Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies (2019) - <AUTHOR> http://theorangeduck.com/page/machine-learning-kolmogorov-complexity-squishy-bunnies <comment><USER2> Using Kolmogorov Complexity and then using PCA is not valid since you are approximating a solution and Kolmogorov Complexity is for exact solutions. Anyway perhaps there is, or should be defined, a signal/noise Kolmogorov Complexity measure, that is the shortest length of a program that computes an approximate solution within an epsilon distance of the true solution. Also since PCA is discussed, why not use SVD?

Edited: See (1)for some related ideas: A Safe Approximation for Kolmogorov Complexity

(1) [https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-11662-4_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-11662-4_24)

<comment><USER3> Well stated. The author also misses two other critical points: (1) accuracy is a poor measure of quality for non-numeric, classification type problems, (2) increasing model complexity has an asymptote in order to prevent overfitting. You can't arbitrarily increase the number of weights and expect that the NN will continue to improve.

<comment><USER4> Overfitting shouldn't be an issue for approximation of a known function, where you can generate an arbitrary amount of "training data". Of course you may not have the resources to do so, but that's a whole different tradeoff.

<comment><USER5> Even then, it might not really be an issue.

[https://youtu.be/5-Kqb80h9rk](https://youtu.be/5-Kqb80h9rk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Key quote from the conclusion: "Neural Networks are not just good for things we don't know how to solve, they can provide massive performance gains on problems we already know how to solve."

That quote is in reference to tasks such as physics simulation. There is an incredible GIF in the OP which shows a digital mannequin being manipulated, with its dress flowing in a hyper-realistic manner due to ML physics simulation. It would be uncanny to see that type of simulation combined with AR.

I'm curious to what extent ML physics simulation may be beneficial for self- driving cars. Generally, we as drivers know the physical properties of objects that we can collide with. Cars don't have that understanding, so they might "think" that colliding with a large paper bag is unacceptable. Stopping suddenly because of that paper bag may be fatal.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the cloth simulation is based on ML, this looks like a normal physics-based solver. If I understand the article correctly the author just uses this as an example of complex behavior that could be learned using ML, but he/she doesn't indicate that this was actually done using ML.

I know some papers that try to improve physics simulations with deep learning and I think it's definitely possible, not sure though if it can really improve most physics-based simulations.

Physical models are already highly condensed and have the advantage of being interpretable, deep learning has a long way to go before it could be used as a replacement, IMO.

<comment><USER6> A "300-5000x" gain in simulation speed for low-complexity simulations would be impressive. If a blade of grass is low complexity, then I assume that would free up resources from basic environmental rendering for more complex objects, and greater complexity in those objects (which themselves might benefit from ML, but with <300x gains). Until everyone has near infinite computing power, that's a de facto improvement in simulation quality right?

<comment><USER7> How would you reach such a gain though? Most physics-based simulations are really efficient already. For example, cloth simulations usually work using a grid of points (finite element approach) that are evolved using a differential equation and a constraint solver (not an expert in this particular area but I wrote e.g. electrodynamic simulations). Each point is usually only connected to its immediate neighbors, so the update algorithm only needs to do some simple arithmetic operations for each point. Often there's another step afterwards that ensures the constraints are met. All this can be executed really efficiently on a GPU already. Here's an example of an electrodynamics simulation I wrote: [https://github.com/adewes/fdtd- ml](https://github.com/adewes/fdtd-ml)

To achieve a 300-500 speedup of this seems impossible because for a single grid point we only do a few numerical operations to update it, so it's hard to see how one could reduce that much further as even an ML-based model will need to update each grid point to maintain the level of detail.

I think there are definitely other areas where ML can speed up things, but IMO cloth simulation is just a really bad example because it's a problem that can be solved using a nearest-neighbors approach with rather simple equations. Problems where you have non-local interactions or more complex dynamics might profit more from ML, but most physics problems can be solved faster with much simpler approaches, I think.

<comment><USER8> They used low inertia cloth and solids because these are the kinds of scenarios that this technique can best approximate.

Once you buy into the concept that your simulation can be represented by a very limited number of parameters it's not hard to suggest that this small state vector can be mutated from state to state using ML.

The issue with this technique is PCA not ML.

I can certainly see this technique being used in place of some existing simulation or animation based secondary motion in video games.

Note that adding up the contributions of 256 basis vectors might be more expensive than a per vertex cloth simulation.

I am experienced in these areas and have done grad computational physics and work on game engines for a living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I first learned about Kolmogorov complexity I understood it as the amount of symbols you have to use, from some specific vocabulary, to represent something.

It walks side-by-side with compression (and pigeon problems). Using Kolmogorov to improve ML in those physical examples means that the solution will be better to the specific case, not that there'll come a one-in-all solution to any kind of clothes animation.

<comment><USER10> What's a pigeon problem? Googling for this term only tells me what to do if I have too many pigeons flying around my house.

<comment><USER11> The pigeon-hole principle.

If you have N+1 things and N pigeonholes to put them in, at least one pigeonhole must have more than 1 thing!

<comment><USER12> In particular, since the number of binary strings of length n exceeds the number of shorter strings, there must be a string of length n that's not described by a shorter program, i.e. that's incompressible.

More generally, the fraction of strings of length n that can be compressed by k or more bits is less than 2^{-k}.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> New concepts to me coming from outside the field. Kolmogorov complexity was discussed just recently on Lex Fridman's podcast with Marcus Hutter - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1AxVXt2Gv4&t=905](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1AxVXt2Gv4&t=905)

I don't know enough to say how accurate Hutter's explanation is but it made sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> TIL about Kolmogorov Randomness, and I'm a happier person.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's an odd jump in this narrative. PCA is indeed a great technique, but the essay goes from PCA to neural nets without explaining why. PCA was around for a long time before NNs and there are fast incremental ways to do it. Why bother with a million-weight NN if PCA will do the job?

<comment><USER16> My understanding is that the neural network is used to predict the "magnitude" of each eigenvector/axe (extracted by using PCA) in order to reconstruct an approximation of the original behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are there any recommended resources to learn more about the design of the fabric physics simulation. The demo with the mannequin looked incredible and taking a stab at an ml algo that could learn that sounds like a fun project.</comment>


Ask HN: Need help stopping scam product - <AUTHOR> Hi Hackernews community,
I usually don't write or post things online, but yesterday evening my girlfriend showed me a celebrity advertising discounted wireless headphones and it seemed fishy to me. I need help people spreading the word to stop this.
The story was published on instagram by @kyliejenner (apparently a big celeberty in US), not sure how one can see it if not using the Instagram app, and the person is advertising "Nova Play" wireless headphones with 70% discount using a promo code. Nothing crazy here.
It started looking more fishy when I saw the website and it said free shipping worldwide and the headphones cost only 39$, and that they have 150k happy customers and the website had only 5 star reviews.
Then I tried googling for reviews of this product - nothing, not even a picture in google images. This is odd.
Then I checked the who.is of the domain name "nova-play.com" and it is registered on 31st of April, only 1 month ago. Interesting.
All of their social media pages have post not older that 4h of May, and in some social platforms like Instagram all the posts are made on 4th of May. Even more interesting.
Tried searching online the company name that is listed n their website and also didn't find anything. Something is not right.
At this stage it looks either they managed to get 150k customers in less than a month, or this whole product is fake.
I need the help of this community to either tell me that this is a real product, or help spreading a word about this fake product so that people don't get scammed.
Thank you all! <comment><USER2>
       it is registered on 31st of April

That would have made it immediately untrustworthy to me.

But seriously: this is a lucrative strategy now: marketing only by social media, relying on the poor critical thinking skills evident in most avid consumers of social media.

A great example is a new Facebook campaign by a company calling itself "Javapresse", saying their coffee in the "top 1%" of worldwide coffee and selling their beans for what turns out to be (if you do the actual math) for $24/lb. for _blends_ of unstated origin. Their site has ~200 "reviews", every single one is "five stars", which somebody called them out on eventually. The founder even claimed to be "good friends" with Alfred Peet, who's been out of the industry for 30 years and dead for over a decade.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_mi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_minute)</comment>


The five most common excuses for not upgrading Windows XP - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/the-five-most-common-excuses-for-not-upgrading-windows-xp-30116403.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm been running the same XP install since 1/11/2004 as my primary machine. It has run on several mother board/cpus and been cloned across HD's numerous times too. It's going to be very difficult to give it up. I have a Vista and a Win8 boxes hooked up to the kvm here at the desk but the XP box is like an old friend.

