Just Saying -- the soapbox thread

[alanp]

I've always liked the idea of space stations, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey and suchlike. I also like Penn & Teller's view on space exploration -- get NASA to do the research, and private industry to build the ships, since they aren't going to spend like $1000 on a hammer.

[Muadzin]

Space research is cool, but the most pressing issue is to get humans living in space and other planets. Off this one at least, cause this one is rather unique and should be saved. First step, industrialize the moon so we can get more space infrastructure in space at a much reduced cost. Start cranking out O'Neill cylinders so we can park our people there, and colonize the solar system. And once we got the solar system covered, next stop, other stars. We have to get out there or else EVERYTHING we've done here, all our art, history, suffering, achievements, they will have been for nothing as the sun inevitable will get hotter with time and make Earth unlivable.

And for those culture pessimists who think we are so bad as a species, we've NEVER been as enlightened, cultured, humanist and peaceful as we are today. We have less wars then ever before, less people are living in poverty, or suffer from malnutrition before, racism and sexism is at an all time low. Quit listening to the media and activists, they lie, all of them. Quit listening to university professors, they have always been doomsayers. Instead of scaring our kids with gloom and doom we should be motivating them with positive role models. Instead of telling people you do this or else, listen to people who say we're going to do this, because!

[matmosphere]

Can't tell if your just having a bit of fun there but an estimated 800,000,000 people in India live in poverty right now. At no time before 1750-1800 did that many people even live on the planet at one time. There is definitively more people living in poverty at the moment than ever before.

[midwayfair]

since they aren't going to spend like $1000 on a hammer.

The U.S. Government is statutorily required to buy something off the shelf if it can, and it can and does get sued if it doesn't buy an off the shelf product that meets its needs.

Bu tif you go to a manufacturer and tell them that their off the shelf hammer is not good enough and you need three hammers with these exact specifications that are durable enough to do something in particular, they're going to cost $1000 each because you're paying a room full of engineers to make something bespoke for you. This happens a lot with military equipment: It doesn't exist, so you have to pay someone to make it, but you also won't let them sell it to anyone else, so you pay for their R&D as well.

NASA is not motivated not by profit but the desire to continue exploration. Its justification for the next mission is the success of the prior. Private industry has decades of experience trying to skirt safety, environmental, and every other expectation they can to please their shareholders. I don't want the kind of folks who hire the Pinkertons to spy on their workers or get a couple million dollars in exchange for failure in charge of the safety and success of pure scientific exploration whose achievements become part of the public good.

[matmosphere]

If the military spent that on a hammer it would be harder to justify, unless it was a prototype. Once the R&D is done though the cost should come down to closer to normal hammer prices.

Now $1000 for a space hammer isn't that bad if you are actually going to take it to space and use it there.

The cost in fuel to get that hammer to the ISS is not trivial, $45,000 a pound, so if they spent that grand to shave a few ounces off the weight they just saved a bunch of money. If they made it durable enough that they only need to send two up for the duration of the mission they saved a hell of a lot more money. Those factors make a big difference in fuel cost. I think NASA has always felt like they are working on borrowed time, if they spend to much or fail to much the money will stop and the mission will end.

If they spend $1000 on one it's because that is the most economically sound decision. Realistically though Alan just pulled that number out of thin air. A space hammer probably cost a lot more than a grand. 

[midwayfair]

If they spend $1000 on one it's because that is the most economically sound decision. Realistically though Alan just pulled that number out of thin air. A space hammer probably cost a lot more than a grand.

It's a perennial myth, but it's based on a real thing. The circumstances and cost get repurposed on the internet.

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/

[Aentons]

The hammer thing is just referring to the big stink in the 80's that also included overpriced toilet seats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Commission

"the Pentagon had vastly overpaid for a wide variety of items, most notoriously by paying $435 for a hammer,[1] $600 for a toilet seat, and $7,000 for an aircraft coffee maker.[2] In fact, these numbers were inaccurate; they were an accounting convenience rather than the actual cost of the materials."
...
"Commission reported that there was "no rational system" governing defense procurement, and it concluded that it was not fraud and abuse that led to massive overexpenditures but rather "the truly costly problems are those of overcomplicated organization and rigid procedure."

[matmosphere]

If they spend $1000 on one it's because that is the most economically sound decision. Realistically though Alan just pulled that number out of thin air. A space hammer probably cost a lot more than a grand.

It's a perennial myth, but it's based on a real thing. The circumstances and cost get repurposed on the internet.

