An important example would be a family with children where both parents could work but do not have to. From the GDP POV, it is a huge boost to have a second parent earning an income, even if most of the additional monies end up dedicated to the costs of outsourcing some parental duties. A stay at home parent might be producing as much or more value to the family, while not contributing to the GDP at all.

The small responsive unit of Delaware has an outsized effect on how corporations are run in all 50 states, and it cuts out the legislature of my state on certain aspects that were traditionally reserved to the states.

The framers never imagined that kind of commercial reach.

The federal gov't was designed to address such issues when they were proven to be significant, by those very framers, even if the framers themselves did not anticipate the specifics. That is what the commerce clause is about, among other things.

I could be wrong, but I would have guessed we were onto the next phase by now, that could be labelled: "Brilli-ant rhymes with grant"

That tenure would come from earning grants. Now keeping the grant gravy-train running smoothly does require churning out papers, but it is not the papers themselves that would be so important.

That was my conclusion, too. The personal economics and the carbon footprint correlate surprisingly strongly. The CO2 costs of hybrids look attractive on a 5-6 year timescale, but it gets bad when the environmental costs of a new set of batteries get factored in. People underestimate the various costs of the vehicle itself, and how they look over a longer haul.

I just threw in the towel on my 20 year old vehicle for a new small gasoline engine car. I figure my odds of getting >12 years out of this vehicle are quite high.

Maybe the picture will be very different in 10 years, with improvements to battery technology. But today I stayed away from the hybrids and electric vehicles, for both fiscal and environmental reasons.

Sure. Self-taught systems put a lot on responsibility on the student. Apprenticeship systems are very mentor-time-expensive and/or put responsibility on the student.

If the students were already so great at this, they could make do with so-so teachers. We do not expect as much from K-6 at least, for good reason. And that will not change soon.

> If the students were already so great at this, they could make do with so-so teachers.

It wastes the student's time tho.

I wonder if hydrogen is practical to transport in large quantities. My guess is no.

Your idea of methane, if it could be done efficiently, seems more likely.

Ammonia might be a better way. Easy to produce, store and transport and contains higher hydrogen density than compressed hydrogen (I think).

http://www.ammoniaenergy.org/

The biosphere can't handle ammonia accidents at anything resembling the scale of crude oil and natural gas accidents. Methane is the better choice.

I saw that very recently an Australian company had worked out a way of transporting hydrogen in large quantities by converting it into something else which I conveniently can't remember.

It was the CSIRO converting hydrogen to ammonia for transport, and then back to hydrogen again: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-08/hydrogen-fuel-breakthr...

Plate tectonics is a candidate to go on that list, and it was controversial until good undersea maps were available circa 1970. That is 50 years ago, not 30.

True. But I presume that Asimov is answering the letter using the language of the same. Translating "wrong" to "incorrect" does not add anything, better to take the issue head on using the same language.

Better still would be to use "accuracy". But that presumes the audience is ready to understand the nature of the issue in a scientific and logical way. We want to get there, but we cannot start there.

Accuracy is a good choice of word. It doesn't come with the baggage of being a binary classification.

The terminology I jump to is "approximation error", where error is some quantified measurement of (in)accuracy. But using the word "error" might lead one to think of e.g. "having erred" or "being in error", which is unhelpful.

There's a quote from Box I like: "all models are wrong, some models are useful".

I guess this might be rephrased less snappily as "no model is completely accurate, but some models are useful".

Replace "model" with "theory", "belief" as desired.

That said, some models or theories fall into the category of being "not even wrong", i.e. to be so incoherent or unfalsifiable that it isn't even theoretically possible to measure how accurate they are.

Pauli: "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!"

That only makes sense for absurdly aggressive speculators or people with the political connections to borrow money for 1% or less.

I have a fixed 15 year loan at 2.75%, which seems like a pretty good deal to me. Know where I can borrow a few hundred thou at 1%?

The interest rate isn’t only important, so is the principal.

Yes, sometimes buying makes sense, but sometimes renting makes sense as well.