LWN: Comments on "Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone"

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

apoelstra — Sat, 04 May 2013 15:16:11 +0000

> This is a common argument, and you are quite right that people have been wrong about specific limits in the past, but to take that on to claim that there will be no physical limits ever seems to me to be pretty obviously wrong. You can't increase both population and consumption in a space of a defined size forever. Something has to give.

Well, at some point there will be so many people that nobody has room to move around and reproduce. I'm with the optimists here that we won't hit any "real" limits before this one -- roughly 1/3 of the earth's surface is solid land, while all of the earth's -volume- contains natural resources (the usual suspects, plus nuclear isotopes, plus geothermal energy, plus biomass...), and there is also ~1kW/m^2 of sunlight hitting half the planet at all times.

We don't even know what's at the bottom of the oceans, or what exactly is below the earth's crust.

And there are tons more resources in other parts of the solar system.

About the Slums Around the World

nim-nim — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:14:37 +0000

Medieval people had lots of free unspoiled nature space to draw from when they made mistakes. They could afford inefficiencies undreamed of in modern slums.

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

nim-nim — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:56:42 +0000

Yes, humans manage to extend limits sometimes. But it is not by far the general case. You can find the remains of people that didn't succeed on all continents, from ruined cities to once-rich now-desertified countryside. And once the world village integration is finished, there will be no one else to pick up the flag in case of extension failure.

It's foolish to assume problems just solve themselves.

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

wookey — Thu, 02 May 2013 10:12:15 +0000

This is a common argument, and you are quite right that people have been wrong about specific limits in the past, but to take that on to claim that there will be no physical limits ever seems to me to be pretty obviously wrong. You can't increase both population and consumption in a space of a defined size forever. Something has to give.

I agree that it is extremely difficult to say in advance when you will hit a problem that can't be technologically-adapted round. But at some point you will run out of _something_ (space/energy/soil/minerals/rest of ecosystem). The modelling of this shows that it's much easier to get a population crash than stability or gentle decline when this happens, which is almost certainly unpleasant for those involved. ('Limits to Growth' is a very good book on the subject). And understanding EROEI is important too.

But you are quite right that it could be significantly longer than 40 years time (the odds are quite good on that).

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

dlang — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:59:45 +0000

> There are physical 'limits to growth' which will eventually cause real difficulties, even for the rich countries.

reminds me of studies from the 1800's showing that there were real pysical limits to growth limiting how big a city could get (based in large part on the amount of manure generated by the horses needed for transportation of goods into the cities)

I have great faith that when it matters people will come up with new ways of doing things that extend the limits way beyond what anyone today can imagine.

I may be wrong, but the naysayers have been wrong throughout history, so I think my optimism is standing on the right side of the odds :-)

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

wookey — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:05:16 +0000

"I'm glad that at least one other person cares about these things more than the financial gymnastics involved."

You can put me in that bucket too. There are physical 'limits to growth' which will eventually cause real difficulties, even for the rich countries. There is very little sign that the current economy or societal arrangements are good at dealing with this, and it remains unclear that we will succeed in preventing everything going to crap during my lifetime. If I had children I'd be _really_ worried.

I'd like to see a lot more people trying to work out how you get from here to a 'circular economy': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

An idea About the Thames Tideway Tunnel

foom — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Boston has been working on it for a few decades now. I think the reason it's desirable to separate them is that if you need to overflow, it's much better to overflow rainwater than sewage, even if you normally want to treat both.

http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/03sewer/html/sewcso.htm

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

khim — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:58:37 +0000

Thus, from what I've read from various historical accounts, the idea with the Space Transportation System was to promise a scalable platform with something supposedly affordable in the beginning that could be expanded through further investment later on, thus deferring the expense to future taxpayers: a classic political move.

Sorry, by no, not even close:

Another competing approach was maintaining the Saturn V production line and using its large payload capacity to launch a space station in a few payloads rather than many smaller shuttle payloads. A related concept was servicing the space station using the Air Force Titan II-M to launch a larger Gemini capsule, called "Big Gemini", rather than using the shuttle.

The shuttle supporters answered that given enough launches, a reusable system would have lower overall costs than disposable rockets. If dividing total program costs over a given number of launches, a high shuttle launch rate would result in lower per-launch costs. This in turn would make the shuttle cost competitive with or superior to expendable launchers. Some theoretical studies mentioned 55 shuttle launches per year, however the final design chosen would not support that launch rate. In particular the maximum external tank production rate was limited to 24 tanks per year at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility.

From the very beginning it was the opposite of your portrayal: yes, Space Shuttle promised savings "sometime in the future" but of course R&D budget was huge from the very beginning - exactly as proposed insane plan for sewers.