<comment><USER2> It's such an epic security risk, I can't understand why you'd want to risk using XP?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its firewalled and scanned regularly, browse with Chrome, careful with emails and downloads, so far so good? I don't do anything anything critical on it anyways. It will be retired soon though.</comment></comment></comment>


Google kills Hotpot - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/08/google-places-hotpot/ <comment><USER2> I saw this being announced in the new version of maps for Android and thought that it was a nice addition. Never even knew that they had launched this as a product. I'm not a frequent reader of the Google blogs but it seems that this was the only way users were alerted of its existence.

Hopefully they will attract more users through pairing this with maps. It seems that it's better to have it as a feature to what is already a successful project than try and start it on its own.

EDIT: typo

<comment><USER3> How do I get to Hotpot in Maps?

<comment><USER2> I have a marker icon in the top right of the maps screen which opens the "Places" menu. That seems to be what has become of it.

<comment><USER3> Places is different. Hotpot was a website where you voted on places in a supposedly social way. I don't think it is in Places (at least not yet).

<comment><USER4> It is, in the sense that you can rate places from Google Maps and the "Places" icon and it appears to be stored to the same database as Hotpot. That integration is throughout maps.

There's also a widget (Rate Places) included with Places/Maps (it's under the category "Maps" on the widgets interface) that gives some of the Hotpot functionality as well, including a similar interface and the "rate more places" game mechanic.

As to why they changed the name? I'd like to think it's for people like me who constantly read the name and type the name as "Hotspot". It's a confusing name - not a word that I think most people encounter often. However, just like the day it publicly launched, talking about it is making me crave a hotpot dinner...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They're not strictly 'killing it' they are to develop it into Google Places.

Back in SXSW Marissa Mayer spoke of consolidating some of their local efforts:

[http://searchengineland.com/googles-mayer-we-do-have-too- man...](http://searchengineland.com/googles-mayer-we-do-have-too-many- products-in-local-68159)</comment>


Seedcamp Week 2011 – New teams and winners, plus a bonus - <AUTHOR> http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/seedcamp-week-2011-new-teams-and-winners-plus-a-bonus.html <comment><USER2> Seedcamp was great once again this year. Vox.io was by far the most impressive company I've ever talked to out of an accelerator or competition. Congrats on all fronts.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Rob, means a lot.

<comment><USER4> +1 was very exciting to see the vox.io live temo call during the demo day!</comment></comment></comment>


Petition Asks White House To Submit ACTA To The Senate For Ratification - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120124/14071517529/new-petition-asks-white-house-to-submit-acta-to-senate-ratification.shtml

<comment><USER2> I speak as an ignorant outsider (Canadian) but have a legitamate concern when 3rd party onlookers are providing a more sensable explanation and rational summary regarding US law than the lawmakers themselves. Aside from the typical bouts of people shouting "corruption" and "incompitence" is there an honest reason for so many of these seemingly simple rules to be overlooked/ignored?

I ask only because looking from the outside in, it seems more and more that the system currently employed is so ass backwards it bends logic. I want to keep a positive outlook and receive justification from all sides before creating a viewpoint that could be portrayed as prejudice.

<comment><USER3> In addition to the comments before me, it's also because the rules are not as simple as they may seem, and the rules change with practice over time. Unless you believe that the U.S. Constitution and laws are absolutely inflexible (which not even the most strict textualists/orgininalist would, I think, contend), law changes via practice and via interpretation. In the US, it's almost always been the case that the lines between treaties, executive agreements, and something called congressional-executive agreements (consent of Congress, but less than the super-majority requirement of a treaty) are blurry and ambiguous. Given that, you could either presume that whatever the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid, it permits (in terms of executive power), or the opposite. Most presidents have presumed the former in the realm of executive agreements and treaties, meaning that, because the Constitution doesn't say that can't make these executive agreements, they've felt empowered to do so. This has been affirmed as permissible by the courts, and has happened very frequently, although that's not to say that future scenarios might arise that test the boundary between executive agreements and treaties in a way that hasn't been pushed before.

In summary: U.S. Constitutional law and the common law are very complex. It's not entirely clear that any rules are being broken, even if Obama does not ask for Senate approval. A court of law would be the proper place to resolve this, presuming the case was justiciable, which is another issue. Lawmakers themselves are no more informed than this comment or other commentators, meaning that they themselves can't provide any definitive answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How much proof do we need that while the likely defeat of SOPA/PIPA was due to the Internet waking up (along with many of it's most popular companies initiating a "black out" that confronted the general public for the first time) the big media companies are not stalled by losing a single battle. They plan for war. ACTA is another "front" to this war that many of us were blindsided to because we were fighting SOPA.

Now, I don't know how one coalesces a decentralized, leaderless, and disparate group of citizens who go by the term "the Internet". But, I do know, that unless we start bringing guns to gunfights (obviously I'm implying the expression here), we will lose the war, in spite of winning the SOPA / PIPA battle.

In order to do that we need to educate the non-geek general public about issues like ACTA and make them understand why they need to care. To do that, we must get out from behind our firewalls and our web farms and begin to communicate using the same mechanisms that old media is using, if for no other reason, the general public doesn't live in the same spaces that we do. If you can change public opinion, you can impact elections and legislation.

Until someone else comes along and steps into the void between the digital world and the power players who pass laws we (US) citizens are bound to, I'm busting my ass to stand up a nonprofit 527 Super PAC as fast as I can. I wish I could move the paperwork faster (IRS, FEC) but it's gonna be a couple of weeks before we can start accepting donations.

The news was all abuzz about how the SOPA / PIPA bills were killed in, what appeared to them anyway, lightning speed and with little notice. Ron Wyden understands how fast Internet mobilization moves, but the rest of Washington still doesn't get it. Yes, Chris Dodd, the SOPA / PIPA death was a "watershed" moment in politics, but not for reasons you might think. It was a watershed moment because we have the capacity to do more than just black out our sites and send emails to Washington and we are taking it to the next level. Like Yamamoto, you have awoken a sleeping giant and we intend on correcting the deficiencies in our armor and arsenal.

God. Sorry to go on a rant, but this shit raises the hair on the back of my neck like few other issues and I'm tired of _both_ political parties in Washington taking for granted that I, the Internet, am not paying attention to what you are doing.

Plug: Consider joining me. theinternetvoice.org. On G+ "The Internet Voice".</comment>


A man who was raised by wolves - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/28/how-to-be-human-the-man-who-was-raised-by-wolves <comment><USER2> _Janer says the young boy would have projected his social needs on to the animals and imagined relationships with them. "When Pantoja says the fox laughed at him, or that he had to tell off the snake, he gives us a version of the true reality, what he believes happened – or how, at least, he explained the reality to himself," Janer told me. "Marcos's mind was desperate for social acceptance," he told me, "so instead of understanding the animals' presence as incentivised by the food, he thought they were trying to make friends."_

I continue to be perplexed as to why otherwise intelligent people deny the possibility of personality and social relations among other species, or that of interspecies communication. Then again this is just the mildest example in this story of people's capacity for being awful.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I think that Rodríguez absolutely has the right of it here. Animal communication is "simple" in human terms, but is quite rich on its own terms. To anybody who spends quality time with animals in their own comfort zones, it is utterly damned obvious that many animals experience and are entirely competent at communicating love, friendship, curiosity, jealousy, covetousness, and many other thoughts/feelings -- and, also, that they are just as able to blur species boundaries as we are. There are varying levels of complexity to this: snakes are too simple-minded to have a sense of humour, for example, but foxes _definitely_ do. Fox humour isn't the same as human humour, but when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you, there's enough overlap for an intersubjectively meaningful exchange to take place.

I think that science's unwillingness to acknowledge this has multiple roots.

The first is a religious relict of wanting to put Man at the centre of the universe. Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata. This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise. But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.

