the obsession with number crunching in the transportation space is really unfortunate because if you just focus on what is going on 'IN THE STREET' , you will see that black market transportation already optimizes for transportation. the problem is that it is not legal, let alone funded for growth.
there are too many vested special interests,namely, the police, the mass transit system, the cab drivers, and now, yes, uber and the ride sharing apps have become part of the institutional dead weight on policy change.
if you want to see what common sense would dictate in ride sharing , it would be pretty simple.
mini busses would not only be allowed all over new york , anywhere and everywhere ( because they already run up and down flatbush avenue in brooklyn) , but large companies would ----if ONLY THEY WERE invited by nyc government---------flock to build premium versions of minibusses with a minimum of one entrance per 2 passengers all along the side of the vehicle.
the designs for such a vehicle are plenty. MANY examples of these designs exist. they are also easily buildable even with safety gear and precautions built in.
optimizing ride sharing is obvious, you give people vehicles with enough entrances and enough privacy so that every pair of people can get enter together, and at most a stranger will be forced to share a pseudo cabin with one other stranger.
the problem as always IS NOT THE LACK OF MATH AND NUMBER CRUNCHING BY WONKIES , it is the vested interests that have crushed innovation by having their meathook money suckers squidlike suffocating government with the help of willingly crooked politicians.
the same issue plagues all major metropolitan areas in the u.s. , especially san francisco.
IF THERE IS NO ART IN BANKSY, THEN WHY DO PEOPLE PAY MILLIONS FOR HIS ART? HAHAHAHAHAH..........
metatrolling in this comment by dual useage of the word 'art' fully intended.
but what banksy does seriously is not easy. and if you don't believe me, please watch 'exit through the gift shop', a truly sublime documentary, itself fake , but SO TRUE, totally worth watching twice.
formal schooling is the worst thing in the world for curious and thoughtful minds like this.
still, it's amazing that such a 'discovery' can be made so quickly by sattelite confirmation. the age old human mind combined with modern sensor tools is capable of 'discoveries'. simply not possible in the past.
consider in the past, it owuld have taken years to put together expedition funding and organize explorers to get to the suspected location of the alleged city.
now, you just get the right person on the phone at the right research department , and existing searchable maps of the location are already at your disposal, if they (high resolution lidar?) aren't already accessible through public google earth maps.
this is amazing. we are making discoveries at light speed because massive quantities of diverse information are available to 15 year olds, and the capacity for verifying suspicions is there because of our capacity for creating searcheable organized data.
this truly is the structure of scientific revolution. so many things coming together to make a new paradigm of discovery possible. it is THESE kinds of stories really give me passion for science making the world better.
yes the problem is politics , or what you might call institutionalized group psychology of those with access to spending tax dollars, and the legislators they need to 'persuade' to get the money spent.
science is not an art , it is generally an institutionally funded social behavior. the art of science is such that a lot of shitty ass sciece research with poorly constructed hypothesis and protocol gets funded............
can we do a better job? maybe. but the answer lies in better policy analysts and politicians, not in better 'scientists'.
on heuristic for helping pinpoint bad and poorly constructed research is to look for where the most 'growth' in research has occured the quickest; and by that-----i mean look for the research 'bubbles'.
why? as with art in general, and clothign and every sphere of human behavior-----that which gets popular very quickly is usually by nature fleeting and without the most substance, like fast growing weeds. that which grows slowly and withstands the test of time usually resembles an oak in quality.
that does not mean that fast growth is always undesireable. you want fast growth in areas where there is great potential and low hanging fruit.
it is good that bubbles occur SOMETIMES. BUT NOT ALWAYS. some bubbles are poorly advised. you must crack a few eggs to make an ommelet but sometimes you are just breaking eggs inside the carton without ever making breakfast.
but regardless of whether or not a bubble is good or bad, all bubbles still must pop at some point to let the overgrowth and wasteful growth be cleared. all forests must eventually have a forest fire.
the longer fire and destruction is suppressed beyond a certain point........the greater the amount of destruction is going to be when it finally comes.
and in general, this is why our current economic bubble is so worrisome
talk about changing goal posts and pivoting, anything to save face about rushing success.
quantum everything is obviously the future of technology, but it is a long long path.
i get more excited about fundmanetal quantum research and research on new methods of testing quantum states.
people claiming to have full working computers of any value, if they even do work-------------are just blowing smoke and mirrors like elizabeth holmes from theranos. nearly criminal behavior , alleging things are simply what they aren't in order to get money.
there is an epidemic of hack science and engineering occuring to secure and suck in scarce funds. and where-ever there is military related big money the likelihood of fraud is even bigger.
read the book about the hafnium bomb and you will understand why the military investors are frequently so easy to scam---a two pronged version of greed and desire to have the unstoppable weapons.
paradoxically enough , if more pre-investigation was done, they'd have more money to spend on real R&D. i guess economists would just call this a massive case of malinvestment.
there is epidemic of bad science resulting from overfunding for anything related to c02 research.
it's nonsense. it's not 'wrong' because 'wrong' is falsifiable in one direction or another it's BAD science because it is inconclusive wasted effort with crap data and nothing verifiable.
fine, believe in the immanent global catastrophic VERSION of climate warming caused and potentially preventable by mankind resulting from c02 emissions. GO AHEAD AND PULL YOUR HAIR OUT.
BUT CAN WE PLEASE STOP FUNDING CRAP ASS SCIENCE RESEARCH THAT WAS NEVER INTENDED TO YIELD CONCLUSIVE FALSIFIABLE RESULTS OTHER THAN X MAY CAUSE Y , OR IT MAY NOT.............
THE CULT OF BAD SCIENCE ..........AND PSUEDOSCIENCE..........continues...........