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

rahvin — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:36:11 +0000

I just think that a company with only 1-2% margin on its entire portfolio would be a miserable place to work. ;-)

AFAIK that's the operating margin of most Chinese manufacturers. The link below quotes FoxConn's rate at 1.5% (in Q1 2012 but were as high as 2.7% in 2007) and they are one of the biggest and have the best ability to charge higher rates due to their size. I've read of margins as low as 0.3% for some contract manufacturers on the mainland. I don't think you are wrong in arguing you wouldn't want to work somewhere with margins that low.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/05/foxconn-profit-margin-remains-tight-as-apple-flourishes/

As a side note, these margins are the reason the Chinese mainland has become the largest industrial zone in the world and one of the primary reason some economists aren't worried about long term Chinese domination of the manufacturing sector because as soon as they try to raise margins it becomes more cost effective to not manufacture in China. There are arguments that even raising the margins to higher than 3% will make US manufacturing cheaper for a great number of products which can be manufactured with limited labor (by that I mean assembly lines that use limited human labor and much of the repetitive tasks are done by automated systems, China will likely continue to dominate the jobs that relay on huge assembly lines of warm bodies as long as their currency doesn't appreciate too much).

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

cladisch — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:03:28 +0000

> One of the purported military uses was the ability to get into orbit, steal an enemy satellite and glide back to Earth, circling the planet in less than a day. It escapes me why gliding was particularly important for this use.

The requirement was for the shuttle to be able to change its course somewhat (in the atmosphere, thus the wing shape) so that it could return back to where it started even after the earth had rotated the start point away: Mission 3A/3B (PDF).

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

intgr — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:37:44 +0000

> What exact capability Space Shuttle offered over Apollo which was ever used for something? It had the ability to return large amount of stuff from space, true, but this capability was never actually used

It had another capability, it could glide! :)

Bear with me because I don't know very much about space tech and I have no way of verifying these claims. But it's an interesting theory, especially in light of what you say about its ability to retrieve things from space and its cost/benefit analysis.

A few years ago I read an article which talked about U.S. military involvement in the Space Shuttle project (I think it was in relation to the X-37 unmanned space vehicle). It claimed that USAF played a role in choosing the particular winged design for the Space Shuttle (out of many), despite the fact that it was unpopular with NASA engineers. Unfortunately I can't find the original article any more.

One of the purported military uses was the ability to get into orbit, steal an enemy satellite and glide back to Earth, circling the planet in less than a day. It escapes me why gliding was particularly important for this use.

On the other hand, with a different design and without military interests, maybe the project would have never been funded.

An idea About the Thames Tideway Tunnel

tialaramex — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:41:22 +0000

The summary is that yes, it's a net win. If you build a new city today (and indeed when new cities were built in the mid 20th century onward) combined sewers are not normally used. Rain water from gutters and pavements flows into storm sewers and both the "black water" (human waste) and "grey water" (washing machines, baths, etc.) go into the sanitary sewers which lead to a treatment plant.

In principle "separating" London's sewers isn't impossible. But it would be prohibitively expensive. Some US cities have done it, but we're not talking about New York or Los Angeles here, but rather places like Minneapolis - scarcely comparable to London in either size or density.

About the Slums Around the World

tialaramex — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:39:35 +0000

I'm not sure the Roman latrine is a good comparison to the flush toilet. It's pretty astounding how wasteful a flush toilet is. Your point is well made anyhow and we've deviated far from the topic.

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

dlang — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:06:14 +0000

sometimes you are better off getting the cheap thing now and replacing it relatively soon rather than getting the expensive thing now.

In areas where the thing you are looking at buying is changing rapidly (improving, dropping in price, etc), buying a top-of-the-line device and replacing it every 5 years is far more expensive, and results in you having a worse device on average than if you buy a el-cheapo device and replace it every year.

Now, if there really is a durability difference, and the object in question is not changing significantly (example boots), then it really can be better to spend a lot more money up front and get the expensive, durable version. And in cases like this, people who can't afford to invest that much money up front do suffer in the long run.

But that doesn't make the people who produce the cheap boots 'exploiters of the masses' or anything like that, they are producing a product that people want, and if the product wasn't available the consumer would be worse off (because they would have to do without, as the lack of a cheap product would not magically give people money to buy the expensive version)

Don't forget that there is a time value of money. Even excluding inflation, current money is worth more than future money, and so tieing up more cash now to get the more expensive version may really be worse for you than getting the cheap version and having the cash available for other things, even if it does cost more in the long run. The larger a percentage of your available cash a particular purchase is, the more likely it is to be a problem. (this is one of the reasons that once someone gets enough wealth, they tend to get richer, they can afford to make decisions that cost more now, but save money in the long run as these decisions involve a much smaller percentage of their available capitol)

perfect is the enemy of good enough. It's not always better to do without while designing/building/saving for the perfect solution.

