Fun to watch how things are made. People that design things are amazing. I guess AI will do much more of this in the future.
I really don’t care about how environmentally friendly they are though. Most of what they are talking about really comes down to saving money
There’s a guy posting at X, Ken Fox, who specialized in the design and installation of production automation systems, especially for the food industry…some of his videos are very impressive. He recently changed jobs to work a SpaceX, so you may have to go back a ways to find his production equipment videos. @robot_brains
After looking at American colleges today—America’s entire Educational System, I have to side with Musk on the need for H-1B visas.
After what Musk told critics – 🙂 – I have to admire Bannon’s response.
From what I have read, it seems that many of these smart H-1B visa immigrants (?whatever?) make 10% less than the American dummies. That doesn’t seem to be much less, so am guessing that such businesses are looking for performance over cost?
RE: Christianity in the West
A headline of an article out today reads, “As Christianity Dies in the West, Western Civilization Dies, Too.”*
Then, there is this recent informed, erudite, deep discussion of the question of the existence of God and the state of Christianity in the West from the Hoover Institution.**
Mentioned in the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” series, as an argument in favor of the existence of God and his creation of the Universe, is the issue of how the Universe is very precisely “fine tuned”–30 or so physical constants, any one of which, if it varied by even the slightest, would result in life not being able to develop in our Universe.
It seems to me that, if the rise of the Enlightenment and the scientific point of view has lead to the increasing diminution of Christianity, then, the road back to the revitalization of Christianity may well be through investigating how the Universe works, is through science.
There are plenty of H-1Bs making much less than an American citizen would get paid for the same job. And by no means all of these people are top software developers or engineers, a lot of them in in pretty low-level jobs.
As Steve Hsu pointed out, there is another visa program called O1, which is used to bring in foreigners of exceptional ability.
I’d also point out the the US economy is no dependent only on engineers and programmers, as important as these jobs are. There is a shortage of skilled machinists, and it is getting worse as older ones retire. In the aviation industry, there is a shortage of A&Ps (certified aircraft and powerplant mechanics, and also shortages in many other skilled trades. We should consider encouraging skilled workers from Germany in particular to migrate the the US, but as permanent residents and eventually citizens, not on some termporary visa program.
Also, the people who create and run important businesses are not always engineers or programmers or physicists. Wal-Mart and Costco are pretty important business, but they weren’t started by engineers. Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky had early interests in ice hockey and art and got a fine arts degree with a concentration in industrial design.
If the best opportunities are to foreigners at the same time citizens are turned away from work the problem will only grow more contentious. Added to the hollowing out of US industry. Musk has money, American citizens should not subsidize business for the failures of 50 yrs of American policies.
Sometimes I find Dave Barry maddeningly even-handed. Some stuff can’t be even-handed away and Dave Barry doesn’t try:
___________________________________________
Just when it appears that the presidential race cannot get any more insane, Trump goes to Butler, Pa., to hold a campaign rally, for which the security has apparently been outsourced to the Boeing Corp. Trump is shot in the ear by a man who is somehow able to climb, unimpeded, with a rifle, onto the roof of a building that not only is within range of the speaker’s platform, but also has three police snipers stationed inside it. Really.
So was the entire Biden administration secretly outsourced to Boeing?
P.S. —
As, for instance, scientists unravel all of the intricate details of how the various types of cells within our bodies actually work–and especially in concert with and supporting each other–it seems to me that it becomes harder and harder to maintain the idea that this incredible, multilayered, interconnected complexity all just came about by chance as, billions of years ago on our planet, various molecules just happened to develop and, then, to randomly collide with each other leading to the creation of life and, then, that that life followed a random path to eventually develop into us (sometimes) sentient beings.*
Perhaps the Steve Bannon and the MAGA anti-H-1B visaists should talk Trump into forming a high paying Jobs Union for America’s Progressive Educated graduates?
SoP,
You’ve hit upon a major problem with Darwinian evolution. DE has a hard time dealing with new species, yet alone life origin. It deals quite well with how a species adapts once it is established. A number of books are out there describing the problem for biology. One of my favorites is Darwin’s Black Box by Behe. If you want to explore ID then Darwin’s Doubt by Meyer is interesting. I don’t totally buy into ID, but DE has major problems just from the Cambrian explosion.
It seems humanity already has enough trouble understanding the physical world around them—something that possibly further ‘muddies the waters‘ regarding the meaning of the ‘Spark‘ (Soul/Spirit/Self) within that many perceive.
Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet was filmed during July, August, September, and October of 1967 in a dozen different locations in Umbria, Tuscany, and Lazio. The male lead was born in June of 1950, the female in April of 1951.
