Light Weapons

Traditional ranged weapons come with some serious drawbacks.  They are hard to aim.  Projectiles can be dodged and slower projectiles can sometimes be caught and used against you by the enemy.  Ammunition is bulky and awkward to carry, and it tends to run out quickly.  Projectiles have a limited range.  Projectiles also only offer a limited set of options.  Projectile weapons can certainly be effective, but there are a lot of liming factors and inconveniences that make them less than ideal.

Light based weapons are much better in a number of ways.  Light sabers are a great, though fictional example.  A light saber blade will never go dull.  Light sabers can cut things that metal blades cannot.  Of course, real life light sabers with modern technology would run their batteries down in a matter of seconds, but for a weapon that can cut a hole in the side of a tank, maybe it is worth it.  Unfortunately, we do not actually have the technology to make the light saber itself.

Laser weapons have major advantages over projectile weapons.  They come with the same limitations as light sabers would though.  Lasers require enormous amounts of energy.  A practical laser weapon using modern technology would need a large and heavy battery or power generator with it.  This would be impractical for battle field use unless mounted on a moderate sized vehicle.  Outfitting individual soldiers with laser weapons is just impractical.  They would hardly be able to carry the battery required to operate the thing, and that is not even considering other gear they need to pack.  We would need much better battery technology for infantry lasers to be practical.

The benefits of lasers are massive though.  The list of limitations in the first paragraph are all eliminated with lasers.

Lasers can offer a broad range of options.  It is not difficult to design a laser that can be operated at different power levels.  In some scenarios, it might be valuable to have a laser weapon that can fire a continuous or pulsed beam, which can sweep the battle field.  For this to be effective, the power level would have to be quite high. This functionality might also be used to fire a laser through a line of people or vehicles, but for this to work, the laser would have to be able to handle many seconds of continuous operation.  This would require a good design for sinking heat as well as a good battery.  This can be done with lasers though.  Using this for a sweep would be similar to using a machine gun for cover fire, and using this for penetration would be similar to using a large gun with a hard projectile.  The difference is that a machine gun leaves gaps and a penetration round cannot control its depth.  Clearly lasers are superior for these functions.

Lasers have theoretically infinite range.  In practice, the beam tends to hit things as it goes, like dust and moisture in the air, but in a vacuum lasers have literally infinite range.  In an atmosphere, a laser beam will weaken with distance, but unlike a projectile weapon, this is easy to compensate for, merely by turning up the power.  Unlike projectiles, foggy conditions may make a laser weapon require higher power to be effective, but this is not a serious issue.  The only real downside with using a laser weapon in fog is that it creates a line back to the user, which would make laser weapons poor choices for covert ops weapons in these conditions.  In clear conditions though, laser weapons are nearly silent, and the beam is not visible, making them better covert ops weapons than guns.  Of course this only applies to visible light lasers.  Range is a major benefit of laser weapons.

Ammunition is less of a problem for lasers.  Lasers still require batteries, but batteries do not require a specific shape.  This means they don't have to be awkward like bullets or arrows.  Currently batteries are heavy.  There is a lot of room for improvement of batteries, while bullets and arrows are pretty close to as good as they can be.  We know that matter carries a lot of energy, and we even know how to extract some of it, but modern technology is not capable of safely extracting nuclear energy on an individual scale, and our abilities to efficiently extract chemical energy on small scales is also lacking.  Solar energy is a good option, but not for military use, because it is either dependent on the weather being good or requires a large battery.  Progress is being made though, and if we put sufficient resources into developing better battery technology, it would probably not be too difficult to come up with batteries that are suitable for infantry laser weapons.

Lasers are not technically much  easier to aim than other projectile weapons.  They do have the benefit of always shooting straight.  Light is not affected by wind or gravity, so it is not necessary to spend time and effort accounting for these things.  This provides a moderate advantage at very long ranges.  The real benefit of lasers in aiming is in their flexibility.  A visible spectrum laser weapon that can be adjusted can have its power turned down to where it merely makes a visible point of light on the target.  This is even better than a laser sight, because it always shows precisely where the shot will hit.  It cannot be misaligned, because it is the shot, just at a very weak power level.  In short, well designed laser weapons can be many times more accurate than projectile weapons.