As for the Shuttle, that's a topic that is FAR to big to go into now. It's an impressive engineering achievement, but was mis-managed not just by NASA, but by Congress as well. There is more than enough blame to spread around there. It never really achieved it's goal (making access to space routine) and while it was presented as a 'delivery van' it was built and managed more like a custom, hand build, Rolls Royce fleet of station waggons. They were years (decades??) behind schedule getting built, but in large part were limited by the technology available at the time the design process was started. I remember reading articles calling for them to be replaced by more modern designs back in the early 80's (and not with new start-from-scratch technologies, but with re-using existing components for the most part, but leveraging the new design capabilities that existed by then)

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

pboddie — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:01:30 +0000

The fact that you accept an explanation of sanitation department that it can provide clean water "with a tenth of the money and no more digging" leads to the stone soup of a Space Shuttle.

Bear in mind, here, that you originally appeared to bring up the Space Shuttle as an example of starting over at great expense (in response to the idea that the London authorities should "start the real project", in the words of the commenter advocating an end to "gigantic ad-hoc solutions"), but getting by on reduced means is more or less what the Space Shuttle was all about.

A lot of the problems shared by large infrastructure owners and NASA have something to do with how you schedule the financing. Thus, from what I've read from various historical accounts, the idea with the Space Transportation System was to promise a scalable platform with something supposedly affordable in the beginning that could be expanded through further investment later on, thus deferring the expense to future taxpayers: a classic political move.

This does actually cross back over to the original article, sort of. One might wonder why people don't save up for a better phone than some $12 unit that some might regard as disposable, but the answer has something to do with needing what it offers straight away and not having the luxury to put money aside for something better. Over time, this may actually mean that the unfortunate customer ends up spending more money on lower-quality products that need replacing than on durable higher-quality ones. Naturally, the sale of lower-quality "economy" products is a rather widespread business model.

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

khim — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:04:43 +0000

For instance, spending towards Apollo had fewer constraints than that towards the Space Shuttle.

Of course. When you build an Formula 1 car price is less important then when you build "a delivery van".

If you look at it from that perspective, the role of the Space Shuttle programme within NASA and its admittedly overambitious objectives was a bit like telling the sanitation department that "yes, you can try and provide clean water, but do so with a tenth of the money and there will be no more digging!"

Which is, of course, stupid. Either you need to decide that there should be no more digging (and then you'll get by without clean water) you you need to approve digging. The fact that you accept an explanation of sanitation department that it can provide clean water "with a tenth of the money and no more digging" leads to the stone soup of a Space Shuttle. Which in the end requires more money and more digging then straightforward approach of keeping old wells around.

One can argue that the money spent on the STS might have been better spent on existing programmes - with recent "doing more for less" activities, there has been talk of using Atlas V to launch some manned spacecraft (although it isn't strictly a continuation of Apollo-era Atlas) - but it's all a question of achieving the right result with the right amount of effort, and having a sustainable organisation.

Yes. That's why I say Space Shuttle is great engineering achievement (no joke, it's really a marvel from the engineering POV) yet miserable managerial failure. The fact that it was actually built and used shows how great NASA engineers are and the fact that it was ever started shows how gullible the top management is.

I think that what almost all of us can agree on, however, is that infrastructure investment is incredibly expensive and is virtually impossible to achieve at any scale for disadvantaged people acting alone and unsupported whose lives are already dominated by the fight to merely survive.

Yup. It's question of scale. You can not do them with a small community and people who can organize and lead large communities rarely stay in slums.

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

khim — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:51:43 +0000

Comparing Apollo and the Space Shuttle by looking at the cost of getting things into orbit ignores the fact that Apollo wasn't meant to get things into orbit cheaply.

Nope. That's the whole freaking point!

The Apollo program was geared towards getting people to the Moon – for a very brief visit – and back (and hopefully before the Soviet Union did it), while the Space Shuttle program was geared towards doing Useful Things in low Earth orbit on a sustainable basis over a period of decades.

Right.

In terms of space engineering these are very different goals.

May be, but does it mean it's good idea to develop something new from scratch for the latter goal if you already know how to solve former goal? NASA had a choice: continue to advance Altas (which brought first US citizen in space, remember), Delta, Saturn V and others or develop something new from scratch. By now Space Shuttle is history and we know that total cost is higher for the second variant (if you'll spread R&D cost over all 135 you still get huge sums even if you'll forget about huge disparity between promised price of launch and actual price of launch), so how can you say it was sane choice?