I suppose that, between Darwinian Gradualism, Punctuated Equlibrium, and Stockbreeding For Dummies, you might get from the initial life form to today.
But that one….A bunch of molecules of greater or lesser complexity had to run into each other just right. And, once they got started, not get stuffed by, say, an acidic bubble floating by, excess UV.
What are the chances?
One physicist said that anything less likely than one in one over three hundred, which is to say a fraction with the numerator being one and the denominator being one followed by three hundred zeros is effectively impossible.
Gelerntner, a computer guy at,Yale, thinks the math doesn’t work. Good discussion on youtube. “Gelerntner” “mathematical challenges”. Couldn’t get the link to work directly.
And then there’s “Doubting Darwin”.
Too much is buried in the background of some of the above assertions to fully refute them in a brief comment, but let’s try a truncated attempt:
1) On Behe, Meyers, and Gelerntner, et al., and their views on DE and ID, please see Jerry Coyne: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/05/17/computer-scientist-david-gelertner-drinks-the-academic-kool-aid-buys-into-intelligent-design/ and/or https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/david-gelernter-is-wrong-about-ditching-darwin/
2) on the supposed lack of precursor evidence of evolution prior to the Cambrian Explosion, they have now found fossilized imprints of soft body animals living before said “explosion”, so no real gaps in the overall evolution of species story.
3) on the 30 or so physical parameters needing to be aligned “just so” for life to exist in our universe, that is a tougher argument to refute but I think:
3a) it is basically a case of correlation being used to describe causation: this universe and we exist, but I don’t know of any argument that links those two facts in a cause-effect relationship [but see #6 below].
3b) if God is omnipotent etc., then He can make a universe with 30 or 3 or 8 or 77 such parameters, and who is to say He did not do so with at least several dozen different universes, each developing “life” of some form, perhaps even life that evolved to our level of brain complexity and resultant levels of modest intelligence (or beyond?). [I gather SOP alludes to such personages as possibly being cross dimensional or cross universe visitors to our realm?]
4) God could well exist and still every religion devised and promoted by man becomes nothing more than extended stories, successful cultural patterns, dreams, hullucinations, etc. God making man in His image is more likely the reverse. I have remarked previously about a desire for transcendence possibly being an evolved psychological element in our brains, with different people having such desires across a spectrum from high to lower. Justin Barrett says we are “born believers” although Pascal Boyer wiffs on trying to explain why some people are (or remain) believers and others not [plus why people move into and out of one camp or the other over their lives*.]
5) on the limitation of DE as applied to existing species, with the “difficulties” of moving from one specie’s phenotype to another’s, see: Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body [2008]. He describes how a fish jaw bone has been studied to show it “evolved” into one of our three bones of our inner ear.
6) on DE as not applicable to the formation of life, rather than “merely” the evolution of life once it had formed, a place to start would be Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death [2022], with perhaps also a sorjourn into Philip Ball’s How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. There are also several You Tube discussions (see Arvin Ash?) about how life could have formed “automatically” from inorganic to organic to biomolecular chemistry [abiogenesis or autobiogenesis]. There are still gaps in those proposals, going from the ideas for the earliest biomolecular precursors finally finding the right physical and chemical environment(s) to form replicating (not reproducing) molecules. Somehow perhaps they eventually evolve into RNA. Once RNA is formed, RNA can be self catalyzing and self replicating. From RNA to DNA is still not fully understood, but is logically quite possible. Once a protocell is formed within membranes as vesicles, have an energy creating/consuming mechanism, and replicate, they are “life”.
7) Finally, even if you believe in ID, isn’t evolution by natural selection just the most marvelous and beautiful “design approach” the “designer” might use to allow for whatever finally became “life” to continue to survive as its environments changed? And it applies for survival of useful biomolecules as for full up “cells”, tissues, bodies, and whole organisms – see Ball’s book.
*The historian Tom Holland ended his book Dominion with claims of not being a believer even though he fully acknowledged the role of Christianity on making our Western culture and eventual social and political environment. I recently saw something that suggested that perhaps after many interviews and public presentations, he has now become a believer – but I am not quite sure on that.
Enough for a Saturday night. 🙂 And peace to all who follow the Golden Rule.
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Fun to watch how things are made. People that design things are amazing. I guess AI will do much more of this in the future.
I really don’t care about how environmentally friendly they are though. Most of what they are talking about really comes down to saving money
There’s a guy posting at X, Ken Fox, who specialized in the design and installation of production automation systems, especially for the food industry…some of his videos are very impressive. He recently changed jobs to work a SpaceX, so you may have to go back a ways to find his production equipment videos. @robot_brains
Steve Bannon Slams ‘Toddler’ Elon Musk After Tesla Owner Tells Critics To ‘F**k Yourself In the Face’ As MAGA Civil War Rages On
After looking at American colleges today—America’s entire Educational System, I have to side with Musk on the need for H-1B visas.