Lastly, laser weapons cannot be dodged or caught.  The advantage with using light as a weapon is that light is the fastest known thing in the universe, and it is the primary thing humans used to sense things.  In other words, even with perfect reaction time, a laser cannot be dodged, because by the time you see it, it is already hitting you.  Laser can be reflected with mirrors, which is similar to catching and using an enemy projectile, except that there is no time to react, because the laser beam is not visible to the target until its light has reached the target.  To dodge a laser, the target would have to move so fast that it is literally traveling backwards in time, and that is not just faster than the speed of light.  That is faster than instant.  All evidence says that this is impossible.

Laser does have some downsides aside from requiring heavy power sources.  In theory, mirrored armor could reduce its effectiveness.  Since there is no known substance that is a perfect reflector, there is no way to reflect 100% of the energy.  This means that mirrored armor would still be heated and probably damaged by laser weapons, but it might be the difference between life and death or victory and defeat, and it could make an army or vehicle significantly more resistant against laser weapons.  This is not terribly difficult to deal with though.  Infantry can also be armed with handguns, and perhaps an infantry squad could have one person armed with a military class projectile weapon.  Vehicles mounted with laser weapons might also have a rocket launcher or some other heavy projectile weapon, just in case.  Alternatively, black paint grenades might be more effective.  A black paint grenade would easily make a mirrorized vehicle susceptible to laser.  Acid grenades could work as well, by putting a nice dark patina on the mirror finish (this would probably violate some war treaty if used anywhere near infantry though, since it would be classified as chemical weapons).  Alternatively, wavelengths of laser could be used that common armor materials will not reflect.

Most laser light is visible.  Most kinds of laser are not visible in the air, when it is clear, but dusty or foggy air will produce a visible line along the path of the beam.  This could have deadly consequences.  In addition, even when the air is very clear, the laser will produce a visible spot on the target while it is firing.  This can be useful for aiming, but it can also provide a clue as to where the wielder is shooting from.  Again, this could have deadly consequences.  We already discussed this in the context of covert ops, but even for infantry using guerilla tactics this could be a serious problem.  There is a solution though.  While most laser light is visible, it is theoretically possible to make laser radiation in any wavelength.  CD drives use infrared laser, which is quite good at producing heat.  IR laser will not produce a visible spot of light, so aiming will be slightly harder, but it also will not leave a line in air that is not clear, and it will not give the enemy additional clues about the position of the user.  In theory, laser could be emitted in the RF and microwave spectra, which are also good for producing heat (especially in water).  UV lasers would also be invisible.  In other words, where it is important to conceal position, there are options for lasers that will not give it away.

Given the massive benefits of laser weapons, I think the military should be spending most of its funding on making them viable for infantry combat use.  Yeah, it's nice to have good fighter planes, bombs, and such, but laser weapons would provide a substantial advantage.  If we were not dumb enough to give them away to what ever insurgent group is willing to do our dirty work, it would provide us with a substantial advantage over terrorist organizations.  Laser weapons also require special technical knowledge and skills to repair, so if they did come into enemy hands, they would slowly phase out as they got old and broke.  Imagine a war where our weapons can hit the enemy hours before the enemy's weapons are within range.  We do not need more military funding to have a strong national defense.  We just need to spend what we already have more wisely.

Shared Liability

In modern financial businesses, the liability always belongs to someone else.  For example, if I am buying a house, and I take out a loan, if the value of the house suddenly drops dramatically, I am liable for the loss in value, not the bank that provided the loan.  This is true even though the bank required that the home be appraised and inspected to ensure that it would have sufficient collateral value to secure the loan.  It also works this way with transaction oriented businesses.  If I sell something and get paid through PayPal, if the buyer's check bounces or credit card is discovered to be stolen, PayPal takes the money to cover the loss from me.  And I mean, PayPal takes all of the loses from me.  If a store sells something on a Visa card, and the transaction has to be reversed due to fraud, Visa charges the store for 100% of the losses.  Financial businesses only take losses when someone walks away from debt, and even then, they don't always take losses.  I read an article a few months ago about an older couple who's house dropped in value by more than 60% when the housing bubble burst.  The value of their house was substantially lower than the remaining value on their loan.  The bank expected them to eat 100% of the loss and keep paying on the loan which the house was no longer even close to fair collateral for.  So the couple walked away.  This is the only place where banks and similar financial companies lose money.  In every other case, they charge it to some other party.