The second is the scientific requirement for experimental controls and reproducibility, which is easiest to do in a laboratory. If animals really were automata, running on instinct, then that would be fine. But they're (mostly) social creatures, formed through interaction as much as we are. If your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you'd form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of. Ultimately, there's no way to to get a proper understanding of humans in a non-subjective capacity. Same goes for animals.

<comment><USER4> > when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you

The _op_ is actually part of the word for human, anthrop·os.

Substituting "fox" in for "human", you'd get "alopecomorphize".

<comment><USER5> You know, you are undoubtedly technically correct, but I really love the use of foxopomorphize. Something about it just so perfectly encapsulates the OP's point about foxes and humans sharing a joke across species boundaries, in the way that "alopecomorphize" does not. I say leave it.

<comment><USER4> Alopecomorphize suffers from the fact that nobody knows the ancient Greek word for fox. I had to look it up. (And I left the comment for other people like me, who might wonder.) You could put the whole thing into a more recognizable Latinate form, "vulpiformify", but then you completely lose the parallel to "anthropomorphize".

I doubt "arachnomorphize" would have the same issues, though.

<comment><USER5> Although I still prefer OP's version, I do appreciate you leaving your comment, because there was a small part of me that did wonder what the correct version of foxomorphize was, and now I don't have to. Also, points for "vulpiformify" as a mid-grade poor man's alopecomorphize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would definitely not say "raised". He lived, and interacted with, humans until he was 7, which is around the age you enter school. At 7, I suspect the average human is far more intellectually advanced than the average grown wolf, so I very much doubt that there was much "raising" going on.

<comment><USER7> I doubt most modern 7 year olds can forage for food effectively and provide effective shelter for themselve etc. So, he could have learned some extremely valuable skills for living in the wild from interacting with wolves. IMO, a reasonable proxy for being raised by.

Personally, I find his story extremely unlikely, but taken at face value it does not seem to be impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As interesting everhing of this is; I actually doubt that is the absolute truth as long there is no evidence.

</comment><comment><USER9> And now the wolf is extinct in Sierra Morena, ruthlessly killed by the hunting lobby in the last decades. It makes you think.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it's interesting to understand how feral children/adults adapt into society, as this gives a glimpse of what people are actually capable of learning in extreme niche cases.

I had done a fair bit of research on this topic in the past, out of sheer curiosity. Mostly to see determine what animalistic instincts are retained, if any at all, and how well someone can acclimate learning a language like English in different age brackets. Also to determine what the fine line between what human/animal instincts /intuition actually were. As you get older, it becomes much more difficult to learn new things, due to new stigmas associated with things you had learned previously. You have to unlearn just as much as you have to learn _(e.g. smarter everyday, riding bike backwards)_. I would watch videos on this topic, gauging effectiveness of speech information rate VS years of learning based on how long someone has lived in animalistic captivity.

I compared this with people who had been born without vision or sight growing up, or if it was lost later in life. Whether learning to speak without ever hearing a word spoken was possible. Extreme examples would be things like Helen Keller, amongst others. Using niche cases like these is one of the best ways to validate a theory, as there are less unknowns and its in a more controlled environment. Its qualitative research over quantitative

On the other end of the spectrum, I would research things on child prodigies. People who were austic savants and prodigies in music, or were off the scale in what was considered average.

On another spectrum would be prisoners of war, during WWII and the effects of solitary confinement / deprived senses for extended periods of time and its effect on human psychology. I wanted to compare the effects of PTSD studies and how this compares to feral humans / PTSD research here.

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The research was mostly just my obsession over optimization of learning patterns & discovery of learning antipatterns. I wanted to validate what was truly effective and what was not, based on actual research with extreme examples, and narrowing it to down what I personally found works for me, and basing it on different personality traits found in myer-briggs/disc/etc.

I don't even remember all the impliciations of this research I did. I would read psychology papers/books on these topics and compare it with things in DSM. Learn about linguistics, etc. Spent 2 months interested on this given topic. I narrowed it down to 2 distinctive methods of thinking, with potential subsystems inside of those. The first being fast, e.g. recognizing someone you've seen before, simulated mostly by sensory information. The latter being triggered as a result, based on "slower" iterative thought processes.

And I would test to see the limitations of expanding the "slower" approach by seeing how much information I could cram in short term, e.g. how many words could I memorize short term with a memory palace. It was only like 10 words/locations at best, for one given type of application. Meaning I could remember at most, 10 todolists for a given day if I really made an attempt, but it became extremely difficult to do.

With this system of (faster) thinking, I was curious how someone who lacks one sensory resource (sight) and is able to compensate elsewhere (sound). People who are blind generally process audio information at a much higher rate, if you ever watch a programmers NVDA speech program the number of words it spits out is incomprensible to most people to understand.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

I would conduct studies on myself, seeing if I could apply these same principles, in speedwatching youtube videos with captions, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. I would be obsessed with learning about speedreading, shorthand notetaking, incremental reading, among other things. I ran tests on myself to see if I would watch 2 videos at the same time, one with captions at 2x speed, the other at normal playback rate with audio, and see if I could comprehend both well enough.

I have always been interested on how people like Tom Scott are able to do a 5 minute video shot in one take, without ever reading a script. Or how book writers like stephen king or brandon sanderson are able to generate these unique works of worldbuilding art, in book format. I would also learn things like memory palaces/competitions, chess champions, speed math competitions, and space repetition learning.

I'm starting to read a book called "Thinking fast and slow". It describes everything that I had tried to formulate in words.

<comment><USER11> I would also recommend reading Why We Sleep from Matthew walker. It has a lot of in depth information about how are memory works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What clickbait nonsense. Do people really believe this? Are people this naive?

He was raised by humans at least to the age of 7. Then he was "abandoned" and he lived by "himself" in heavily populated spain? A few miles from cordoba, madrid and other spanish cities? He wasn't raised by wolves. He lived near wolves. Using this logic, everyone in spain was "raised by wolves".

Aren't journalists supposed to be skeptical? Aren't extraordinary claims supposed to demand extraordinary evidence?

This article is on par with history channel's aliens built pyramids.

I walked through central park when I was younger. I guess that means I was raised by squirrels.

<comment><USER13> I especially doubt so much the anecdote about the she-wolf that fed him like Mowgli ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcBAI6iOn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcBAI6iOn0)). That's just what people want to hear and is totally in tune with the guy that seeks social acceptance.

Not to mention that people are in strong demand with "nature is so cool", and "human are evil" narratives where it totally fits.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. It's obvious that these claims are lies or at the very least exaggerated. And if they aren't lies, then we should be demanding real evidence. I don't get why people are downvoting me. Of all places, you would think that HN would be where skepticism reigns supreme.

<comment><USER3> That's not how skepticism works. A cursory search reveals that his case is quite well-attested to since the early 1970s, and the verifiable facts are not in dispute. What happened when he was alone in the wilderness is _not_ verifiable, so "I won't believe it without evidence!" is a hollow and useless bellow. There are many situations in which evidence will never be available -- there were no webcams set up to observe wolf-child interactions in the mountains of Spain in the 1950s -- but that doesn't mean its untrue. A skeptical mind, in such cases, needs to rely on other faculties rather than complain about a lack of evidence.

<comment><USER13> I agree the lack of evidence doesn't mean it's untrue. But it doesn't mean it's true either. So here we have to believe the story of a man. Some people do, some don't...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Was hoping it was Eddie Izzard - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKF_H_9AnAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKF_H_9AnAY)</comment>


Free will under threat: humans are at risk of becoming wards of technologists - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/free-will-under-threat-how-humans-are-at-risk-of-becoming-wards-of-technologists-1.5540390 <comment><USER2> Are we Turing machines? :|</comment>


CERN's iPod-like control devices, from 1973 - <AUTHOR> https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2018/02/cerns-ipod-like-control-devices-from.html <comment><USER2> May just invalidate a few patents..

<comment><USER3> I read the paper and I'm trying to figure out what "iPod-like" means, and what patents you think might be broken.

Could you elaborate?</comment></comment>


Canada and science: NRC will now only do science that promotes "economic gain" - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/05/13/canada_and_science_nrc_will_now_only_do_science_that_promotes_economic_gain.html <comment><USER2> A note for the non-Canadians reading this: NRC is a government agency which does "in-house" research, but it is distinct from NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, which provide funding (almost exclusively via universities) for research into the sciences-and-engineering, social sciences, and health.

