The article says the US currently imports about 10,000 tons of tungsten per year, and has no active production, so that's also its current usage.
Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]
So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.
If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and
government $38 billion.
That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.
For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.
A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.
The experiment in the article goes further than this.
I expect a self driving car to be able to read and follow a handwritten sign saying, say, "Accident ahaed. Use right lane." despite the typo and the fact that it hasn't seen this kind of sign before. I'd expect a human to pay it due attention to.
I would not expect a human to follow the sign in the article ("Proceed") in the case illustrated where there were pedestrians already crossing the road and this would cause a collision. Even if a human driver takes the sign seriously, he knows that collision avoidance takes priority over any signage.
There is something wrong with a model that has the opposite behaviour here.
Why not? The Vietnam War drew plenty of organised protesters. The details would be different, but big popular actions can still be coordinated through traditional media and word of mouth.
Lack of social media didn't prevent the French Revolution.
"You can't do X" is a much different experience from "you can do X, but you need to spend a year and thousands of man-hours of paperwork applying for permission to do it".
In China, if the five-year plan prioritizes something, businesses will be up and running in months. In France, if the French parliament enacts a law prioritizing something, businesses still have to fight individual departments or local governments that have their own ideas about how they should regulate it.
Maybe you can scale to have one operator operate ten or a hundred household robots at a time.
An autonomous robot that has 99% reliability, getting stuck once an hour, is useless to me. A semi-autonomous robot that gets stuck once an hour but can be rescued by the remote operator is tempting.
Expect security and privacy in the marketing for these things, too, but I don't think that's a real differentiator. Rich and middle class people alike are currently OK with letting barely-vetted strangers in their houses for cleaning the world over.
Last night I downloaded a TV episode and played it in VLC. 30 seconds in, the power failed. Fine, it's an old laptop I'm using as a media server, battery is long dead - this never happened before but maybe something is loose. I checked the power supply and restarted it. It failed again at the same point in the video, and again a third time. Something about that video causes my laptop to die.
I turned it off and went to bed. Maybe I'll troubleshoot it today. But I'd love to understand what could have happened. The closest thing I know of is the Janet Jackson video that could crash hard drives [0]. In this case the sound was playing on a different device (my TV) so I don't think it's the same explanation.
For extra weirdness, the episode was Black Mirror S7E01. Exactly the kind of thing the creators would like to build into a Black Mirror episode.
Dying on the exact same frame, or just generally in the same spot?
In the case of the latter my first thought would be thermals. Different video codecs have significantly different decoding costs, and may also stress different parts of your system. You could check for that by playing that same video but not starting at the beginning and see if it's the same duration. Or jump to just before it dies and see if it plays through.
If by "downloaded" you mean The High Seas, those who provision the high seas are often on the cutting edge of using codecs with every last feature turned on to make the videos smaller to squeeze every last bit out of the encodings that they can, which can make them unusually expensive to decode. Or so I've heard.
I didn't get to dig much further into it, but for those of you who suggested ideas:
- not always the same frame. The first three failures were within seconds of each other, possibly the same frame. I tried again the next night and it got through that part of the video, but crashed a minute later
- I was able to play the video using a different app (Ubuntu's built-in Videos app from an old Ubuntu release, maybe 20.04)
Some of these video codecs have pathological cases that might be maxing out your video while doing the decoding. If you're only using it as a media server, that might exceed the (possibly age-degraded) capacity of your power supply. Replacing the power supply might help in that case.
It's also possible that something in a particular frame is triggering a bug in your driver and crashing that way. In that case, your best bet might be to transcode the video to a different codec or something.
Maybe your particular video download is from an entirely trustworthy source, but it's not unheard of that untrustworthy folks will modify a file with the intent of causing this to happen.
This is a study from an elite institution published in a respectable journal in the social sciences. Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.
[Reads abstract]
They didn't? It's a pure observational study that one measure of sloppiness in the organisation correlates with another? What do we pay these guys for?
Per abstract it's a "a dynamic difference-in-differences" analysis, which means likely that they see whether the employee behavior changes after the event. But establishing causation with it still requires quite a few assumptions.
PNAS is kinda known for headline grabbing research with at times a bit less rigorous methodology.
> Certainly they took the time to perform a controlled experiment and assigned managers at random to deliver the birthday cards late or on time. That would be cheap to do and minimally invasive for the human subjects.
If the results are true, it would be actually quite expensive because of the drop in productivity. It could also be a bit of a nightmare to push through ethical review.
They could start by observing the rate at which birthday cards are delivered on time, and not vary too much from that.
I suppose the impact on productivity isn't known in advance, and it might be that failing to receive a birthday card from a normally diligent manager costs the company more in productivity than it gains from a sloppy manager unexpectedly giving one on time.
It says it's different to human skin in multiple aspects.
Do I need more collagen or more moisture in my skin? I would expect evolution made some pretty good choices around default human skin for typical human activities, and if more moisture was obviously good, I would already have it.
Maybe tilapia skin is better for people who spend 24 hours a day swimming in lakes.
> It says it's different to human skin in multiple aspects.
No it says "even more than in human skin and other skins". Not different.
> Do I need more collagen or more moisture in my skin?
For this context? Yes? Clearly the article answers that already. I even included in my first reply but you'll have a third chance to read it:
> ...which are very important for scarring...
And your attempt to move the goal post fails miserably as well. Or do you think humans evolved to perfection by thinking this:
> I would expect evolution made some pretty good choices around default human skin for typical human activities, and if more moisture was obviously good, I would already have it.
I don't think you are debating in good faith. Good luck.
Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]
So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.
If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and government $38 billion.
That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.
For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.
A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.
[0] https://www.metal.com/tungsten
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
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