This is nothing new. I had a Shearson account back in the early 1980s and bought an oil company stock that was undervalued. One of those leveraged buyouts occurred when I was on a short vacation, and I did not find about the expiration of a buyout offer (no broker bothered to call me). Later I found out that Shearson had sold a lot of shares from their customer accounts to get the benefit of the buyout offer, and replaced them with lower priced shares after the offer expired. Later, Sandy W., the head of Shearson was hailed as a financial genius. This was nearly 40 years ago.
I saw a program once about elephants that showed that they carried around the bones of the revered loved ones in their mouths. Maybe the males were not as revered or maybe they tended to die in spots that it was dangerous to get to carry away their bones.
Well, we already manufactured in Wisconsin a lot of the stuff you need for an LCD panel. 3M Menominee makes the light diffuser (Vicuiti) film that a lot of the top end LCD makers used, Wisconsin up until 2008 had one of the top flex circuit facilities in the US ( 3M Eau Claire). TTMI in Chippewa Falls has one of the most advanced printed circuit board making facilities (built by Cray Research/SGI).
I was no fan of the Foxconn plan. Wisconsin has enough smart people and know how to have done it themselves without a Taiwanese assembly shop. Pretty soon, making LCDs will be like making cheese. Just order the cheese making machines and go to work. If we don't have the smart people here (like Seymour Cray, Mark Andraesen etc) we get them from nearby states (Gene Amdahl, PhD UW Madison). Just call up Nikon, order the machines and go to work.
Is it legal to hire someone in the US from a foreign country because the hiring manager is not fluent in English and needs someone with fluency in a foreign tongue, when other qualified candidates DO speak English? I lost an engineering job with a fortune 500 company once, for a job in California because I believe I did not speak Russian.
Maybe it is time to think about moving astronomy to space or possibly the moon. Issues for years about street light polution. Even ducks show up sometimes on astronomy photos.
Cray-1 from that era had 80 Mhz clock and 8 Megabytes (1 Megaword) memory. But had peak floating point of 160 mega flops. Also, no cache. But highly interleaved main memory.
I am opposed to UBI. I want smart people to have more money. I want less smart people to have less money, provided they have enough to live on. A smart person might invest in books, study and self improvement. Then those industries that create these will be stimulated. That is what you want. Less smart people might spend their money on lottery tickets, junk food, booze etc. Those industries would be stimulated by UBI and that is what you do NOT want.
I came to this conclusion when my state had its first statewide lottery drawing. They interviewed all the final contestants. And when they interviewed the biggest idiot of the bunch, I told the person next to me that he would be sure to win. And that person did. And I had visions of him running out with the winnings and buying expensive sports cars, drinks etc. I was sure the money would be gone in a month. And the net effect was that a lot of poor people lost money on their lottery tickets and the money went up in smoke.
Back of the envelope calculation says that one gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs of CO2 when burned. One hundred gallons of gas per ton of CO2. I have seen sequestration costs of $200-$500 a ton for current CO2 sequestration or conversion to fuel hydrocarbons. This would work out to a $2 to $5 dollar tax for gallon of gas. So this would take us to $4 to $7 per gallon gas to create a sustainable CO2/hydrocarbon economy. For a lot of people, this would be better than spending an extra $20K+ for an EV. Twenty thousand dollars buy a LOT of gas. Ten to 15 years worth for a typical computer driving 10k a year even with the added taxes. Plus, this might make some places like New York, more politically open to oil/gas pipelines and fracking etc to increase supplies because gas/oil would now be green.
"Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law. To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right."
Courts need to apply the above to Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution, as well as the 10th and 2nd amendment.
There was once was an operating systems that allowed you to format your entire hard drive when you only intended to format a floppy disk, if you typed format c: instead of format a:. This was called Microsoft Dos 2.x.
My favorite was when I was working at SGI after it had taken over Cray Research. I was one of the lowly Cray guys in Wisconsin working with the wonderkind in California. I was to run the regression tests on the chip being design in California using some software that they had provided. I would run the tests, but some days they would crash in the middle of the night. Then the California guys would be angry that they got no tests results. I started debugging the code and got to a program called lswalk that would dole out jobs to the dozens of servers to be 'run'. The code was written by a hot shot young MIT graduate, but I was sure that the problem was with this code. I got the source code and started looking for problems and one thing I found was that if one of the servers resplonding with error the code would print out an error message. One problem though... The error string printed had an uninitialized string, so that when the printf routine would search for an end of string that was never there, probably overwriting buffers and crashing code all over the place. So one lesson is that even the best and brightest make mistakes.
Sometimes I wonder how we accomplished anything in those days with software that had so may trap doors beneath it.
My fist thought was what could Denmark trade at that time for the return of Bornholm? My first thought was the atomic secrets that the Neils Bohr group had.
Ten years ago I got an MRI when they were searching for kidney stone. I think the hospital charge was over $3000. I had one last year and the charge was less than $500. You can point to MRI as one of the success stories for technology in health care.
I am an EE with a degree from a big ten university. Now turning 66. What amazes me about electronics/computer science is how much I do not know and how much I am still learning.
The process for making ammonia from air (nitrogen) and hydrogen. Allowed a huge increase in agricultural output that saved a few billion people from starvation.
Haber-Bosch process.
The Elxsi 6400, built in the early 1980s could do logical operations to memory using the off the shelf drams of the day. Designer was Harold (Mac) McFarland, of PDP-11 fame.
I saw a youtube interviewing the guy that wrote the code for the HP-35. He said that David Packard got mad when he heard that every engineer in a certain division of HP was going to get their own HP-35. He said that one calculator could easily be shared among 4 or 5 people.
Remember programming these when in college in the 1970s. We bought some surplus (probably out of spec) 1702s. The programmer would have trouble programming them until we noticed how hot they were getting. We spayed them with freezing spay to cool them down until the programmer finished.
I thought about this. My watch needs to tell me (no matter were I am, by using GPS) what time are the most common for meals and what time is my meeting with the locals. What numbers it assigns to these are not material, but UGMT would make the most sense.
I once made a trip south of Chicago. Got to my destination in Indiana. I could not make sense of the miles per hour I realized for the trip. Then later on I realized that Indiana has two time zones and I had gained an extra hour between Gary and Indianapolis.