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/

Yeah, I've read about that stuff in the past. The point I was trying to hit home is that the needs and cost of a space hammer are very different than terrestrial needs and cost.

If you want to talk about wasteful spending I could tell you about how they used to repave roads in my hometown every few years because if they didn't spend their whole budget every year they'd get less the next year. They got extra for a big project back in the early eighties and have made sure to spend it every year since. The roads there are very nice. Not a pothole or even a patch in sight.

[alanp]

... I never realised how much the movie 'Independance Day' influenced me. (I'm thinking of the Jewish father saying to someone, "What, you think they spend $600 on a hammer, $1000 on a toilet seat?" when they ask how the secret alien research facility was built.)

[Muadzin]

Can't tell if your just having a bit of fun there but an estimated 800,000,000 people in India live in poverty right now. At no time before 1750-1800 did that many people even live on the planet at one time. There is definitively more people living in poverty at the moment than ever before.

India had to come a long way, but percentage wise MORE people used to live in poverty in India after independence right up to the 80's, when free market reforms were enacted. India's economy has been booming for decades and more people have been lifted out of poverty then ever before. Of course India's population is also booming, which is masking the massive gains that have been made. And that is also excluding the fact that India has not had a famine since 1972. Same with Africa, because of a booming population that masks the massive gains that are being made in lifting more people then ever out of poverty. Overall populations go up, including the total number of poor people, but as a percentage of the total population poverty goes down. If those countries had their population growth in check poverty would be dropping really hard. It's really two separate issues, poverty and population growth.

Through human history there has been an endless progression of culture pessimists and doomsayers, and yet history has proven then wrong again and again and again. We are far more resilient, resourceful and willing to do what it takes then what the naysayers keep on saying. I've experienced too many scares and so called endings of the world to fall for that again. We will make it work. Faith manages!

The U.S. Government is statutorily required to buy something off the shelf if it can, and it can and does get sued if it doesn't buy an off the shelf product that meets its needs.

Bu tif you go to a manufacturer and tell them that their off the shelf hammer is not good enough and you need three hammers with these exact specifications that are durable enough to do something in particular, they're going to cost $1000 each because you're paying a room full of engineers to make something bespoke for you. This happens a lot with military equipment: It doesn't exist, so you have to pay someone to make it, but you also won't let them sell it to anyone else, so you pay for their R&D as well.

NASA is not motivated not by profit but the desire to continue exploration. Its justification for the next mission is the success of the prior. Private industry has decades of experience trying to skirt safety, environmental, and every other expectation they can to please their shareholders. I don't want the kind of folks who hire the Pinkertons to spy on their workers or get a couple million dollars in exchange for failure in charge of the safety and success of pure scientific exploration whose achievements become part of the public good.

NASA is also a government bureaucracy and they cannot make ANY good decisions because they are not driven by a desire to get the most maximal result (profit in the private sector) but politics. We've seen that with the Space Shuttle, which turned out to a money pit of limited value, as its far cheaper to send satellites into space with an unmanned rocket then it is with a reusable huge expensive space plane. But that shuttle sucked the budget out of NASA, eating up so much that its exploration missions were kept on a very tight budget. For the money wasted on the Space Shuttle we could have send a LOT more probes to Mars, Venus, all the other planets. Science could have been extended so much further, if it weren't for NASA's obsession with maintaining a manned space delivery system. And its not like the government safety record is so much better, because they lost half of their shuttles, including their occupants. And even in the military we see gross neglect of safety and concern with well being and health of soldiers. Exposing them to toxic materials and munitions and covering up any potentially harmful information. Harmful to the government that is. Governments aren't the solution, they are the problem. You say Pinkertons, I say FBI and NSA. And if one company takes risks with safety, I can usually go to a different company. If the government takes unnecessary risk or does other things, I can't go to a different government.

... I never realised how much the movie 'Independance Day' influenced me. (I'm thinking of the Jewish father saying to someone, "What, you think they spend $600 on a hammer, $1000 on a toilet seat?" when they ask how the secret alien research facility was built.)

Hollywood is a poor source of information, and especially history. And sadly these days a poor source of entertainment as well. Just look at the disastrous Oscars ratings. I'm currently watching old Babylon 5 episodes and its writing blows ANYTHING recent out of the water.

[alanp]

Roughly 2001, 2002 or so I saw Grave of the Fireflies.