I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that _all_ government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> From Galileo to WW2, science progressed at an amazing pace with little and sporadic government support (mostly in the way of prizes). Then governments stepped in and started throwing insane amounts of money at research projects - who was going to say no? Now everyone's addicted to public funds, and waking up to the realization that who pays the piper calls the tune.

<comment><USER4> Through that entire time, the cost of every incremental discovery has increased exponentially. It's not that people are addicted to public research funds, it's that it's no longer possible to do experimentally-rigorous science without massive amounts of money.

You see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.

<comment><USER3> There are several good reasons to reject the argument that costs make massive government intervention necessary.

First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway.

Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics. Many, if not most projects these days can be conducted with a few graduate students / postdocs, who are paid close to minumum wage and use existing equipment. Still, this kind of "cheap" research is nonetheless conducted overwhelmingly with government funds.

Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.). The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment.

Finally, increased costs are also a symptom of lack of innovation [1]. Maybe we're just on the final legs of existing logistic curves and have no new ones to latch on to?

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations>

<comment><USER5> Those aren't good reasons, and at the risk of sounding more patronizing than I would prefer, I suspect that you aren't very well acquainted with the research world outside of Math/CS.

> First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in > Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed > through private means anyway.

100% of the research done x number of years ago was funded using the funding methods of x years ago; the existence of successes is no indicator of the efficiency of the process. Plenty of alchemists threw their funding away on projects that would never meet the standards demanded by the NSF, NIH, and DOD.

We both know that science funding would fall precipitously if it were left to the private sector. Do you really think that money would go to a better use?

> Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment > is small, and mostly confined to physics.

This is the reason why I accused you of not being well acquainted with modern research. The set of subjects in which science is cheap looks more like {CS, Math} than ~{Physics}. Chemists have to buy (pay the depreciation of, if you insist) their spectrometers (NMR, IR, mass), chromatographs, calorimeters, Schlenk lines, proprietary reagents, and gloveboxes. Biologists rely on sequencers, synthesizers, designer enzymes & antibodies, synchrotrons (monochromatic X-ray sources for crystallography), nanofab tools for microfluidics (all insanely expensive because of the semiconductor industry), patch clamps, and a million specialized commercial assays and imaging techniques. Astronomers depend on tons of custom made hardware: mirrors, specialized ASICs/FPGAs/CCDs, lenses, buildings in the most inhospitable places on earth, not to mention their space platforms. Ecologists and geologists need to travel to exotic locations almost by definition (requiring specialized transport & shelter) to set up sensor networks and the like.

Although data-crunching is important, it doesn't even constitute the bulk of the scientific process. You can't replace academia with a bunch of weekend- warriors on laptops (outside of CS, that is).

> Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the > past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but > rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, > Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.).

Theorists have the most impressive long-term returns. By definition, they define their fields. This says very little about science in general or the utility of intermediate physical results, which inevitably guide the development of the underlying theories. Thought alone can't tell you which theories are right; at some point you have to test them. Einstein would have been ridiculed had it not been for the availability of ludicrously precise measurements of Mercury's precession and the Michelson-Morley experiment, both of which failed to match any metric of usefulness before their importance was understood. Darwin was inspired by his travels and Maxwell essentially had the E&M problem dropped in his lap by the experimentalists. Quantum Mechanics managed to derive macroscopically useful results (MO theory, semiconductor & condensed matter models, etc) by puzzling over observed atomic spectra. Who would have wondered why the rainbow had holes in it if nobody bothered to go look? Nobody.

The "huh?" always precedes the theoretical explanation and the "huh?" usually comes from experiment, as well as countless guiding nudges along the way that eliminate possible explanations. Theory & experiment exist symbiotically. I don't think focusing on theory to the exclusion of experiment will benefit science as a whole.

> The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not > conducive to a similar environment.

Agreed, but I'm pretty sure the process of begging money off of rich individuals is even less conductive to scientific progress. Grant committees are much less susceptible to buzzwords & unrealistic promises than uninformed* private investors and even so they sometimes falter. NSF = due dilligence. It sucks, but someone has to do it, and I'm not convinced that the private sector could do it cheaper/better, given that it doesn't have any incentive to: science yields much more favorable ROI to society than individuals because the goods it produces aren't excludable and take 100 years to perform a proper valuation on.

* = not an expert in everything, I don't mean to imply investors are stupid.

> Finally, increased costs are also a symptom of lack of innovation [1]. Maybe > we're just on the final legs of existing logistic curves and have no new > ones to latch on to?

That's exactly the case. It's also _usually_ the case. When a breakthrough happens it only takes 5-10 years to climb the curve you linked to (I'm basing this claim off of the development of QM). The academic world has an extraordinary capacity for innovation (and not in the "look I built a CRUD app that makes somebody's life infinitesimally easier" sense of the word), although this capacity typically goes unappreciated due to the 99.9% failure rate of experiments conducted in the interim between periods of readily available low-hanging fruit (where failure := negative ROI). It's unfortunate that breakthroughs happen much less frequently than every 5-10 years but there really isn't any way to shortcut the process, at least not one I can think of (and not one that any of the world's experts in the field can think of, else they would simply go pursue that line of inquiry on their own).

I don't think defunding America's scinetific apparatus would accelerate scientific progress and I think we would run a terrible risk of handing the next wave of industrial dominance to China & India if we tried. They're rapidly catching up in terms of publication counts/funding and it's no secret that new industries are born out of academic discoveries and that early entry into a new market conveys a huge advantage. The bulk of the spoils go to the victor, so I desperately hope the USA stays in the race.

<comment><USER3> Don't worry, I wasn't proposing to cut funding. My point was simply that, if government hadn't taken over research since the 1940s, science would be in a better fundamental shape right now. Alas, that did not happen, and killing the NSF overnight is probably a worse cure than the disease. Also, science is first and foremost a possession of humanity as a whole, not a tool of industrial domination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a Canadian, this makes me extremely sad. I always saw Canada as progressive ... hopefully the next government will flip this around.

<comment><USER7> The next government will flip it around, and use NRC to further THEIR ends. Please forgive my cynicism, but the act of thinking that one political party is "better" than the other is a triumph of optimism over experience.

<comment><USER8> It is actually possible for one party to be "better" than another. In this case, we are talking about science, and it is very obvious that limiting science in this way is "worse." Science doesn't respect your political bias.

<comment><USER7> I was not addressing the possibility of impartial administration of research funding. I was merely stating that, given the record of Canadian (and other) governments, impartiality is unlikely, regardless of party affiliation.

I should also state that any budget is, by definition limited, as it is an allocation of scarce resources; so any budget will "limit science".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a pretty thinly veiled attempt to defund climate science.

<comment><USER10> If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.

<comment><USER11> The Cons have never been overly concerned about collateral damage. (And have been stung by government-critical environmental findings enough times as-is.)

It's a government that's made it explicit that it does not govern on the basis of scientific findings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Canada have also sold out public museums.. they'll only cover topics approved by the current in-power government, making them the definition of the ministry of truth.

<comment><USER13> _Canada have also sold out public museums.._

Do you have any citation or source for this?

<comment><USER12> Sure, take your pick.

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of- civil...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of-civilization- to-change-name-focus-only-on-canadian-history/article4611129/)

[http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_e...](http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_ends_history_begins_at_canadas_biggest_museum.html)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper- conservatives...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper- conservatives-canadian-history_n_3208625.html)

[http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment- harper-s-...](http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-s- tories-aim-to-whitewash-canadian-history-1.147710)

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa- canadian-museum-civilization-becomes-canadian-museum-history.html)

<comment><USER13> They are all concerning the same action regarding the Ottawa Museum of Civilization. I wasn't sure about the claim that they sold out "public museums", when the vast majority of Canadian museums are not at the federal level, and have zero accountability of concern about the federal government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If research is done purely in the private sector, then how do the research findings make it into the wider scientific community? Especially if the processes become patented. There is no communal well of scientific knowledge to draw from.

</comment><comment><USER15> I find it interesting that sentence in the article that the title is taken from actually says 'they will only perform research that has "social or economic gain"'. A bit of a change. That sentence is a hyperlink to the following article: [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research- counci...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-councils- makeover-leaves-industry-setting-the-agenda/article11745246/)

</comment><comment><USER16> As a Canadian ... how are the broadband speeds in New Zealand these days?

