow -- such as buying up the whole neighbourhood before proceeding with the development. This is why profitable train companies in Asia build train lines to where they own the land, and develop the area around their stations into shopping malls and residential complexes).

That's very different than having free riders. If you give your investors the option of paying $100 per share, or $0 per share, and in either case they'll get the same number of shares, then you suddenly won't find any investors willing to pay. Even if it's a profitable endeavour at $100 per share!

Why would you be offering such a strange deal to your investors? Well, you wouldn't, because it would totally undermine your ability to get your project funded. But it's exactly the model you're proposing when you suggest that private citizens might donate to the government if they really want public infrastructure to get funded! The ones who don't donate are paying $0/share, and the ones who do are paying $100/share, and they all get equal use of the infrastructure.

The free rider problem is not when you try to get investors to buy into your project, even though a few people who don't buy in will also benefit slightly. It's when you try to get investors to buy into your project, even though anybody who doesn't buy in benefits just as much.

Having said this, now let me put it in the context of your quote:

"This is just not something I consider in any way when choosing to make an investment"

When you consider purchasing shares of a company for $100/share, do you not consider in any way the possibility that these shares might be available for a lower price from another seller? I would expect you would do research and pay the lowest price that is on offer. And if someone is offering them for $0/share, wouldn't you consider that when deciding whether or not to pay $100?

edit: Let me bring this back to the example. How are you going to pitch investors to pay to upgrade a water treatment plant, when they'll reap exactly the same gains from it as their neighbours who didn't contribute a dime? Or, after attempting this and failing to raise any funds whatsoever, let alone the required $500 million, how might you alter your fundraising strategy to make it more successful?

To simplify, let's assume that every one of the 5 million citizens has equal wealth, and the identical preferences, and is willing contribute up to at most $200 for this project, but prefers to pay the minimum possible amount and will always opt to pay $0 if the treatment plant gets built regardless.

In my real estate venture, the dividends are paid exclusively to the investors who are my shareholders. So there are no free riders; the people who don't invest don't get the same benefits as those who do. For ventures like this, we don't need the government to coordinate anything.

For projects like waste treatment plants, it's very hard or impossible to ensure that only the "investors" (ie, people who volunteered to fund it) get the benefit. If the waste gets treated, the tapwater is safe to drink, that weird smell in the streets goes away, the coliform count goes down, the beaches are open for swimming in the summer, and fewer people get sick. That's wonderful but how do we limit the benefits to the shareholders of the waste treatment plant, so as to convince people to invest in it?

Was my explanation inadequate? We're not the people in category (2) who are concerned about free riders; we're all the people in category (3) who would be free riders. But we also want our water treatment plant. And we are willing to pay for it, but only if we have no way to personally avoid the obligation ourselves. And the same is true of our peers. We're an entire civilization of would-be free riders. So we're stuck because nobody will personally commit to pay unilaterally, even though we all want to. So how do we make ourselves happy? How do we get together and sign a contract to pay for it, without defecting on each other?

That's what taxes are. They're not there to coerce payment from people who aren't willing to donate. They exist to coordinate payments from a bunch of people who want to get things done but don't want to be the only sucker left with the bill. That's the whole point. And we get our schools and water treatment and garbage pickup and nobody has to make personal donations to the government to make it happen. We won't get our treatment plant any other way.

"The only time taxes are required is when people will not freely give money for a project. That is literally the only reason taxes exist. Nothing is stopping people from donating to the government."

This really sounds true, but it disregards game theory. For concreteness, let's say the government proposes to upgrade a waste processing plant for $500 million, and you think it's a pretty good idea. There are varying levels of being willing to "freely give money":

1. You are willing to personally pay for the waste processing plant out of your own pocket. You happen to have $500 million, and regardless of what anyone else in the country thinks, you think the waste processing upgrade is badly needed and you're willing to devote your entire personal fortune to it. Maybe the waste processing plant will be named after you.

2. You are willing to pay for it, but only if your fellow citizens also pitch in. The waste processing plant serves 5 million people in the area. You aren't willing to personally pay $500 million, but you are willing to enter a contract with your 5 million fellows that you'll all pay $100 each.

3. You would be willing to join a pact to pay for it, but not if you can easily get away with being a free rider, where the plant gets built without your support. If a generous billionaire will personally donate to the government to pay for the entire thing, then why should you pay anything? Or, if 1 million of your fellow citizens will happily pay $500 each, then why should you pay anything? But that's not to say you don't think the plant is worth the money. You'd even be willing to pay for it if there were no other way to get it built. You'd just prefer not to waste your own money on it if the plant gets built even when you opt out of the payment contract.

Unfortunately, the common mentality of option (3) usually prevents options (1) and (2) from being feasible, because anyone who doesn't agree to pay still gets the benefit of the plant upgrades. Option (1) can still work for very prestigious projects that make a good legacy-building donation, but probably not waste processing plant upgrades. The free rider problem prevents almost anyone from voluntarily forming a pact to share the cost burden even when the plant upgrades are direly needed.

Fortunately there is a fourth option.

4. You would be willing to pay for it conditional on your fellow citizens fairly sharing the bill. Thus you support entering a mutually-binding pact which will also bind any potential free riders in the municipality who also benefit from the waste processing plant. The pact takes force as long as the motion to upgrade the waste processing plant wins majority support. In order for this kind of pact to be possible, you all (even the free riders) voluntarily agree ahead of time to support the legally-binding force of these kinds of pacts, and the conditions under which the majority will be determined. In other words, you choose to live under a democratic government.

Of course there's also a fifth option:

5. You don't think the waste processing plant needs upgrades, and you don't support yourself or anyone else paying for it.

I often hear from Americans that taxation equates to theft, or slavery, or being held at gunpoint to pay for other peoples' things. But this naively assumes that anyone who doesn't have opinion (1) must have opinion (5). In fact, I think the vast majority of people have opinion (4), because it's the Nash equilibrium for people who support a public works project, but I never hear opponents of taxation even talk about the existence of opinion (4).

Perhaps they haven't imagined that someone would be unwilling to donate $100 to the government, but be enthusiastically willing to have that same $100 forcibly taken from them (as long as it's also taken from their fellows)? I certainly am. That's why I vote to raise taxes even though I wouldn't donate to the government.

Actually, the US only thought that there wasn't MAD. As mentioned in the documentary "The Fog of War", only decades later did the US discover that there were already nuclear missiles with warheads in Cuba when they began the blockade. And Castro was willing to use them!

That made the situation even more dangerous than they realized at the time. The US would not have come out intact. It's very lucky for everyone that the Soviets decided not to escalate the situation.

Of course, I suppose MAD isn't MAD if there isn't also mutual knowledge of mutually assured destruction. It's something even worse when both sides think they have the advantage.

Japan is bigger than Tokyo! Anywhere outside of Tokyo, even in beautiful livable world-class cities, the prices for Japanese homes are quite reasonable.

For example, this is in a very central and convenient part of Kyoto: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/538465

Or this one, for half the price: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/438354

Other cities outside of Kyoto are even less expensive.

This was an excellent summary explanation; thank you.