Space Shuttle is both majestic and awful: the fact that this beast was eventually brought to space is great achievement, but the fact that it was ever conceived is miserable failure.

So if Ferrari suddenly decided to build delivery vans, having built a championship Formula 1 race car before would probably help them some (automotive engineering being what it is), but re-using or even changing the Formula 1 design would not lead to a useful delivery van.

That's the problem: it was cheaper to adjust Formula 1 design in this particular case! The development cost of new delivery van was so huge and savings from it so minuscule that suppositional savings never materialized.

Hence it is ludicrous to claim that Ferrari should compare the ongoing cost of re-using the Formula 1 car design that Ferrari already has, to the R&D cost of coming up with a new design for a delivery van that will actually do the job at hand.

Why is it ridiculous? Well, may be not with Formula 1 and delivery van, but this is routine calculations Airbus or Boeing are doing. Any new plane must not only be cheaper then a plane it replaces, but also must recoup R&D cost, or else it's considered failure. If there are not enough savings in the supposed lifetime of some model then projects are shelved early on. Why should NASA should treated any differently?

However, simply continuing the Apollo and Saturn V programs wouldn't have helped NASA do what NASA did with the Space Shuttle.

Really? What exact capability Space Shuttle offered over Apollo which was ever used for something? It had the ability to return large amount of stuff from space, true, but this capability was never actually used and everything else Mercury or Apollo had the ability to do.

There might have been better ways of accomplishing the same goals (and in 2013 the outlook for that is a lot more positive than in 1973), and the Space Shuttle program could surely have been managed better (especially in light of the Challenger crash and its aftermath), but projects of that scale tend to develop a life of their own that does not always proceed according to optimal management and engineering theories.

Initial calculations already showed that advantage of Space Shuttle over Apollo were tiny and as we now know they were very, very optimistic. The only true capability Space Shuttle brought to the table was never used, so... where is the win?

About the rich Finns

nix — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:14:24 +0000

... and doubtless they funded that R&D, and production, from the profit margin they got from doubling the sale price, and Estonian jobs were created that otherwise wouldn't have been. I'm not seeing the problem here.

Place for Dirt-Cheap Developers

nix — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:13:11 +0000

I usually have less trouble with people, who have worked in multiple places, multiple types of institutions, multiple roles, than those, who's life experience is limited to only a few roles, few institutions.

So... your response to Al pointing out that you sound like someone who blames others... is to insinuate that this is his fault for being insufficiently experienced (snort).

I think you just backed his thesis up.

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

pboddie — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:53:53 +0000

Looking at the historical record, comparing Apollo to the Space Shuttle in the way done in this thread is almost getting things backwards or at least only selectively considering all the factors involved.

For instance, spending towards Apollo had fewer constraints than that towards the Space Shuttle, even when considering the budgetary curtailments made in the late 1960s as US politicians saw the opportunity to ramp down spending on space (and ramp up spending on war), leading to the end of Saturn/Apollo production (and the repurposing of vehicles for things like Skylab and Apollo/Soyuz). If you look at it from that perspective, the role of the Space Shuttle programme within NASA and its admittedly overambitious objectives was a bit like telling the sanitation department that "yes, you can try and provide clean water, but do so with a tenth of the money and there will be no more digging!"

One can argue that the money spent on the STS might have been better spent on existing programmes - with recent "doing more for less" activities, there has been talk of using Atlas V to launch some manned spacecraft (although it isn't strictly a continuation of Apollo-era Atlas) - but it's all a question of achieving the right result with the right amount of effort, and having a sustainable organisation. One can also argue that NASA and associated organisations have never got this right (and that various military-industrial contractors make good money from the result), but I also think that the budgetary conditions that NASA operates within are rather different to that of large and necessary infrastructure projects, at least within developed countries: even in Britain, governments will commit large sums over several years to get such projects done, whereas NASA will see funding rise and fall depending on the mood of the legislature.

I think that what almost all of us can agree on, however, is that infrastructure investment is incredibly expensive and is virtually impossible to achieve at any scale for disadvantaged people acting alone and unsupported whose lives are already dominated by the fight to merely survive.

Apollo vs. the Space Shuttle?

anselm — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:04:43 +0000

Comparing Apollo and the Space Shuttle by looking at the cost of getting things into orbit ignores the fact that Apollo wasn't meant to get things into orbit cheaply. The Apollo program was geared towards getting people to the Moon – for a very brief visit – and back (and hopefully before the Soviet Union did it), while the Space Shuttle program was geared towards doing Useful Things in low Earth orbit on a sustainable basis over a period of decades. In terms of space engineering these are very different goals.