<comment><USER17> Not amazing when I visited there last year. Stick to the larger cities and you should be fine, though. If you are on the West Coast of Canada, I'd highly recommend moving before October, 2014 -- that's when higher concentrations of Caesium-137 (from Fukushima) are predicted to strike our coastal waters.

<comment><USER18> Citations or sources please?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's like Stephen Harper knows he's running out of time, and he's trying to screw up as many remaining parts of the Canadian federal government as he can before the end.

</comment><comment><USER20> This isn't limited to the Canadian government. Try to get a STEM paper published in a respectable venue in any field that has no appreciable economic utility. Nobody cares about finding things out simply because they are interesting (at least not enough to do something about it), they all have to have an obvious application that generates money.

Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.

</comment><comment><USER21> Governments should only fund science that doesn't promote immediate economic gain - such economic gain will fund itself.

Government funding should be un-economic.

<comment><USER22> that's a cute thought. How do you, then pick which projects aren't run by total charlatans - to fund them? I suppose you could have grant review boards. But these grant review boards are then populated with other 'expert scientists' who are merely people who were funded by the exact same process. Eventually the whole thing becomes a cyclical echo chamber populated by an elite cadre of politically connected scientists, who, because of perverse, monetary or non-monetary incentives (such as status), performance might be unhinged from any character traits actually important to science, like ability to craft smart experiments, ability to pick up scientific insight, or ability to do experiments without fudging data.

<comment><USER21> I'm not exactly sure if that's different from current academia :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they've been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success."

The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process.

What they _did_ do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is _horrendous_ at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly.

If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet- style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.

<comment><USER23> Yes exactly, it was all about glory-chasing who just wanted to see their names in print. It had nothing to do with climate and environmental scientists warning of the impact of governmental policies when their studies and models fell on deaf ears.

Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create.

I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.

<comment><USER13> _Experimental Lakes project?_

Your best example of the oil agenda of the government is a very long running project having nothing to do with global warming or the oil industry at all? The other one -- an arctic station built to monitor the ozone layer -- provides zero scientific measurements that aren't replicated a thousand times over by many other arctic measurement stations, but maybe that'll hide global warming?

Good stuff.

Sarcasm, a bit of a conspiratorial closing note (such a nice way of offering a counterpoint). Absolutely _nothing_ proving anything.

And yes, I __despise __political-agenda driven bullshit, which is just incredibly common in Canadian politics. The misinformation and vilification for anything and everything grows tiring to anyone with a concern for discerning reality from fantasy.

<comment><USER24> Oh for heaven's sake. The NRCC is _run_ by a non-academic oil engineer raised in Edmonton. They could have chosen almost anyone -- a university president, e.g., or even, god forbid, someone -- anyone -- with a PhD.

But they didn't. It's a conspiracy, but not the secret kind.

<comment><USER13> _They could have chosen almost anyone -- a university president, e.g., or even, god forbid, someone -- anyone -- with a PhD._

Or maybe a petroleum engineer with an excellent CV and a long list of successes, most recently on environmental efforts (CO2 recapture).

This is the same _garbage_ that has people ranting about the credentials of federal ministers (hey wait...you did that as well) when the position has never, ever, in the history of Canada, demanded specific skills for the role, and instead is a leadership and reporting position.

<comment><USER24> > and instead is a leadership and reporting position.

You're absolutely right in that the specific technical skills associated with having a PhD in, say, physics, or math, or even (heck) engineering have little to no bearing whatsoever on what the person at the top of the organization will do during their tenure.

But there are more things learned during a PhD than a bunch of technical skills. You might learn something, e.g., about the very nature of scientific inquiry. About the nature of the challenges of collecting and analyzing scientific data. About explaining complicated research to a lay audience. About trying to convince higher-ups of the scientific merits of a project even when said merits are subtle. About why something qualifies as "science" while something else doesn't -- and knowing the difference between the two decidedly _does_ matter when you're in a leadership position.

"'Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value,' John McDougall, president of the NRC."

... I don't think John Holdren would have said this. Indeed I think one would be hard pressed to find anyone with a PhD who would say this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squiggles what Faraday had discovered. And Faraday's claim to fame was working for Davy, doing things like inventing electric motors and lamps. So if you want to use that history as an example, it says applications come first, and hypotheses and research papers and scientific conferences and the rest of that crap are just the documentation of the new invention.

<comment><USER26> _Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...]_

Maxwell "invented" the displacement current:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current>

<comment><USER5> The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter.

It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!

<comment><USER25> No, the application comes _first_ , the theory follows.

I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first.

Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis".

They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't _grounded_ in anything.

In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a _real_ problem. Because who cares about applications, right?

The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.

<comment><USER27> > The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while > the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's > supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.

No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with.

This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things _really_ happen.

Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them.

So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.

<comment><USER25> _save you from dying of hunger_

The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so _damn badly informed_. There's a whole field called _History of Science and Technology_ about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it.

 _So stop spreading disinformation_

I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often _don't give a shit_ about applications. They care about getting _publications_ and about getting _tenure_.

Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually _make_ , which will be _helpful_ for _Aunt Tillie_ , which she actually might be able to _buy_ in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.

<comment><USER27> > The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses.

Are you trying to sound like an idiot? Don't be so narrow minded.

> Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop > being so damn badly informed.

This is a very typical argumentation failure. I make a statement where specifics of the examples are entirely irrelevant to the point, and you cherry pick one of them and throw some info about it that you presume I'm not aware of. You then go whole hog straw-man, trying to tear me down over the apparent ignorance, which you manufactured. Yet, it remains that you _missed the entire fucking point_. Let me get my crayons out: Academia does research into many, many problems, and some of it is 'pure', meaning there is no accompanying application. Some other research _does_ have immediate applications. Nevertheless, research is a highly complex process, but has tremendous value... _beyond it's immediate commercial ramifications_. This is why people are complaining about the NRC's recent claims, which are bullshit.

>I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure.

I'll grant you that some, even many, academics are highly driven by things like publications, fundable research and tenure. However, if you'd had any experience in academia (and kept your eyes open!) you would have seen that this is merely a circumstantial hoop, and often times the top level academics who are doing this are also the ones get the funding to allow all sorts of other research to continue for its own sake. Sometimes applications come early, sometimes not. You're being naive to think that all academics are simply giving us 'the run around'.

> If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be > helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her > local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go > on, try it. I dare you.

And he would be correct to do so. Getting something into the shop for people to buy is not the job of academia. Go buy a year supply of ramen noodles and drop out of that's what you want to do. You may not _like_ it, but science actually, really does have a theoretical component to it, and a lot of your fancy shit (which you bought in stores) is the direct result of people using academic research. If you can't understand that, then you're the one who is badly informed.

<comment><USER25> _Are you trying to sound like an idiot?_

No, but YOU are succeeding.

 _And he would be correct to do so_

Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.

Getting something into the shop for people to buy is _deployment_. Deployment is how science _started_. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.

This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.

Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since it hasn't been tested so it is not known what it's true costs are and whether the assumptions behind it are even valid. The only reason for pure theory to even be allowed to exist is because it might lead to application in future, but science has become so corrupt that the dominating majority of the "scientific" output is stupid theory, and actual application gets no respect at all, or as you say "is not the job of academia".

The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and _engineering_ fields, where engineering specifically meant application. But now you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if you're in the engineering department.

I'll give you one of many concrete examples. Design for manufacture for antennas could really help improve wireless internet, if you could get handset antennas to narrowcast data instead of broadcasting it, thereby avoiding interference. Try pitching that to a Professor and you'll get shot down.

Next, try AI-based packet scheduling and collision prediction for wireless handsets. The topic is a complete fraud, because you have no idea when the other handset is going to transmit without knowing the future. But you can get lots of Greek squiggles out of that topic, so you'll get greenlighted.

 _and often times the top level academics_

So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not _top level_ academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count... You love your No True Scotsman fallacies, don't you?

<comment><USER27> > No, but YOU are succeeding.

You actually just used the "No YOU'RE stupid!" retort. I'm afraid I'm not the one making sweeping generalizations like "the work of everyone else is irrelevant" when speaking about the development of global agriculture.

