Posts by WH
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As long as it’s only one horse, right?
Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know. Close your mouth, block off your senses, blunt your sharpness, untie your knots, soften your glare, settle your dust. This is the primal identity. Be like the Tao. It can’t be approached or withdrawn from, benefited or harmed, honored or brought into disgrace. It gives itself up continually. That is why it endures.”
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Out of the crooked timber of humanity no completely good thing was ever made.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Farmer Green,
Maybe. I'm just not sure everything's quite as it seems.
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In all seriousness, are we sure that this isn't some unhappy milestone on the road to the apocalypse? Cryptic crossword. Some of you know what I am talking about.
I remember watching the old trees fall.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Automation of jobs is killing more jobs that outsourcing ever did.
I wonder whether this gets at the difference between Luddism and ideas in the space around mercantilism. While an uneven convergence of standards of living seems inevitable, we’ll either make the right moves when it comes to the policies that lie behind the balance of payments or struggle to afford what we buy from other countries.
Along with the closure of their factories, US workers have had to contend with stagnating wages and significant increases in the cost of tertiary education and healthcare. Obamacare has clearly helped, but one of those graphs states that employer-based healthcare premiums clock in at 21% of the median income, and I suspect that’s before co-pays, deductibles and other out of pocket costs.
In any event, I wish the people of the United States all the very best for the next four years.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Moore made much the same prediction for “President” Romney. Spooky.
Ha – I hadn’t seen that. Still, as far as I know, Moore was the only person to say that Trump would target and win the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (together with Ohio) in 2016. Maybe there are others, but this was the state of the polling models as at 7 November.
I wonder how James Comey will be remembered by history.
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That’s great writing.
There was a series in the Guardian filed by John Harris in May that really brought out the extent to which Trump’s messaging around trade and outsourcing was resonating in the Midwest. Michael Moore (of Flint, Michigan) made an eerily accurate prediction along similar lines.
As that New Yorker article you linked to put it:
[Some conservative intellectuals have] discerned the outlines of a simple and, in [their] view, eminently sensible political program: “less foreign intervention, less [free] trade, and more immigration restrictions.”
That’s fine, as far as it goes – if you can still see it in the blizzard of concern Trump’s behaviour and musings have stirred up.
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Hard News: Public Address founder…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I wish I could know more about this than I do. There are some really interesting ideas being expressed and claims being made that one can’t verify without an expert’s understanding of physics. I guess that leaves me waiting for the kind of evidence that can satisfy a layman’s curiosity.
As you alluded to, the properties of the hydrogen plasmas you can see on Youtube are at the heart of Mills’ controversial claims. We’ll see how much progress he makes over the next year or so.
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It’s fascinating in its own right, but this 2007 New York Review of Books article by Professor Lee Smolin also discusses Albert Einstein’s view of quantum mechanics:
By the time Newton died the Royal Society was filled with Newtonians. But after Einstein’s death in 1955, to be an Einsteinian was to be in a decidedly marginalized position in the physics world, if by Einsteinian one meant someone who agreed with Einstein’s strongest convictions and consequently approached physics in the same style he did. The big question that any assessment of Einstein’s later period then hinges on is whether Einstein’s later views were correct or not. The least that can be said is that there is an entire field now devoted to questions raised by the counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics called the foundations of quantum mechanics. Most experts agree that the questions raised by Einstein have not been resolved, and a fair fraction of them suspect that in the end Einstein’s view that quantum mechanics is just a step on the way to the right theory will turn out to have been correct.
Nonetheless, for most of Einstein’s biographers, who have been either nonphysicists or, like Pais, particle physicists firmly in the dominant quantum theory camp, the question is closed. To them one of very greatest scientists in history was completely wrong about the truth of a theory whose development he initiated. Isaacson asks, “So what made Einstein cede the revolutionary road to younger radicals and spin into a defensive crouch?” The simple truth is that Einstein ceded nothing because he had well-thought-out and principled objections to the quantum theory.
It’s probably worth re-iterating that I don’t have a scientific background.
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This is the company’s two hour presentation about its efforts and its pathway to commercialisation (12/2016).