You could compare these to winning the Formula 1 world cup vs. getting deliveries done around town. Both are ultimately feats of both engineering and management that should not be belittled (although one of them gets more press). Of course a delivery van will do the latter more efficently and cheaply than a race car, but that is to a greater extent due to facts such as that the delivery van has a big space in the back where you can put stuff, that it will run for thousands of kilometers without needing a lot of maintenance, and that it is road-certified – all of which are perfect non-issues if you're building a Formula 1 racer. So if Ferrari suddenly decided to build delivery vans, having built a championship Formula 1 race car before would probably help them some (automotive engineering being what it is), but re-using or even changing the Formula 1 design would not lead to a useful delivery van. Hence it is ludicrous to claim that Ferrari should compare the ongoing cost of re-using the Formula 1 car design that Ferrari already has, to the R&D cost of coming up with a new design for a delivery van that will actually do the job at hand.

Of course – especially with 20/20 hindsight – it is easy to claim that the Space Shuttle program was a »colossal management failure«. However, simply continuing the Apollo and Saturn V programs wouldn't have helped NASA do what NASA did with the Space Shuttle. There might have been better ways of accomplishing the same goals (and in 2013 the outlook for that is a lot more positive than in 1973), and the Space Shuttle program could surely have been managed better (especially in light of the Challenger crash and its aftermath), but projects of that scale tend to develop a life of their own that does not always proceed according to optimal management and engineering theories.

We have known for a long time that the Space Shuttle program, for all the cool technology involved, fell far short of what was originally expected of it both from a operating-cost and a technical-performance POV, which is a pity but is also what happens when you're messing around with very new things. It was still an important thing to do. So tell us something else that is new.

About the rich Finns

osma — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:49:23 +0000

"Rich" Finnish developer here. I've lived for a year in Estonia and speak the language fluently, so I know a bit about both countries.

I don't know much about your specific example. You say the Estonian company was a subsidiary of the Finnish one. Does it then matter how the profit was distributed, if it's all under the same ownership?

It's true that Finnish companies have outsourced a lot of jobs to Estonia where wages have been much lower, and to some degree still are. In Helsinki, Estonian construction workers are everywhere. This probably means a lot of money is flowing from Finland to Estonia (which also happens when Finns go shopping for cheap liquor in Tallinn). Estonian wages are rising. Is that bad?

I'm sure this can be seen as exploitation but that's just how the market works and presumably all parties benefit to some degree from the cross-border cooperation, otherwise they wouldn't do it.

Maybe if you moved to Finland (like the construction workers have done, at least temporarily) and got a job here, you'd get a higher salary. But with the current downturn and fall of Nokia, there are not that many development and engineering jobs to be found here either.

As for "leeching" the Soviet Union, the position of Finland was highly delicate during those years. Trade did flourish, but after 1991 the depression was severe, banks failed, a lot of companies and people went bankrupt when interest rates soared and the currency tumbled.

An idea About the Thames Tideway Tunnel

khim — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:36:59 +0000

I agree with the Space Shuttle example, but only TILL IMPROVEMENTS HAVE TO BE MADE to the old rockets. From that point onwards it's more reasonable to dedicate the development resources to brand new technology.

Abstract ideas with no basis in reality again? Space Shuttle is rare program which threw away everything and started from scratch. There were other programs which did what you say is a sin: Delta in US, Proton and Soyuz in USSR, etc. They all produced more effective, robust and safe way to the orbit.

Same thing with the sewers: new and thoroughly renovated houses should be connected to the parallel, rain-water-free, system.

Well, yes: it's easy to create new, modern and ineffective solution. But to know if it'll be a net win or loss you need to compare costs and benefits of both solutions.

Not that nice from Public Relation's point of view, e.g. can't sell that idea to get votes at next elections, but makes sense in a few hundred year perspective.

If your project is beneficial only on timespans measured in centuries then it's a failure: too many unknowns and they tend to increase costs and decrease benefits.

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

rodgerd — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 03:26:41 +0000

Henry Ford got very rich by disagreeing with you.

An idea About the Thames Tideway Tunnel

XERC — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:47:19 +0000

I agree with the Space Shuttle example, but only TILL IMPROVEMENTS HAVE TO BE MADE to the old rockets. From that point onwards it's more reasonable to dedicate the development resources to brand new technology.

Same thing with the sewers: new and thoroughly renovated houses should be connected to the parallel, rain-water-free, system.

Not that nice from Public Relation's point of view, e.g. can't sell that idea to get votes at next elections, but makes sense in a few hundred year perspective.