This is stupid.  Yes, I understand that businesses cannot survive net loss, but they can survive occasional smaller losses, and a well run business can handle this.  Companies like PayPal and Visa charge someone else mostly because they can get away with it.  The thing is, when a transaction has to be reversed because it is fraudulent, no one deserves the loss, except perhaps the perpetrator, who generally is both impossible to find in a timely manner and does not have the money anyway.  In short, someone is going to get ripped off.  Paypal justifies charging the seller on the grounds that the seller should have known better.  How so?  I mean, yeah, there are often warning signs and red flags, but it can be really hard to tell a good scam from a legitimate sale.  Scammers are not the only ones that hire private transportation for bulky items.  Scammers are not the only ones who have poor but passable English skills.  And what do you expect an honest person to do when they have been overpaid?  Yeah, you and I might know that overpayment is a major red flag, but scamming has become so complex that there could be whole college classes on the topic and still barely brush the surface.  An online business owner might be reasonably expected to know how to identify common scams, but in what world is it reasonable to expect every regular 9 to 5 worker who just wants to get a bucks for an old chair or table to have a top class education in internet scams?  I mean, the 5 to 10 hours required to learn about just the most basic scams would be worth more working minimum wage than the value of the typical used furniture item.

Financial companies that provide loans or electronic payment should take part of the risk.  I understand a bank offering loans repossessing the house when the buyer is no longer capable of paying the mortgage, under most conditions.  The house is not just an investment for the buyer though.  In fact, it is more of an indirect investment for the bank than anyone.  (If you have ever owned a home and kept track of all of the associated costs, you will likely be aware that homes are not investments.  They are liabilities.  The biggest financial benefit you get out of buying a home is that the net cost is lower than renting.  There is almost always a net cost though, even after selling the home.)  When the value of a home drops below the remaining value of the mortgage, the buyer has two options.  One is just walking away and taking the loss as is.  The other is continuing paying on a loan that is larger than the value of its collateral.  The first is morally questionable and the second is financially unwise.  And if the buyer does walk away, the entire liability minus what has already been paid is on the bank.  A wise and ethical bank would contact the buyer and renegotiate the loan.  This would balance the risk, earn the trust of the buyer, and help the bank cut its own losses.  Likewise, a wise and ethical electronic money transfer company, like PayPal or Visa, would also take part of the risk.  Because the fraudulent use of a credit card is not entirely the fault of the seller practically ever.  Yes, the seller might have been the victim of a scam that some people might consider obvious, but PayPal or Visa was the moron who accepted the payment in the first place!

Shared risk on this sort of thing is not merely a good idea.  It should be legally enforced.  While businesses may not be able to take a net loss, a small percentage of transactions resulting in losses is not as big a deal for them as one transaction is for someone who is just trying to sell a couch.  And if a company like PayPal or Visa is having bad transactions so frequently that it is a serious problem, that company deserves to fail.  It is bad for the economy to keep propping up companies that are too dumb to be profitable on their own.  The fact is, currently the end user ends up taking all of the risk, while the financial businesses are reaping most of the profits.  This is just plain wrong.  If the banks and electronic money transfer companies are going to making most of the profits, they should also be taking most of the risk.  And frankly, the loss of a company like Visa or PayPal is far less destructive than thousands of people getting ripped off because those companies won't take responsibility for their own security.  If Visa or PayPal dies, another company will appear to replace them.

And perhaps a legally enforced shared risk policy would prompt our financial sector make this kind of fraud harder.  They are not going to start caring about forged money orders or cashiers checks, about stolen credit cards, or about hacked accounts as long as they are allowed to keep making their customers are pay for all of the losses.  A legally enforced shared risk policy would push the financial sector to do a better job of protecting the assets of its customers.  And likewise, a legally enforced shared risk policy would also encourage lenders to adopt wiser lending policies that avoid the creation of recession causing bubbles in the first place.  And even more importantly, a legally enforced shared risk policy would make all of this stuff fair and ethical, instead of rewarding financial institutions for making fraud easy and for poor lending practices.  An effective and beneficial free market also needs to be a fair market, and right now it is not even close.