There are so many things in your post I want to respond to I don't even know where to begin.

> Bingo! There you go, sounding like an idiot and proving my point.

All you've done is quoted me disagreeing with you and then called me an idiot. And pray tell, what exactly _is_ your point? That deployment is all that matters? This is a pretty common sentiment among engineers... that the general edification of the human race is not a worthwhile endeavor. You know, to become smarter and better people, in addition to building bridges? Unfortunately a lot of the rest of the educated world seems to disagree.

>Getting something into the shop for people to buy is deployment. Deployment is how science started. Look up Archimedes, because he was the guy who started math and physics, building siege engines to defeat the Roman navy. Oh yeah, and medicine and biology started with Imhotep and also the Sassanid hospital system.

What does this have to do with deployment vs. theory? You're giving examples where those people worked on what you call deployment. I'm sure they also worked on theory, because you don't know what theory is going to be deployable until you work on it. Even if those guys were pure engineers, and never worked on theoretical matters, how does what some guy decided to do in triple digits BC have to do with what the NRC should/shouldn't fund now? Nothing.

> This crap ideology you are pushing only came about relatively recently, and > I don't remember anyone asking the taxpayers about it.

Okay just to be clear, what ideology is it that I'm pushing? That theoretical work can have some intrinsic value? People have been working on theoretical pursuits for a long time.

> Something that only exists on paper is no good to anyone, especially since > it hasn't been tested

Do you seriously propose to know what could come of every piece of theoretical work that could be? No? Well then you also don't know what is and is not of value. Do you disagree with that? Please explain. Also, you seem to be talking about pure theory ("hasn't been tested") on one hand, and on the other hand speaking about unproven technical work (such as AI packet inspection) that has a theoretical bent. Do you think that literally everything that is not yet working and sold is useless? I doubt you do.

>The corruption has gone even further, because there used to be a division between scientific fields and engineering fields

What you're seeing is engineers intelligently realizing that there is more to engineering that just jumping right into the lab.

> you can get the same "That's not SCIENCE" bullshit from Professors even if > you're in the engineering department.

It sounds to me like you've had some experience asking professors to let you build something you wanted to build just because you wanted to, and they told you no, so you're angry about it. I have never heard a professor exclaim "That's not SCIENCE!" to any reasonable request. That doesn't mean I haven't heard them say "No.", but I'm sure some other folks here on HN could tune in (if anybody was still reading this thread) and back up my feeling that this sounds like fiction.

>I'll give you one of many concrete examples

I don't know anything about your specific examples, so I can't speak to the details. However, are you claiming that the antenna idea is a sure thing and needs development, yet has been shot down (you've tried?) by many professors (surely you wouldn't characterize all of science based on your experience with one person...) simply because it's not theoretical enough? That hardly seems likely.

> So if there's a problem with academics it's because they're not top level > academics, and somehow only the tiny percentage who are top level count...

Erm... I don't think you understood what I said. I said that perhaps the top level academics, who often run labs full of many other academics, are highly driven by the publish-or-perish game because that is how they get funding, and without funding NO research gets done, applied or theoretical. I don't think there's any logical problem with what I said.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sweden Has a 70 Percent Tax Rate and It Is Fine - <AUTHOR> https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/01/05/sweden-has-a-70-percent-tax-rate-and-it-is-fine/ <comment><USER3> Former Scandinavia resident here (Oslo).

There are some very strong reasons why this works in the region and not elsewhere.

1) The country has a small and closely connected population. Policy makers have a very close dialogue with their populace. It helps ensure that people see the benefit of their taxes.

2) They're socially and similarly well educated and adjusted. When people are raised with similar values, it's much easier for them to come to consensus, in this example, on how to spend tax revenue.

3) The wealthy upper class don't need much salary, they're already rich and taxed more on capital gains. So a 70% income tax actually helps protect their place in society.

The 'Sweden has it, we should too' is really weak honestly. We can learn a lot from them but ours is a very different situation.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't really follow that tax policy should be different because a diverse population disagrees more. With the exception of point 3 (which actually does apply to the US as well) you could make this argument about any policy.

<comment><USER5> > It doesn't really follow that tax policy should be different because a > diverse population disagrees more.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that people are more okay with giving the government more control of their money in societies where people tend to be similarly situated and have similar values.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't overestimate homogeneity as a reason for the Swedish welfare state. The strong Swedish state probably goes back to the nationalization, and later decreased influence, of the Swedish church. That standing was later used by the Social Democrats (among others) to reform Sweden to a welfare state. Today, as those ideas are becoming less popular it is relatively apparent that Swedes don't give a shit about each other more than anyone else. The political parties can't even form a government since the last election.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems strange to me that so much focus of tax is on labor (directly taking a chunk of what people 'earn' by actually working), vs tax on capital gains and profits (what some people 'earn' simply by doing nothing).

I use the term 'earn' loosely, because IMHO, the amount of money people manage to direct their way is a result of a complex 'business model', and many other factors - I think it's way too simplistic to say that someone's gross income is 'theirs', and that taxes are taking 'their' money.

<comment><USER8> What's more surprising is that so little is on consumption.

<comment><USER4> Like sales tax or some other form? They're usually regressive taxes.

<comment><USER8> Nope, they're usually flat taxes.

<comment><USER4> Flat taxes are regressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a Swede, it is interesting to see people using Sweden's tax policies for arguments without fully following the studies on our tax policies. There are studies showing that the highest margin taxes in Sweden actually lose more money than they make, due to dynamic effects. In other words, Sweden is far to the right on the Laffer curve.

Even low and medium income people – for example, assistant nurses straight out of school – pay half of their wages in tax – even at the 2000 USD post-tax a month range.

And since the 20% margin tax on top of that kicks in already at the equivalent of ~50k USD a year »pre-tax«, this creates a situation where it is very hard to build capital just by working. Basically, you can only get wealthy by:

* Earning money with money (tax on capital is a flat 30% - or potentially even way less, if you use a special savings account),

* Founding the next iZettle or creating the next Minecraft,

* Or have bought real estate when it was 50-90% cheaper (that is, 5+ years ago).

In practice, this creates a system which hampers class mobility in Sweden. Even if you are in top 1% of wages, it will take decades for you to catch up to the capital gains of someone who bought an apartment close to Stockholm five years ago.

So perhaps it's safer to say that Sweden is fine _despite_ our 70% tax.

<comment><USER6> What you are saying is fairly correct, but I don't agree with your conclusions.

> There are studies showing that the highest margin taxes in Sweden actually > lose more money than they make, due to dynamic effects. In other words, > Sweden is far to the right on the Laffer curve.

Progressive taxation isn't merely about tax revenue, but income equality. You can't have a welfare state without much of the population being in "the middle".

> And since the 20% margin tax on top of that kicks in already at the > equivalent of ~50k USD a year »pre-tax«, this creates a situation where it > is very hard to build capital just by working.

That is true, but ignores the fact that it is simply also hard to make a lot of money. It wouldn't be unreasonable to be able to save €30k a year as a high income earner in Sweden. That isn't rich rich, but certainly wealthy.

> Earning money with money (tax on capital is a flat 30% - or potentially even > way less [...] Or have bought real estate when it was 50-90% cheaper (that > is, 5+ years ago). [...] In practice, this creates a system which hampers > class mobility in Sweden. Even if you are in top 1% of wages, it will take > decades for you to catch up to the capital gains of someone who bought an > apartment close to Stockholm five years ago.

I agree that this is a huge problem. But I find it very unlikely that you would solve this by lowering the top tax rate. Most people who make money from capital would already be, or put themselves, in such a position. I would support lowering taxes on work in general and increasing taxes on capital, inheritance, loans etc. But that is unlikely to happen.

Basically I don't think the tax rate is unreasonable, but the low taxes on and high cost of e.g. housing definitely is. This is just a problem a problem with earning as much as someone who bought an apartment 5+ years ago, but if you don't own an apartment (or got into the housing market later) you will be paying 2x-3x what they are doing for housing while you are trying to catch up.

I would move from Sweden for this reason if it wasn't for wanting to be close to my family.