After what Musk told critics – 🙂 – I have to admire Bannon’s response.
From what I have read, it seems that many of these smart H-1B visa immigrants (?whatever?) make 10% less than the American dummies. That doesn’t seem to be much less, so am guessing that such businesses are looking for performance over cost?
RE: Christianity in the West
A headline of an article out today reads, “As Christianity Dies in the West, Western Civilization Dies, Too.”*
Then, there is this recent informed, erudite, deep discussion of the question of the existence of God and the state of Christianity in the West from the Hoover Institution.**
Mentioned in the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” series, as an argument in favor of the existence of God and his creation of the Universe, is the issue of how the Universe is very precisely “fine tuned”–30 or so physical constants, any one of which, if it varied by even the slightest, would result in life not being able to develop in our Universe.
It seems to me that, if the rise of the Enlightenment and the scientific point of view has lead to the increasing diminution of Christianity, then, the road back to the revitalization of Christianity may well be through investigating how the Universe works, is through science.
* See https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/as_christianity_dies_in_the_west_the_west_dies_too.html
** See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2u54a1FL28&t=1877s
There are plenty of H-1Bs making much less than an American citizen would get paid for the same job. And by no means all of these people are top software developers or engineers, a lot of them in in pretty low-level jobs.
As Steve Hsu pointed out, there is another visa program called O1, which is used to bring in foreigners of exceptional ability.
I’d also point out the the US economy is no dependent only on engineers and programmers, as important as these jobs are. There is a shortage of skilled machinists, and it is getting worse as older ones retire. In the aviation industry, there is a shortage of A&Ps (certified aircraft and powerplant mechanics, and also shortages in many other skilled trades. We should consider encouraging skilled workers from Germany in particular to migrate the the US, but as permanent residents and eventually citizens, not on some termporary visa program.
Also, the people who create and run important businesses are not always engineers or programmers or physicists. Wal-Mart and Costco are pretty important business, but they weren’t started by engineers. Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky had early interests in ice hockey and art and got a fine arts degree with a concentration in industrial design.
If the best opportunities are to foreigners at the same time citizens are turned away from work the problem will only grow more contentious. Added to the hollowing out of US industry. Musk has money, American citizens should not subsidize business for the failures of 50 yrs of American policies.
Sometimes I find Dave Barry maddeningly even-handed. Some stuff can’t be even-handed away and Dave Barry doesn’t try:
___________________________________________
Just when it appears that the presidential race cannot get any more insane, Trump goes to Butler, Pa., to hold a campaign rally, for which the security has apparently been outsourced to the Boeing Corp. Trump is shot in the ear by a man who is somehow able to climb, unimpeded, with a rifle, onto the roof of a building that not only is within range of the speaker’s platform, but also has three police snipers stationed inside it. Really.
–Dave Barry, “Dave Barry Year in Review: 2024 was an exciting year, and by ‘exciting,’ we mean ‘stupid’”
https://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article296995874.html
___________________________________________
So was the entire Biden administration secretly outsourced to Boeing?
P.S. —
As, for instance, scientists unravel all of the intricate details of how the various types of cells within our bodies actually work–and especially in concert with and supporting each other–it seems to me that it becomes harder and harder to maintain the idea that this incredible, multilayered, interconnected complexity all just came about by chance as, billions of years ago on our planet, various molecules just happened to develop and, then, to randomly collide with each other leading to the creation of life and, then, that that life followed a random path to eventually develop into us (sometimes) sentient beings.*
* See,for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_tYrnv_o6A
and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe-83tBcxhs
and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hk9jct2ozY
and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv89fSt5jBY
Perhaps the Steve Bannon and the MAGA anti-H-1B visaists should talk Trump into forming a high paying Jobs Union for America’s Progressive Educated graduates?
SoP,
You’ve hit upon a major problem with Darwinian evolution. DE has a hard time dealing with new species, yet alone life origin. It deals quite well with how a species adapts once it is established. A number of books are out there describing the problem for biology. One of my favorites is Darwin’s Black Box by Behe. If you want to explore ID then Darwin’s Doubt by Meyer is interesting. I don’t totally buy into ID, but DE has major problems just from the Cambrian explosion.
It seems humanity already has enough trouble understanding the physical world around them—something that possibly further ‘muddies the waters‘ regarding the meaning of the ‘Spark‘ (Soul/Spirit/Self) within that many perceive.
Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet was filmed during July, August, September, and October of 1967 in a dozen different locations in Umbria, Tuscany, and Lazio. The male lead was born in June of 1950, the female in April of 1951.
Trump to Reinstate Famed ‘Diet Coke Button’ in the Oval Office
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/12/trump-reinstate-famed-diet-coke-button-oval-office/
January 6 Political Prisoners Launch Historic $50 Billion Class Action Lawsuit Against DOJ
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/12/january-6-political-prisoners-launch-historic-50-billion/
I suppose that, between Darwinian Gradualism, Punctuated Equlibrium, and Stockbreeding For Dummies, you might get from the initial life form to today.
But that one….A bunch of molecules of greater or lesser complexity had to run into each other just right. And, once they got started, not get stuffed by, say, an acidic bubble floating by, excess UV.
What are the chances?
One physicist said that anything less likely than one in one over three hundred, which is to say a fraction with the numerator being one and the denominator being one followed by three hundred zeros is effectively impossible.
Gelerntner, a computer guy at,Yale, thinks the math doesn’t work. Good discussion on youtube. “Gelerntner” “mathematical challenges”. Couldn’t get the link to work directly.
And then there’s “Doubting Darwin”.
Too much is buried in the background of some of the above assertions to fully refute them in a brief comment, but let’s try a truncated attempt:
1) On Behe, Meyers, and Gelerntner, et al., and their views on DE and ID, please see Jerry Coyne: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/05/17/computer-scientist-david-gelertner-drinks-the-academic-kool-aid-buys-into-intelligent-design/ and/or https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/david-gelernter-is-wrong-about-ditching-darwin/
2) on the supposed lack of precursor evidence of evolution prior to the Cambrian Explosion, they have now found fossilized imprints of soft body animals living before said “explosion”, so no real gaps in the overall evolution of species story.
3) on the 30 or so physical parameters needing to be aligned “just so” for life to exist in our universe, that is a tougher argument to refute but I think:
3a) it is basically a case of correlation being used to describe causation: this universe and we exist, but I don’t know of any argument that links those two facts in a cause-effect relationship [but see #6 below].
3b) if God is omnipotent etc., then He can make a universe with 30 or 3 or 8 or 77 such parameters, and who is to say He did not do so with at least several dozen different universes, each developing “life” of some form, perhaps even life that evolved to our level of brain complexity and resultant levels of modest intelligence (or beyond?). [I gather SOP alludes to such personages as possibly being cross dimensional or cross universe visitors to our realm?]
4) God could well exist and still every religion devised and promoted by man becomes nothing more than extended stories, successful cultural patterns, dreams, hullucinations, etc. God making man in His image is more likely the reverse. I have remarked previously about a desire for transcendence possibly being an evolved psychological element in our brains, with different people having such desires across a spectrum from high to lower. Justin Barrett says we are “born believers” although Pascal Boyer wiffs on trying to explain why some people are (or remain) believers and others not [plus why people move into and out of one camp or the other over their lives*.]
5) on the limitation of DE as applied to existing species, with the “difficulties” of moving from one specie’s phenotype to another’s, see: Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body [2008]. He describes how a fish jaw bone has been studied to show it “evolved” into one of our three bones of our inner ear.
6) on DE as not applicable to the formation of life, rather than “merely” the evolution of life once it had formed, a place to start would be Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death [2022], with perhaps also a sorjourn into Philip Ball’s How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. There are also several You Tube discussions (see Arvin Ash?) about how life could have formed “automatically” from inorganic to organic to biomolecular chemistry [abiogenesis or autobiogenesis]. There are still gaps in those proposals, going from the ideas for the earliest biomolecular precursors finally finding the right physical and chemical environment(s) to form replicating (not reproducing) molecules. Somehow perhaps they eventually evolve into RNA. Once RNA is formed, RNA can be self catalyzing and self replicating. From RNA to DNA is still not fully understood, but is logically quite possible. Once a protocell is formed within membranes as vesicles, have an energy creating/consuming mechanism, and replicate, they are “life”.
7) Finally, even if you believe in ID, isn’t evolution by natural selection just the most marvelous and beautiful “design approach” the “designer” might use to allow for whatever finally became “life” to continue to survive as its environments changed? And it applies for survival of useful biomolecules as for full up “cells”, tissues, bodies, and whole organisms – see Ball’s book.
*The historian Tom Holland ended his book Dominion with claims of not being a believer even though he fully acknowledged the role of Christianity on making our Western culture and eventual social and political environment. I recently saw something that suggested that perhaps after many interviews and public presentations, he has now become a believer – but I am not quite sure on that.
Enough for a Saturday night. 🙂 And peace to all who follow the Golden Rule.