Why Net Neutrality is Fundamental

Since the FCC voted to end net neutrality, it has become a major issue again.  The first time around, net neutrality was all about fair business practices, and that is still part of the discussion.  The original discussion was triggered when Comcast used its position as the communication medium to make Netflix look like an inferior service to its own streaming service.  This harmed Comcast customers, Netflix, and was a violation of laws against monopolies (though I don't think anyone realized this last point).  This time, the discussion is much more broad.

Net neutrality is not just about business, as the right suggests it is.  The Republican Party has framed net neutrality as purely a business issue.  The justification for ending net neutrality was that ISPs have a moral right to control their networks, including the right to charge some business users more for their use than others.  This even seems to make sense.  By this reasoning, Comcast was still in violation of the law.  Using this power to give another product they own an advantage over competing products is a violation of the law.  Comcast would still be within its rights to charge content providers more, however, without this serious conflict of interest.  The problem with this reasoning is that this is not purely a business issue, and treating it like one results in the violation of rights far beyond businesses.

Imagine what would happen if the U.S. Postal Service was not client neutral.  For example, what if the U.S. Postal Service prioritized its own advertisements and delayed advertisements for FedEx and DHL?  Obviously, the other companies would be bothered by this.  Now, what if they complained, and the USPS told them they could have the same priority, but they would have to pay a million dollars a year for it?  This is essentially exactly what Comcast and some other ISPs are doing, except instead of using it to advertise the service being used, they are doing it to diminish the quality of service of other companies to push their customers into using a totally different service they are offering.

Now imagine something else.  What if the U.S. Postal Service decides that it is opposed to Catholicism and wants to promote Protestantism.  So, it treats bulk advertisements from Protestant groups as first class mail, and it treats mail from Catholic organizations as the lowest priority mail.  And maybe it also supports opening the borders to free immigration, so it delays Republican mail while putting anything Democratic or apparently supporting open borders in the fast lane.  Of course, we are talking about a government agency here.  That would be totally illegal.  With the dismantling of net neutrality, it would not be illegal for ISPs to do this though.

The fact is, the internet is a communication medium, and it is currently the most important one we have.  Net neutrality was not just about fair business practices.  It was also about the ethical moderation of communication lines.  Without net neutrality, ISPs get to decide what we communicate and how we do it.  They get to control what internet services we choose to use.  They get to choose what kind of advertisements we are exposed to, and they get to choose what web sites we can use.  They even get to choose what political platforms we are exposed to.  If Comcast wants its customers to vote for a particular political candidate, it can dramatically slow down service for web sites promoting other candidates.  Comcast users who want to research candidates could find themselves waiting minutes for a site promoting Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump in the next elections, because maybe Comcast prefers the platform of some other candidate.  Since the Republican Party is largely responsible for the repeal of net neutrality, maybe Comcast will provide faster service to websites promoting Republican congressional candidates, and maybe it will even put in a filter somewhere delaying email to and from Democratic congressional candidates.  Comcast can now legally take what amount to bribes from Microsoft to slow down Google's search service.  Perhaps it would also take bribes from Yahoo to put Gmail correspondence in a slow lane.  Net neutrality was designed to prevent a very wide range of abuses of control over U.S. communication.

Ending net neutrality did not just allow companies like Comcast to charge competing businesses more for their bandwidth.  It has allowed them complete control over communications through their network, including the ability to decide exactly what their users can see and experience as well as what those outside of their network can see and experience from their users.  This is bad!  It is a serious violation of some Constitutional freedoms (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion) and many many other obvious freedoms not mentioned in the Constitution.