(And personally I wouldn't call Sweden fine from a wealth equality perspective).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recent discussion about a software developer's take on living in Sweden [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18799643) and one Swedes opinion of the high tax rate [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800067).

That discussion was mostly focused on taxpayer funded healthcare, but a few Swedes estimate that half the population feels that the high tax rate is not fine.

<comment><USER11> > a few Swedes estimate that half the population feels that the high tax rate > is not fine.

So the tax rate is the median of the tax rates that people find fine? A perfect balance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was taking a tour in Sweden, they showed me a neighborhood in Stockholm (I forget the name) and said "that's the apartments of the richest Swedes, but they don't live there, all the richest Swedes live outside Sweden".

<comment><USER13> Which is an anecdote that means exactly nothing. For example all the richest apartments and houses in London and Sydney are often owned by people who live outside the respective country. There's nothing in your story that indicates tax rate is the reason for the behaviour.

<comment><USER14> To nitpick a bit, it is true that the richest apartments in London and Sydney are often owned by people who live outside England or Australia. But that is not evidence that "the richest Britons" live outside England; it can easily be the case that the richest Britons are happy to stay in Britain and the richest apartments are owned by a class of foreigners richer than the richest Britons.

Whereas, if all the richest Swedes live outside Sweden, that does tend to suggest that something made them move. (And doesn't suggest that the apartments they maintain _in absentia_ are the richest apartments.) The default for Swedes is to live in Sweden.

<comment><USER6> > Whereas, if all the richest Swedes live outside Sweden, that does tend to > suggest that something made them move.

Not really, at least not in the way I assume you are thinking. In a small country, of course someone who has international success if going to be wealthier than someone who only has domestic success a lot of the time.

<comment><USER14> So what? Someone with international success can still only live in one place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Born in Sweden and I am not fine with it. There are some good things like free education and healthcare - especially compared to healthcare in US - <USER2> there's enormous waste on maintaining the welfare state.

I recently moved away, partly due to taxes and partly for other reasons. I doubt most people with high incomes are fine with it, but the price for exit is expensive.

For me it was only doable because I spent most of my time abroad anyway, my work is international and I am young and flexible.

If you are a Swede considering moving, make sure you don't have significant economic ties with Sweden after moving out. For example, I had to liquidate my Swedish LLC to prove that I had no significant business in Sweden anymore (which was already the case, but IRS can be rather...precise).

A tax lawyer can easily help with this, and it is easily worth the one time cost if you are on a high income.

<comment><USER6> I have made that calculation and it hasn't really been that convincing for me. If you are moving for opportunities, including say career or housing, that is one thing. But in pure tax, the difference really isn't that big between similar countries. Even in a properly low tax country, your additional income might increase €20k a year. Is that worth giving up everything you know for? Probably not in isolation.

Maybe I will move someday, but it won't be because of taxes.

<comment><USER15> You are right, it doesn't make sense if you want to live in Sweden. For me, I had already spent years living abroad in various places, so effectively it wasn't that big of a deal.

FWIW it ended up being a lot more than 20k/y for me, but YMMW.

<comment><USER6> Presumably you are able to charge more than the average high income earner. Because usually an employer would pay maybe 70k SEK a month and the employee would get half of that after taxes, but that also includes pension. So in a low tax country you might pay 10% tax and then 15% in pension which leaves you with ~15k SEK more a month. Which could certainly pay for a nice life, but isn't mind blowing.

On the other hand if I lived abroad I wouldn't "pay" 15k SEK a month to live in Sweden. In fact, I probably wouldn't move back to Sweden at all because of the increasing lack of quality of life. Which ironically makes it even harder to move in the first place, since I would have to commit to living abroad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Notably, tax records are also kind of public:

> In Sweden, a single anonymous telephone call to the tax authority is enough > to find out what someone has paid. Almost all income tax details are public > and Swedish tabloids often publish lists of the highest earners in different > neighborhoods, and who paid the most tax each year.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-nordics- idUSKC...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-nordics- idUSKCN0X91QE)

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting, but the article begs the question without answering it: if employer-side payroll taxes should count as part of the employee's tax rate (and I agree that it should), what is America's real rate? Also, unrelated, how do our utility and estate taxes compare? Sales and VAT? Regulatory costs passed along into the final price of consumer goods? Capital gains paid on retirement savings? There are a lot of variables, and if we're going to acknowledge complexity in making comparisons, we should try to really ferret out all of them.

<comment><USER18> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rev...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio?wprov=sfla1)

Sweden is 49.8% the US is 26%

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another fact worth pointing out in this discussion is that Sweden is doing great as a country, which makes it easier to maintain a high tax rate.

The blue graph is inflation-adjusted disposable household income from 1950 to 2017:

[https://www.ekonomifakta.se/fakta/ekonomi/hushallens- ekonomi...](https://www.ekonomifakta.se/fakta/ekonomi/hushallens- ekonomi/hushallens-inkomster/)

Note that the disposable income _doubled_ between 1997 and 2017. Also note that it is _median_ income, which means that the outlier richest 1% don't distort the numbers very much. The _average_ Swede doubled their disposable income in twenty years' time.

Compare those numbers to the US, where the same graph is pretty much flat, because the only people getting richer in the past few decades has been the 1%.

</comment><comment><USER20> If we were talking about generating similar level of services from taxes, it could be discussed.

Just to name two big ones, Sweden has free top rate healthcare and education. Imagine wiping out all student debt and health payments?!

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel like even if we had a 70% tax rate here in the US, our government services (nyc subways, for one) would still be deplorable. Maybe the Swedes could run our country better? :)

<comment><USER17> This was brought to light in that excellent NY Times piece several months back[0] about the relative cost of train line infrastructure in other countries. Even the ones with strong unions and first class living standards were able to get it done for a fraction of NYC estimates on even older urban topologies. Something is seriously rotten in American govt. spending, both in the public sector union agreements and private contracting oversight for why we seem to get so little for paying so much.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york- subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway- construction-costs.html)

<comment><USER22> Two competing factors:

(1) Organized crime is heavily involved in large scale construction and doesn't even have the ethos of doing a good job at it like in some other parts of the world. All it's about is funneling money from the municipality or state to the criminal enterprise, and only minimal effort is put forth for the ostensible purpose of a project.

(2) There has been an almost century long propaganda campaign in the United States specifically to make people believe Government cannot actually work in any meaningful capacity, by interests that ultimately want to dismantle it and distribute the spoils among themselves.

This intensified massively starting in the 1990s after the American right wing saw what happened to the Soviet Union's infrastructure during privatization. By systematically discrediting Government, they want to have the same thing happen via privatization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Have they ever had a lower tax rate? I mean, what if things would go much better have they 30% rate?

</comment><comment><USER24> If you include payroll tax and employer payroll tax (as this example does), then the US has been quite close to a 70% rate in recent years. When the top marginal income tax rate was 39.6, once you add the FICA and Medicare on both sides of about 15%, you are within reach.

Meanwhile, actually rich people are not paying FICA, or Medicare, or even income tax. Capital gains and dividends are taxed at far far lower rates.

<comment><USER25> You only pay FICA up to $127K currently....

<comment><USER26> Medicare is uncapped and adds 0.9% above 200K.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd feel more accepting of Sweden-level taxes if we spent the money like Sweden does, instead of spending trillions on questionable wars.

</comment><comment><USER5> The comparison between Ocasio-Cortez's proposal and Sweden's tax structure is misleading. As far as I know, Ocasio-Cortez is not espousing other key features of Sweden's tax system:

1) Top marginal rates that kick in at just $98,000, so the upper middle class bears a significant portion of the tax burden.

2) A 25% VAT, so that the middle class carriers a significant portion of the text burden. (The net result of this is that the average effective tax rate is effectively flat through the income spectrum.)

3) Low corporate taxes, almost the same as the U.S.'s after Trump's tax cuts (22% in Sweden, 21% in the U.S.).

</comment><comment><USER28> The heights marginal income tax rate in Sweden is 56% where the hell are they getting 70% from?

If they include things like VAT then yes, but a 20%> VAT is pretty much universal in Europe.

<comment><USER29> The tax mentioned in the title is the overall tax, not income tax only. The actual tax is actually closer to 90% per generated coin if you include the VAT.