I find climate change very depressing, though I'm a complete believer in it. So I normally welcome any debunking of articles like this, since its good to know things aren't as bad as they could be.
But your debunking is not useful. Capitals are unpleasant to read and imply someone ranting/unhinged. You don't seem to actually address anything specific in TFA. You allege there is an epidemic of bad science but provide no links or backup to your claims.
A complete believer? Welcome to the Church of CAGW! It has to be 'Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming' because no 'denialists' deny the fact that carbon dioxide produced by humans helps the atmosphere retain more of the sun's heat. That's not up for belief; it's a fact. The question is: to what extent and what is the nature of the relationship? We do not yet know the answer.
Google search for "may contribute to" (with quotes) yields:
> Cartilage protein may contribute to the development of breast cancer
> Zinc deficiency may contribute to increased inflammation among HIV-positive individuals
> Neurotrophine-3 may contribute to neuronal differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells through the activation of the bone morphogenetic protein pathway.
...and thousands of others.
Do you object to all of them for being "CRAP ASS SCIENCE RESEARCH THAT WAS NEVER INTENDED TO YIELD CONCLUSIVE FALSIFIABLE RESULTS OTHER THAN X MAY CAUSE Y", or do you only object to those with political implications regarding fossil fuel industry?
I object - I can't even begin to keep straight whether I'm supposed to eat eggs or run in fear of them, or whether blueberries prevent cancer or if antioxidants give you mega-uber-cancer this week.
I don't think you understand how research works. Unless you have a super no-strings research grant (e.g. Nobel award or something), the expensive gold-standard research you're asking for just isn't funded in the first round. Instead, you get funded to do lower standard correlation type research first then if that pans out, you report on it and apply for the higher standard one to completely prove/disprove your theory.
But if all caps helps you get that inner rage against how science works out, then shine on I suppose.
it's funny how few people on this comment board fail to realize we in the west are all greece soon.
too much leverage leads to an insolvent society, just as too much debt leads to an insolvent individual.
the history of the world is largely intertwined with stories of debt------who is under the control of whom else?
the answer to too much monetary debt is always monetary debasement. as the money supply is turned to toilet paper, as we have seen in the 20th century with zimbabwe and other countries------------the answer is that societies reform themselves.
the result is other types of debt and relationships arise to fill the gap, while poverty sweeps over the nation.
no financial trickery can solve this problem, at best one can hope to mitigate it.
firms like goldman sachs seek to exaccerbate it as financialization is rooted in crisis capitalism, generating and encouraging crisis in order to take advantage of it.
the entire wall street edifice has transititoned over the years from semi responsible stewards of financial wealth, to a parasitic casino that is built upon the practice of crisis capitalism, bribery and price manipualtion.
it's funny how all the people are focussed neo malthusianism.
malthunianism isn't about the biophysics of some sustainability paradigm hatched out of a theoretical model that places massive amount of assumptions about bio blablaba.
the real malthusianism is wrapped up in the nature of the relationship between population growth relative to the political-economic societies interacting with the realities of hierarchal governance.
all socieites are based on hierarchchal pyramids of one version of cheap labor or another dominating the bottom, with dominant 1% at the top. call it capitalism, communism , or any other ism to describe every society that has almost ever existed, but the few at the top are always contending with the demographics of the many at the bottom.
in our present circumstance we have a fairly intricate global dollar/euro/yen based credit system.
the economics of the western aging population don't add up to increasing amounts of cheap labor going forward.
even in china this is a problem.
so the solution of outsourcing everything and importing streams of young immigrants (dilution of middle class) is clearly not going to work as a strategy for keeping up the stability of the banking systems and governments layered on top of the western system.
malthusianism is not so much that everything will 'collapse', but that the structure of governments and societies elite power institutions cannot remain remotely stable going into, and especially out of, population explosions.
social structure is highly dynamic in response to the bubblenomics of long term human population explosions.
world wars, failed states and many more things are deeply guaranteed by the underlying demographic realities.
bizarrely enough , it's not because there are too many people. it's because there aren't enough slaves to replenish the pen of tax producers and the pen of 'demand' for usurous credit offered by banks. when decades of pricing mortgaged assets at near zero interest rates, the banks are having a harder and harder time finding people to burden with 30 year mortgages , or as bill clinton liked to emphasize , the american dream of home foreclosureship.
eventually the price and tax reset comes (like in post soviet russia) and the clearing of the pricing and taxing system once again allows for growth in spite of the dynamic balance of debt and demographics.
then again there's always tons of high birth rates in the developing world. so long as that is the case, there's no real problems
there are too many vested special interests,namely, the police, the mass transit system, the cab drivers, and now, yes, uber and the ride sharing apps have become part of the institutional dead weight on policy change.
if you want to see what common sense would dictate in ride sharing , it would be pretty simple.
mini busses would not only be allowed all over new york , anywhere and everywhere ( because they already run up and down flatbush avenue in brooklyn) , but large companies would ----if ONLY THEY WERE invited by nyc government---------flock to build premium versions of minibusses with a minimum of one entrance per 2 passengers all along the side of the vehicle.
the designs for such a vehicle are plenty. MANY examples of these designs exist. they are also easily buildable even with safety gear and precautions built in.
optimizing ride sharing is obvious, you give people vehicles with enough entrances and enough privacy so that every pair of people can get enter together, and at most a stranger will be forced to share a pseudo cabin with one other stranger.
the problem as always IS NOT THE LACK OF MATH AND NUMBER CRUNCHING BY WONKIES , it is the vested interests that have crushed innovation by having their meathook money suckers squidlike suffocating government with the help of willingly crooked politicians.
the same issue plagues all major metropolitan areas in the u.s. , especially san francisco.
i vote peter theil for dictator of california.