I never saw another Ghibli movie again. GotFF is one of the genuinely saddest movies I have ever seen. Titanic was a soppy soaked letter next to it. If you see Grave of the Fireflies, you will never want to see nuclear weapons used again.

In 2021, I just saw _Spirited Away_. It's... so wonderful...

[matmosphere]

Roughly 2001, 2002 or so I saw Grave of the Fireflies.

I never saw another Ghibli movie again. GotFF is one of the genuinely saddest movies I have ever seen. Titanic was a soppy soaked letter next to it. If you see Grave of the Fireflies, you will never want to see nuclear weapons used again.

In 2021, I just saw _Spirited Away_. It's... so wonderful...

Sprited Away is an excellent film. GotFF is as well, but yes, it's kind of heavy. I really like the Ghibli films, Spirited Away is certainly among the best.

Princess Mononoke is also very good, though more violent and not kid friendly. I'd almost liken it to Dune actually, it's the intersection of politics, mythology, tradition, and the natural world. I'm guessing you would enjoy it. Something tells me  you like Dune.

Kiki's Delivery Service and Ponyo are both excellent, for a little younger crowd, but they both capture a lot of what makes Spirited Away so wonderful.

But My Neighbor Totoro is the other one that is just a complete and total gem start to finish, just like SA, though in a different way. Once again, clearly made for a younger crowd, but it's just so great. It makes me wish I had a catbus.

[alanp]

Well... thing is... after Grave, I didn't want to take the chance, and never looked up anything by Studio Ghibli again, ever. (Until tonight, in 2021.)

Grave was bad enough. I didn't want to be driven any further down that dark path, if the other movies were like that.

[matmosphere]

Well... thing is... after Grave, I didn't want to take the chance, and never looked up anything by Studio Ghibli again, ever. (Until tonight, in 2021.)

Grave was bad enough. I didn't want to be driven any further down that dark path, if the other movies were like that.

Yeah, I get it. That's a tough entry point. I think given Myasaki's age and country of origin I completely understood why he would want to tell that story. It can be a tough watch though. Sometimes it's weird movies or books that hit us, I can't make it through this Disney movie, Onward, without tearing up, but with a movie like GotFF it's probably more uncommon to not have that.

[midwayfair]

I was looking back through my videos the other day, and the concert I streamed in December had a copyright claim. I was pretty surprised because I was pretty sure everything I did in that concert was traditional or original.

It turned out that the copyright claim was for Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More," a song that has been public domain since before the 20th century.

So after disputing it (which will take 30 days, and which if BMI decides to just arbitrarily say "no we own this" -- they aren't required to provide proof I believe), I did some reading, and apparently YouTube's content ID is actually too stupid to tell the difference between two different performances of the same work. So BMI can upload hundreds of recordings of classical or folk works and essentially claim them all.

The process is opaque, because YouTube understandably doesn't want people figuring out how to bypass their system and actually steal copyrighted material, but it's obviously broken in many ways. And since I have some background in machine learning I can take a guess how this works: The content ID takes a recording and strips it to is most salient features, which is going to be the melody. (Hence they can say "This video uses this song's melody.") Which is why they can't even label which particular recording I'm alleged to be violating the copyright of. (I assume that BMI is not, in fact, actually claiming to hold the copyright on a Stephen Foster *song*.)

I'm lucky if I get a hundred views on a video, but apparently this has caused classical musicians no end of grief, because they get can get muted for playing Beethoven.

I just kind of can't believe how stupid this all is, though. There should be some different method for whether someone is using the melody of a work that is under copyright and whether the work is actually a specific recording, but YouTube is happy to just funnel billions of dollars for BMI to pocket. Who the hell on BMI's roster would even get whatever minuscule amount of advertising is generated for that song? That's what bugs me the most. Like you want to incorrectly say "This is the Ma/Meyer/O'Connor version" I might say, "Okay, I like them, they can have the penny a year this might generate," but right now I'm just assuming that some executive at BMI pockets it.

This also feels like theft from the commons. There should be some sort of penalty for imposing ad revenue on something that is public domain against the wishes of the performing artist. I hope the EFF manages a lawsuit against YouTube at some point about this, because there are artists out there that are actually monetarily harmed by it. https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

Oh! I forgot to mention: There's no option in YouTube to say "This video does contain copyrighted material, but the material that's under copyright is not what's been claimed." So if you cover a song and play one that's in public domain, and only the public domain one gets claimed, you can't tell them that they got it wrong, so this is obviously not in any way meant to ensure that the actual artists get their money.