<comment><USER28> Still seem to contradict OECD data [https://read.oecd- ilibrary.org/taxation/taxing-wages-2018_ta...](https://read.oecd- ilibrary.org/taxation/taxing-wages-2018_tax_wages-2018-en#page21)

<comment><USER29> Looking at the Sweden IRS pages, the tax on income is ~31%. Taxes (or "fees" as they call it) paid by the employer for each employee is also ~31%. Then add the VAT of 25%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And how many actually pay that rate?

Vs how many would if it was 40 or something non ridiculous?

In that income bracket you can live anywhere in the world. Could buy suite in Paris just on tax savings.

<comment><USER31> Well, if you read closely, the 70 rate is cutting to the sum above the threshold value. So if your salary is X + Y + Z, where X, Y, and Z are, respectably, the lower, middle and the high threshold values, the taxes you pay is something like

(X * alpha) + (Y * beta) + (Z * gamma)

and only `gamma` is 0.7, `alpha` is something like 0.35 and I assume `beta` is something in between.

So those who pay 70 percent taxes are already maxed out on the lower contributions in corresponding income range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Swedes in the US are materially better off than Swedes in Sweden, so you could say Sweden is doing pretty poorly.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm seeing a number of (well intentioned) people here raising the classic Randian argument of the morality of taxes, and several other points from her work _Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal_ , such as taxing consumption.

As a former Objectivist, all I can say (without writing an entire essay) is that there are logically sound and morally superior counter arguments against both of the above arguments, and in favor of limited forms of socialism.

I use the word 'limited socialism' because people (like me) who grew up during the Cold War tend to associate any socialist program with Soviet communism and totalitarianism.

</comment><comment><USER34> .

<comment><USER25> That's also a regressive tax poorer people spend more as a percentage of their income.

<comment><USER34> But poorer people will buy only groceries and cheap androids, all barely taxed.

<comment><USER25> If I made a $20K more than I make now, I doubt I would spend most of it. It would go to savings. If I was making $30K a year, I would probably use it to have a more comfortable lifestyle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It is not fine

There are many good reasons to live in Sweden but tax rate and winter are not among them

The marginal tax rate used to be over 100% in some cases and it is caused by too many years of too populistic socialism

Political economy has it tax rate should be no more than 50% and that corporate tax rates need to be far lower

populism has a problem with taxing workers, but real estate, workers and consumption should be taxed acc. to science. Middle class workers must be taxed because they are so many they steer the totals

In such calculations, per the article, worker taxes paid by employers need to be included as well as significant deductions

they also used to have a wealth tax causing the rausings/milk carton to move out and kamprad/ikea to claim religion. If your rich enough and have to pay 4% of your wealth you can never catch up and instead claim your living in Brussels yelling from your condo on Strandvagen

How you tax rich individuals depends whether they move or not. If they move, everbody lose. In the case of US, it is unlikely richies will leave because of tax rate, there is really nowhere to go with similar opportunities. Imagine Larry Page on punta del este: he'd be bored to death inside of a week

populism is a curse

</comment><comment><USER36> Comparing the US to Sweden is moronic, given the wide disparity between the two countries and the fundamentally different structures of their economies.

It's the worst kind of argument, a false equivalence.

<comment><USER37> Every time a discussion like this comes up I see a reply like this. Yet, it never offers a counter point, or suggestions on how to make things in the US work as well as they do in Sweden.

<comment><USER22> That's because it's a dogwhistle, not an actual argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> But how can you morally justify taking 70% of someone's income at threat of violence?

<comment><USER39> Not 70% of someone's income, just 70% of only the portion of any single person's income over $10,000,000 per year. Morally justified the same way all taxes are justified.

<comment><USER40> theft is never morally justified.

<comment><USER41> It's not theft, it's public policy. Threat of violence is how most public policy are enforced.

You don't have to agree to the laws of a democratic constitutional republic, but you sure do have to follow them.

<comment><USER40> not if they are unconstitutional, i don't.

<comment><USER31> Eighteenths amendment prohibited selling of alcoholic beverages nationwide. Would that be active today, would that stop you from buying beer?

<comment><USER42> Yes it would. Might not stop me from homebrewing though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested raising the top tax rate to 70 > percent in order to raise money to fund climate change investments. > Conservatives were dismayed by the proposal while liberals and leftists > generally defended the proposal by pointing to the fact that top tax rates > in the US were once 91 percent and by pointing to tax scholarship that says > rates that high (or even higher) are optimal.

Income != Wealth

We should just tax wealth directly. We already do it for real estate (ie property taxes).

Modern technology and finance makes taxing the average daily balance of bank accounts and stock/ETF/mutual fund holdings doable. If you tax the entity that is holding those assets across the board, you don't even have to worry about tax shelters or pass through corps. They'll have no choice but to pass on their hit upstream.

It's the ultimate progressive tax as the destitute have nothing and pay nothing.

<comment><USER27> It's not so great for retirees, though.

<comment><USER44> In those socialist European countries that doesn't really apply. Pension is supposed to be payed by the state, not by individual wealth built up during your work live (very different to the US). Whether that idea is sound is a different question, but that is how it kinda works ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Controlling Walking Direction Using Electrical Muscle Stimulation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://hci.uni-hannover.de/papers/pfeiffer2015CHICruise.pdf <comment><USER2> This seems both promising and creepy.

Could make walking somewhere a lot easier for the blind. Could be a safety system that kicks in just before your kid chases a ball into traffic (if strong enough). Could help with training for sports (if precise enough).

</comment><comment><USER3> Now combine it with transcutaneous electrical stimulation on the inner ear. In the past (2000s) there were more than a few studies show this could control walking direction of blindfolded participants too.</comment>


My fridge died. Fisher & Paykel charged $149 to tell me. Here's what I said. - <AUTHOR> Dear Fisher and Paykel consumer insights:
You have been sending me emails to ask my opinion but I would rather tell you in an email.
1: the Fisher and Paykel service person who came advised that my fridge is dead and needs replacing.
2: the fridge is probably only about 8 to 10 years old.
3: the service call from Fisher and Paykel cost me $149
 when someone finds out that their fridge is dead, they immediately are in the market for a new one.  Any clever company should know at this point that is knows what none of the other appliance companies know - i.e precisely who wants to buy a new fridge.  This is incredibly important information
 Fisher and Paykel has two key questions to ask itself at this point: "What does this consumer think about Fisher and Paykel right now?" "Will this consumer buy another Fisher and Paykel fridge?"
 The answers are likely to be: Well I am unhappy because my Fisher and Paykel fridge just died. I am even more unhappy because Fisher and Paykel charged me $149 to tell me my fridge had just died. I need a new fridge, and it cost an extra $149 because I got a service call first instead of immediately replacing the fridge.
My fridge should have lasted longer than 8 to 10 years but it's probably similar to the life of other such products in the 21st century.  It doesn't matter much to me. The answer to this question should matter ALOT to Fisher and Paykel.  Right now you know I need a new fridge and you also know that how I feel about Fisher and Paykel is either negative or neutral.  You should fix the relationship and give me incentive to buy again from you.
When Fisher and Paykel sends a service guy, who says the fridge is dead, Fisher and Paykel should charge me $0, not $149.  At this point Fisher and Paykel should offer me incentive to buy another Fisher and Paykel.
Right now I am out of pocket $149 and need a new fridge.  I'm thinking it probably won't be a Fisher and Paykel. <comment><AUTHOR> I post this here because there are such obvious business lessons in this situation.

So your client has just found out that your product has died and needs to be replaced .... do you charge them $149 and wave goodbye, or do you build upon your existing relationship with them and get them to buy from you again?

If you're running a startup hopefully the answers are obvious.

If you are a giant multinational company then you probably don't care so much.

<comment><USER2> Strategically, you charge them $149, then give them a discount on a new fridge that's $149 minus the actual cost of the service call.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I think it would be to their advantage to say, well you just paid $149 for the service call to hear your fridge is dead, and we love you so here is a $200 voucher towards your next Fisher and Paykel fridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi - I work at Fisher and Paykel and I'm sorry about your experience. We'd really like to dig into this more. We typically don't charge that for service and we do usually give a discount if someone wants to replace a product. I would totally be happy to look into this more. Can you email email@example.com and let us know a few more details about what occurred?</comment>