About Free Trade Agreements

jdulaney — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:25:30 +0000

So, the question then becomes: "Is it really free trade if the restrictions are removed one-way?" Look at China and US; relatively speaking, there are exceptionally few barriers from Chinese products entering the US, but the other way is extremely restricted by the Chinese government, who looks the other way when Chinese domestic companies rip off US products for their domestic market.

An idea About the Thames Tideway Tunnel

khim — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:25:40 +0000

If I were the London city key official, then I would finance a project that leaves the current, rainwater based system, intact, because the "right place for clean rainwater" is in the river, and would build a parallel sewage system that uses only the water that comes from toilets and alike. The current, Thales, approach assumes that a huge amount of rainwater, that is already clean enough to be added to the river when it flows on a street, is first mixed with the infectious sewage and then , later, a lot of effort is made for transporting the dirty version of that, initially clean, rain-water and filtering it out of the infectious mixture.

Ah, ideal worlds of RPGs! They have such a nice, clean rainwater which belongs to river...

Sadly in our reality the biggest pollutant are not humans, but cars. And where do you think all that toxic road run-off goes after rain? Exactly.

Now, it may still be a net win to separate these (heavy metal from cars need different treatments then bacterial pollution from human waste), but since there are a lot of places where they can be mixed I'm not sure if it'll be a net win. More information is needed.

If the only, ultimate, solution is to keep them separate, then the London city officials should just get on with it, start the real project in stead of financing gigantic ad-hoc solutions.

The next Space Shuttle project? Sorry, but one failure was more then enough.

P.S. People often don't understand why I say that Space Shuttle is colossal management failure: come on, it's slightly cheaper to launch something to orbit using Space Shuttle then it's to do that using Apollo - surely it's a success? Not so. At the beginning of Space Shuttle program Apollo program was finished. It was not possible to go back in time and save Apollo's R&D cost by replacing it with Space Shuttle. Which means that ongoing costs of keeping Saturn V and Apollo alive should be compared to development cost of Space Shuttle (and you need to add ongoing costs, too, of course) - and by that measure it's miserable failure. Your "great" sewers idea has the same issue: sure, if you build sewers for a new city it may be feasible to have two parallel systems, but when you deal with the existing city then solutions that "are just piled up on old infrastructure" may actually be preferable.

About the Slums Around the World

khim — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:03:27 +0000

For one thing the Romans weren't using their sewers the way Great Stink era London had begun to use sewers.

Really?

The trigger for the Great Stink was, amusingly, the introduction of a water closet that resembles modern toilets. ie what we'd think of as a step forward for hygiene - suddenly more and more Londoners were pouring vast quantities of polluted liquid into the system and it couldn't keep up.

Yup. But if you'll actually check the facts then you'll see that latrine systems have been found in many places, such as Housesteads, a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall, in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere that flushed waste away with a stream of water.

Disease caused by raw sewage getting into your fresh water supply is a problem that doesn't scale linearly. In a hamlet or village maybe once in a while somebody gets sick and people stop using a particular supply, in a small town it causes larger groups of people to get sick, a personal tragedy but it's still manageable. In cities it causes epidemics, overrunning public health agencies and leading to a population crash.

Right. The only problem: it explains why medieval towns were much smaller then Ancient Rome or today's cities, it does not explain why Ancient Rome and Industrialization Era London were able to solve this problem while medieval towns died off instead.

An idea About the Thames Tideway Tunnel

mpr22 — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:32:34 +0000

While mixing storm and sanitary sewers is indeed a bad idea, digging up every road in London to fix the problem is not viable on the desired timescale.

An idea About the Thames Tideway Tunnel

XERC — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:14:41 +0000

I watched the introductory video of the project and the first thought that came to my mind was that the approach there seems to be the same that trashable software projects use: in stead of proper refactoring, starting a parallel and properly designed system, things are just piled up on old infrastructure.

I'm not a civil engineer, but if the problem is that the London sewage system overflows to the river and it happens due to rain, then even a small child can calculate it out that the amount of sewage a single human creates during a 24h period versus the amount of water (per capita) that rain can produce during a 24h period differs a lot.

If I were the London city key official, then I would finance a project that leaves the current, rainwater based system, intact, because the "right place for clean rainwater" is in the river, and would build a parallel sewage system that uses only the water that comes from toilets and alike. The current, Thales, approach assumes that a huge amount of rainwater, that is already clean enough to be added to the river when it flows on a street, is first mixed with the infectious sewage and then , later, a lot of effort is made for transporting the dirty version of that, initially clean, rain-water and filtering it out of the infectious mixture.

For that reason I think that mixing rainwater and plain sewage water is a really dumb idea.

