> The debt is already so large that this barely affects the momentum.
The idea that a 66% increase in the deficit "barely affects the momentum" is absurd reflects either your ignorance or your bad faith. Apply that logic to your personal spending and see how long it takes before you're bankrupt.
Valuable for who? Open source (at the margin) is more valuable for everyone--except the inventor, for whom it is not as valuable. So the inventor keeps the design proprietary, and keeps more money for themselves.
But, as is often the case, decisions that are optimal at the margin can often lead to suboptimal outcomes in aggregate.
I'm not convinced that's the case in IC fabrication, but its not impossible.
The Bell Theorem shows that any local hidden variable theory wouldn't match the experimental data we already have.
There's other options for getting around the weirdness of the Copenhagen interpretation that aren't ruled out by the data we have, but most of them are even weirder.
> It takes years of education before people realize that the known laws of physics are just approximations or historically refined by discovering new details.
It's in high school chemistry textbooks. Typically in the first chapter or two. I'm assuming the audience of this site has taken at least one chemistry class in their life. Whether or not they paid attention is their own problem.
It's been a long time since my QM course, but, assuming by unitary you mean deterministic, then the answer is that time evolution of a particle's state is NOT deterministic. It is probabilistic. For large collections of particles, the probabilities come to overwhelmingly favor a single average state, but the state of any single particle remains non-deterministic.
This is in contrast to, for example, classical statistical mechanics where individual particles are considered to behave deterministically, but we simply lack the ability to measure their behavior. In (the Copenhagen interpretation of) QM there is no underlying determinism at all.
You might not like this idea (it's certainly non-intuitive), but decades of experiments have shown that the alternatives are all, most likely, wrong.
This sounds like semantic befuddlement (though, not on Wheeler's part; he was just engaging in wordplay).
Physical laws are not 'laws' in the sense that nature is required to abide by them. They are simply features of natural behavior that have been so overwhelmingly observed that we treat them as axioms.
An example of this is the 'law' of conservation of mass. Strictly speaking, nature does not follow this law. Nuclear reactions and subatomic interactions do not conserve mass. They conserve other quantities, but not mass in and of itself.
The idea that there is no ultimate law of physics is not novel or interesting. It's obvious on its face, unless you do not properly understand what 'law' means in the context of physics.
It's subsidized by those volunteers' time. Time that could otherwise be spent on other things.
Granted, there's nothing nefarious about this, but there isn't anything necessarily nefarious about the fact that anything you get for free is being paid for somewhere else. Just potentially nefarious, if you don't know what's paying for it.
There's also the fact that Walmart achieves low prices by strong arming suppliers into giving them lower quality goods masquerading as the "same" model.
Buying anything that you expect to keep more than a year is a waste at Walmart, even if its cheaper.