What it comes down to is this: If we cannot trust the government to protect our rights from companies like Comcast, then maybe internet service should be a government owned and operated national utility.  I don't like this idea, because it gives the government too much power over communication, but it is better than a very clearly greedy, profit driven private business having that kind of power totally unchecked.  In short, if we cannot have net neutrality, then lets abolish private ISPs and had over the internet to the government.  Because without net neutrality, that is the only way America stays free.

Sexism in Reporting

Today I read yet another article on sexism in STEM fields, written by someone with extreme bias and poor research skills.  The article used political incorrectness and gender statistics as evidence to support the claim that a vast majority of women in computer related fields have experienced workplace gender discrimination.*  Unfortunately, this dramatic misrepresentation of facts has yet again weakened the argument that women are facing more discrimination in technical fields than men.

To start with, I want to verify that women in software and engineering legitimately face unfair discrimination.  Sexual harassment against women is more common in these fields than in those where women are more evenly represented.  Women are typically paid less, even when they are equally productive.  Some men in these fields and some clients of these fields treat women as inferior.  American culture in general tends to discourage women from entering these fields.  The situation is legitimately bad.  Unfortunately, it can be hard to see this though all of the obviously wrong propaganda suggesting discrimination where it does not exist and implying there is more discrimination than there really is.

Sexual harassment is a problem.  In computer and engineering fields, mild sexual harassment in the workplace is not terribly uncommon.  In fields where women dominate, it is certainly far less common.  The evidence, however, seems to suggest that in computer and engineering fields, sexual harassment against women is still less common than it is outside of the workplace, and it is far less common than it is on American college campuses.  The fact is, U.S. culture has a problem with sexual harassment, and when you get a higher concentration of men in the workplace, sexual harassment seems to increase proportionally.  In short, sexual harassment in computer and engineering fields is not unusually high.  Yes, we should still be doing something about it, and it is still a form of discrimination against women, but it is stupid to suggest that this is a problem unique to these industries, and it is even more stupid to suggest that something that is so much worse outside of the workplace is solely the responsibility of managers of a very small percentage of the population.  If we want to eliminate sexual harassment in computer and engineering workplaces, we need to focus on U.S. culture, because that is the source of the problem.

It turns out that there is a legitimate reason women are paid less in computer and engineering fields.  This is not always fair, but most of the time it is!  It is true that some employers routinely pay women less without justification.  It turns out this is much rarer than most of these news articles suggest though.  A number of recent studies have shown that women approach work differently from men.  The most consistent finding is that women are far more likely to work only their scheduled hours and take more time off.  For many, this is about child care, but this is not always the case.  Women have reported reasons for this that include wanting more general family time (where child care is not a factor) and wanting more personal time.  Many women have said that they have little loyalty to their employers, putting friends, family, and other commitments far above their job.  Men tend to rate their employment much closer to family, and some even put it above family.  Men are far more likely to work when sick, skip vacation time entirely, and work longer than required.  It has been suggested that men tend to spend more than 20% more time working than women in the same position, on average.  Now, there are women who work as much as men on average, but they are fairly rare, especially in computer and engineering fields.  So why are women reporting lower pay as discrimination, if they clearly work less?  The fact is, it is not clear that they work less.  Most businesses don't publish hours worked for every employee, for privacy reasons and because they may not actually track hours for salaried employees.  Those who leave a 5pm on the dot are not there to see others working several hours later.  Those who take more time off may not realize that other employees are always still working during that time.  Women who take holidays off to be with family may not realize that most of their male coworkers are working through the holidays.  Men are also more likely to do work during their time off at home, which is also difficult to see.  An employer may easily notice that the male workers are more productive than female workers but not fully understand that it is because the men are spending more time working.  This can lead to a subconscious bias favoring paying men more and hiring more men.  And this can lead to unfair discrimination, in the rare cases where a woman does work as much as men and is equally productive.  Recognizing this bias can help employers make sure they treat employees more fairly, but most activists would rather bury the evidence that women tend to work less, instead of admitting to it and eliminating the resulting bias against women who work as much as men.