If the only, ultimate, solution is to keep them separate, then the London city officials should just get on with it, start the real project in stead of financing gigantic ad-hoc solutions.

Place for Dirt-Cheap Developers

XERC — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:49:40 +0000

Thank You for Your feedback (negative or not).

I usually have less trouble with people, who have worked in multiple places, multiple types of institutions, multiple roles, than those, who's life experience is limited to only a few roles, few institutions.

What regards to blaming others, then I acknowledge that I can not assume that I can change others, but I can assume that I can change myself and look for a more suitable place for myself. The question from that point onwards is: what direction should I change?

My approach is that I want to behave the way most talented people, who do not act as parasites on others around them, are interested/able-to stay around me. Here's one thought that I like.

Huang: The $12 Gongkai Phone

pr1268 — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:30:25 +0000

A good example would be a company that produces Asprin

Funny you should mention Aspirin - it is, in fact, a trademark name for acetylsalicylic acid (or ASA). But not in the USA. I remember visiting Canada a few years ago, and the local television stations were showing commercials for just "Aspirin" - it has retained its trademark in Canada (and presumably other countries) - and generic equivalents have to be labeled as "ASA". IIRC its trademark name is owned by Bayer. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodification

But, I disagree somewhat with your assertion that companies will only produce the same product at 1-2% margin. I would counter that most companies that produce commodity products would be diversified enough to have other highly-profitable products. For example, Boeing Aircraft - I remember reading that the 737 airliner was a consistent money-loser for the manufacturer, but the 747 was their "cash cow"¹. Of course, a commercial jet airliner isn't exactly a commodity product...

I just think that a company with only 1-2% margin on its entire portfolio would be a miserable place to work. ;-)

¹ I believe it was T. Heppenheimer's book Turbulent Skies that mentioned this, including the verbatim "cash cow" quote.

About the Slums Around the World

tialaramex — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:42:02 +0000

Hmm, a few things are going on here. For one thing the Romans weren't using their sewers the way Great Stink era London had begun to use sewers. The trigger for the Great Stink was, amusingly, the introduction of a water closet that resembles modern toilets. ie what we'd think of as a step forward for hygiene - suddenly more and more Londoners were pouring vast quantities of polluted liquid into the system and it couldn't keep up.

The solution then was the same as the solution today (London's combined sewers right now, like those in many older cities, overflow into its major river, pouring untreated sewage into the Thames every time it does more than drizzle), build a massive city-wide carrier sewer to transport the mess outside of the city via pumping stations. The Victorian sewers were a massive civil engineering project, funded only because of the Great Stink. And today we're just a little ahead, we're building a truly gargantuan civil engineering project under London because the water quality after storms, though it doesn't yet stink, is unacceptably poor.

http://www.thamestidewaytunnel.co.uk/

The other thing is that the problem in villages and towns is not just a linearly smaller version of the problem in a city. Disease caused by raw sewage getting into your fresh water supply is a problem that doesn't scale linearly. In a hamlet or village maybe once in a while somebody gets sick and people stop using a particular supply, in a small town it causes larger groups of people to get sick, a personal tragedy but it's still manageable. In cities it causes epidemics, overrunning public health agencies and leading to a population crash.

About the Slums Around the World

khim — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 07:33:17 +0000

Ah, next fiction.

I agree that building a well might be a bit difficult, specially in dry areas, where the well has to be very deep, but what regards to the running water, then I do believe that a community of slum people are able to collectively afford an electrical pump and dig/build sewage canals the way they were built during the Roman times.

Yep, Roman times. Well, think what distinguished Ancient Rome and Ancient China (with running water and sewage) from medieval towns and villages - and you'll understand why your belief is baseless. Hint: sewage disappeared from Rome not because all the citizens suddenly become mad and stayed mad for a millennium. There were other, more objective reasons.

I'm just saying that there's nothing stopping those people from building that infrastructure, if they just spent the time that they spend on drinking vodka and doing drugs, on working.

You want to say that all these millions of people in the medieval Europe also spent the time on drinking vodka and doing drugs and that is why running water become luxury and sewers were destroyed?Dream on.

Place for Dirt-Cheap Developers

viro — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:07:46 +0000

*snort*

You come across as something considerably more unflattering than "radical". "Shining wit[1] extremely likely to blame anyone and everyone else whenever something goes wrong" is more like it. With quite a dollop of "if $X disagrees with me, it's just because $X hates my guts for my views|ethnicity|religion|whatnot" shat on top of that. Plus the readiness to go out of your way to create a personal conflict whenever you need to deflect a criticism by aforementioned mechanism.

I obviously don't know if it matches what you really are (and neither do the people doing those interviews), but yes, you *do* sound that way.

