The paper relies heavily on another paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) for estimates of upstream material losses. That paper attempted to quantify production stage losses from raw fiber, into fabric, and then into apparel by surveying factories in Bangladesh for their mass input/outputs for different production stages.
In case you missed it, that was a joke. There is infact an Army Corps of Engineers that is responsible for exactly what the comment suggested (amongst a lot of other things).
The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.
The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.
Can you clarify? Do you mean that superconducting qubits are unable to perform the "real applications" theoretically, or that superconducting qubits at the scale this foundry could produce will be unable, or that superconducting qubits that will foundry could produce will still be outperformed by classical techniques?
I mean, we are no where near the scale [qubit count] & quality where the applications apply. Not just this foundry but in general. I suppose the point is to eventually get there, but we are not close yet.
You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
I don't have the same level of cynicism with quantum that I had with enterprise blockchain. (Hey, I spent a number of years getting sucked into things that didn't pan out along with some that did in a big way.) I pretty much agree with respect to quantum. Practical value is probably further away than a number of folks were betting on at one point though I still believe it's there.
> You should still view anything Quantum as early R&D.
The good thing is that someone who can make lots of chips can reduce the effort it takes to do R&D. With more people researching possible applications, it's likely we'll progress more quickly.
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
A useful framing for other systems as well: Our modern system of chemical/material manufacturing has been hugely influenced by "can we use this leftover junk somehow?"
For that matter, it also applies to the relentless swarming horde of nanobots known as biological life.
A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, and it accepts that the state needs to be fair and predictable.
I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state.
And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.
Thermodynamic efficiency (which is what turbine blades enable) has increased from ~30 to 55% over the last 50-60 years. The book estimates that the practical limit of for thermodynamic efficiency is in the 65-70% range.
All other things equal, range varies proportionately with efficiency. Ie, if you have 500km range at 50% overall efficiency, then at 65% overall efficiency, you have 650km range.
This is a phys.org "article". They're usually just rehashed press releases, and this one is particularly bad - it's literally just the NASA press release with the last 2 paragraphs chopped off. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/nisar/us-indian-space-mission-...
Uhhh... editor/author/LLM was asleep here. There are 4 sentinel-1 sats in orbit, but one of them has been decommissioned because of system failure... as the article itself states.
There is a generalized military response in place (CTF-151 via UN). The insurance based scheme tends to work because it's basically dealing with "leakers".
UNCLOS permits any country to intervene in case of piracy. Because piracy attacks the public good of assured, consistent, low cost maritime transit and commerce (which the entire developed world is addicted to), and successful piracy begets piracy, there are a lot of countries with a lot of resources deeply interested with intervening.
As other people have noted, Somali piracy is not "new". It's been happening since the 90s (Somali Civil war and failed international interventions). There were, and still are multinational (basically chartered by the UN) naval task forces operating in the area, to deter and interdict pirates. See CTF-151 (https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/)
These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen.
And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned.
So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.
The paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) is about quantifying the environmental impact of material losses that happen in a typical scenario, including a single full recycle (as opposed to reuse).
The paper relies heavily on another paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) for estimates of upstream material losses. That paper attempted to quantify production stage losses from raw fiber, into fabric, and then into apparel by surveying factories in Bangladesh for their mass input/outputs for different production stages.
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