Male workers and clients sometime treat women as inferior in these fields.  This is certainly a bad thing, but there may be reasons for it.  This may be the result of male workers noticing female workers leaving several hours before they do.  The lower productivity of women who work less could be noticed by clients.  I strongly suspect, however, that most of this is just pure discrimination.  Even if they do work only the required hours, there is no call for male employees to treat their female coworkers poorly.  And if female workers are not living up to the expectations of clients because they are only working scheduled hours, employers need to make sure those projects have enough hours worked on them, even if it means assigning additional workers to them.

A lot of the blame is on U.S. culture though, not specifically on workplace cultures.  It is pretty dumb to expect the computer and engineering industries to fix a problem with U.S. culture that goes far beyond their control.  These fields should be expected to discourage workplace discrimination against women, and they should be expected to discipline obvious workplace discrimination, but they should not be blamed for the culture that is creating it.  On the other side, we need to make sure women in their fields are aware of how their work habit affect their productivity.  It might bring up privacy concerns for businesses to publish hours worked by individual employees, but there is no issue with publishing averages.  Perhaps if female employees saw that the average time worked was 60 hours a week, she would not be so bothered that she is getting paid 10% less for her 40 hours (33% less work) a week.

This might sound like I am suggesting women should work more if they want fair treatment.  This is not what I am saying!  What I am suggesting is that we need to do our research so we can understand where claims of discrimination are legitimate and where they are based on incomplete information.  Personally, I tend to be more like women when it comes to work/family balance.  I would prefer to work a 20 hour a week job than even 40 hours.  I am even willing to do so for $40k a year, which is less than half of the $100k that is common for my field (and more like $120k that I am actually worth).  I cannot find a job that fits these requirements though, so instead I teach advanced undergrad college courses as an underpaid adjunct professor.  The fact that I cannot find a job that allows for the work/family balance I want is evidence that part of this problem is our society's work culture.

In my opinion, the best solution to the pay problem is to return salaried pay to its original purpose.  Salary was invented for part owners and upper managers in a company.  There were two things that separated salaried workers from hourly workers.  One was a vested interest in the success of the company, and the other was some degree of representational power for the company.  The idea was that people who get paid based on the success of the company have enough interest in its success that overtime work will be inherently compensated through dividends and increasing value of the company.  This is why laws protecting unions and union workers do not protect managers and often do not protect salaried workers (representational power for the company is a conflict of interest with being a member of a union of workers for that company).  (This is beginning to change.)  President Obama even suggested that we need to legally enforce the original assumptions applied to salary.  If this was done, a vast majority of computer and engineering jobs would become hourly.  This would hopefully eliminate the pay discrepancy between men and women, because most employers in these fields seem to be trying their best to pay employees fairly.  On average, men would still be paid more (in fact, much more, because the extra hours would be subject to overtime pay, and because the current pay difference is far less than the difference in hours worked), but it would become very clear that the higher pay is the direct result of working more hours, not because the hourly rate is any different.  This would also bring a few other benefits.  Many employers would reduce the extra hours worked by male employees, forcing them to have better work/family balance and opening up new positions, reducing unemployment.

The fact is, right now most arguments about sexism in certain STEM fields is filled with red herrings and lies designed for shock value.  In reality, most of the things that are commonly discussed are not actually legitimate problems.  Things like pay discrepancy can easily be explained by differences in average hours worked, but when they get all of the focus, they overshadow the real problems.  The result is, every article on this topic gets filled with comments easily discrediting the claims of the article, and unfortunately that discredits the valid argument that women are treated unfairly in the first place.  As long as we are focused entirely on problems that mostly don't exist or that are part of U.S. culture, not work cultures exclusively, there will continue to be so many holes that few people take the real problems seriously.  We need two things.  First we need better research, and second, we need to quit letting political correctness get in the way and start discussing the real problem, instead of using lies and incomplete information for shock value.


* It turns out that if you assume computer and engineering fields have less women because fewer women enjoy that stuff, reports of discrimination are about equal to the national average of all workplaces.  In other words, to prove that fewer female employees is evidence of discrimination, you first have to prove that women who want to go onto those fields are not able to due to discrimination, and so far no one has successfully proved this.  The best evidence we have is that in the '90s, those fields were 30% female and now they are only 25%, but that only suggests 5% additional discrimination, not the 25% that is based on the assumption that women are equally interested in these fields as men.