[1] with apologies for overused spoonerism.

About Free Trade Agreements

XERC — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:24:19 +0000

Leaving the USA "Free" Trade Agreements, that provide asymmetrical freedoms, to aside, "free trade agreements" like the European Economic Zone remove government repressions from borders of geographical areas.

If You claim that freedom of trade is a negative thing, then would Your argumentation still stand, if the protectionist zones were halving Your home town like the Berlin Wall? How about automating the bureaucracy and placing some trade restrictions between every town or part of town? What makes trade restrictions between countries different from trade restrictions between towns?

To avoid misunderstanding: I love the idea that trade is not limited and anyone can provide its goods to any other country (like in the European Union) without any government restrictions, interventions. (OK, the EU does have some rules about gathering statistics to governments and environmental rules, e.g. rules, how goods must be transported, but they are not that repressive).

About the Slums Around the World

XERC — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:49:41 +0000

I agree that building a well might be a bit difficult, specially in dry areas, where the well has to be very deep, but what regards to the running water, then I do believe that a community of slum people are able to collectively afford an electrical pump and dig/build sewage canals the way they were built during the Roman times.

With some modern, salvaged, materials, it should be considerably easier than ant the Roman era.

I'm not saying that it's a small job. I'm just saying that there's nothing stopping those people from building that infrastructure, if they just spent the time that they spend on drinking vodka and doing drugs, on working. Since drug addiction, depression, etc., is a mental illness, the slum, as we know it, is a result of a mental illness. And I'm being called radical for that view....

Place for Dirt-Cheap Developers

XERC — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:35:24 +0000

In Estonia janitors make about 400€/month after all taxes are paid. Official minimum wage, after paying all taxes, in Estonia in 2013 is 144€.

Students that do not pay for their tuition, need about 600€/month to cover healthy food, accommodation, minimum clothing, commodities. As of 2013 public transport in Tallinn is literally "free of charge" (financed from tax revenue) to all Tallinn residents.

About Being Overqualified

XERC — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:19:55 +0000

Thank You for Your kind answer. :)

May be You are right. The thing is, I'm interested from the result. I want to prove to be valuable, to really earn some arguments for a good salary and I want to earn the respect of the smartest developers, regardless of what the bosses and dumb ones think.

I'm also self-motivated and that means that some bosses might start to feel that if some subordinate organizes everything, studies what the clients need, communicates with fellow developers and works really hard to get a great product, then their job might be at risk. Why to pay to an expensive manager, if the team is able to work without the manager, the tech-geeks are capable of communicating in "plain human language" and capable of understanding the context, where the development team organizes?

As a matter of fact, it has been asked from me at some job interviews, that am I really interested in doing the hard coding or do I need to become a boss. My answer: I'm interested in the results and I do not care about the hierarchy, I just want the hierarchy to be out of my way. After hearing that answer, the face of my "future boss" showed concern....

Depressing. Really.

But, by all means, I do not consider myself to be any kind of genius or "above average". I'm just different by my nonstandardness and if that seems far fetched, e.g. how can anybody be "nonstandard" in a world, where there are so many people, then I say that if i weren't weird, I would not have so many troubles and there would be no problem hiring me.

Place for Dirt-Cheap Developers

XERC — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:02:07 +0000

I am sincerely thankful for feedback, even if it is negative, but what regards to the statement that people might avoid hiring me, because I am too "crazy", then I believe that You are right.

It makes perfect sense to me that people tend to hire their own-like and if my views are rather radical, and they certainly are, in many respects, then I obviously disqualify.

Unfortunately for me, unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Richard Stallman, etc. I am not talented in any possible way. I only stand out as a weirdo and have trouble finding my place "under the sun". If there is anything that I am really good at, then it is probably provoking discussions with really crazy, radical, ideas that people consider to be either too crazy to be taken seriously or fun or terrible enough to get excited about them and to debate about them for about 15 minutes or so without me making a single sound. It usually happens more easily among creative "young" people(older than 20, younger than 40).

Another thing that the hiring side at job interviews does not seem to stomach is my openness and honesty: I say it directly that I will never get bored, I can always find myself some really fun academic or charity project to work on and the only reason, why I'm trying to get to Your organization in stead of some awesome academic research project is money.

Also the HR people tend to get caught lying to me at job interviews and it happens so that they even self understand that they're caught lying, without me explicitly telling it to them. They usually leave the interview with a shy smile. (Last time it happened, the HR head said that she does not know salary ranges, while there were public articles in mainstream media, where some previous HR head of the same company described in great detail, how they determine salary ranges in their company. All I did was smile and say that I do not believe, what she says. :-D