Fast-forward to 2040.... Today may be scary, but the future will be FAR worse, and it won't be just those old people who will believe this crap.
I hate to break this to you, sonny boy, but in 21 years you will be somewhere between middle aged and old!
You'll be one of "those old people who will believe this crap."
Well sonny boy, you missed my entire point, which was centered around the fact that this study assumes only "old people" are gullible. Technology will eventually become so good that NO human at any age will be able to discern the difference between real or fake. It won't matter how old ANY of us are by the time this happens. And it won't just be bullshit politics or fake porn videos we have to worry about. It'll be innocent people getting framed for crimes with video "evidence".
Good luck defending yourself in the legal system when this kind of technology is available. We can't even get the dinosaurs behind the bench to understand how IP spoofing can make an innocent person look guilty. Fat chance you're going to convince a judge that HD-quality video clearly showing you committing a crime is fake.
And realistically, my estimate is probably inaccurate as hell. It won't take until 2040 for this to happen. I see it within the next 5-10 years.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
I guess you don't know this, but at least since 2016 (I remember that year because of the US presidential election) American right wingers have been saying that Snopes itself isn't trustworthy and is a liberal front for the Democratic Party whose goal is to knock down conservatives and the Republican Party.
I grew up in a small town where lots of people i went to school with are now very conservative Republicans. I've seen them blast Snopes as being unreliable when someone, usually on the left, usually Snopes to point out that some article they shared on Facebook is false. This seems to be based on one story that was some kind of joke that Snopes fell for and called a hoax when it was actually just a joke and pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it was just a joke. So some devious conservatives realized that the best way to fight Snopes is to accuse them of lying and being Democratic shills because conservatives will believe it. There's a lot more dishonesty in the US right now from the right than the left, so a large part of what Snopes debunks is lies from the right and conservatives just use that as "proof" that Snopes is a front for the Democratic Party and can't be trusted either.
I get that this study was centered around an election timeframe, but the fake news problem isn't limited strictly to politics. It's merely fashionable right now to join the left or the right and bash the living shit out of the other side by any means necessary. Professional Victim and SJW are valid professions these days. Lies from the right aren't any easier to deal with than mass ignorance from the left (as Evergreen State can attest). A name-calling shit-show between those two groups in recent times isn't exactly what I would define as justification to discredit sites like Snopes. If either the right or the left were actually interested in preserving truth over all, they would work to support fact-checking services, not destroy them.
Scary thing is that this kind of crap is believed as news...I guess it makes for better headlines to call it 'Fake News' instead of 'Dumb-ass People Believing Everything They Read'
(Fast-forward to 2040. Deepfake AI exists. Humans can no longer discern reality in video)
I guess it makes it for better headlines to call it 'Fake Videos' instead of 'Old fuckers who refuse to get their optical AI implant'
Today may be scary, but the future will be FAR worse, and it won't be just those old people who will believe this crap.
...After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.
First off, I agree with your various statements here, but wanted to talk about this specific one to gain another viewpoint. Resource management is a responsibility of every government on the planet, and since we've carved this planet up into countries with borders (a.k.a. "yours" and "mine"), those resources are finite. Failing to create policies that control the population within that country would be a failure of resource management. This is why a product as deadly as tobacco is legal in the US. It creates both massive profits and death, which is a win-win for any capitalist country.
TL; DR - You see a problem to solve. Others see an expected end result and by design.
The solution you suggest hides the problem instead. We already have a problem of gang-trolling and "mis-"reporting real news as 'hate-speech' etc. and have it deleted. Your solution exacerbates this problem.
Once again, for clarity:
...When fake news is reported and verified to be fake
If you care enough to present factual news on your platform, you will do the due diligence and verify and validate news properly and thoroughly, not fall for more "gang-trolling" bullshit peddlers.
And filtering/deleting fake news isn't "hiding the problem". I guarantee you don't feel that way about your email SPAM filter, which operates on the exact same principle. It's a bullshit filter. Don't care if it's manual, automated, or a hybrid of both. When justified, it's certainly better than little or no filter.
My solution also proposes education for the gullible masses too. There's a reason Snopes is still a valued service after 25 years. People DO need to step up and not exacerbate the problem due to not knowing or understanding how to use data validation services.
Yeah right. We can barely make software that works reliably, but AI is right around the corner, right?
A statement that ignorant tends to invalidate any wisdom that might be inferred by your low UID.
When was the last time you had to search for a driver for the OS to detect the hard drive to start installing? (assuming you had the cylinder-head-track detail to program into BIOS first)
When was the last time you installed an OS and then had to go hunting for hours for a dozen hardware drivers?
And assuming you're talking more about Windows, are you trying to say that Windows XP was less reliable than Windows ME? Linux hasn't improved since Mandrake? Give me a break.
And when I say AI is closer than you think, remember the majority of the planet was dialing up to the internet 20 years ago, and a 20GB hard drive was massive, and more than enough for anyone. And no one could have predicted Gigabit connections to our homes back then. We've come a LONG way in 20 years, and we humans generally suck at predicting the future, so best not remain ignorant of it. It will only take "good enough" AI to replace humans at their jobs, and automation is working now to remove the lower-end jobs that enable people to educate themselves for the jobs that will be replaced by AI later, so mere automation is enough to start creating an impact on human employment. We will see how corporate greed handles that balancing act, since it's hard to sell product and thrive when your customer base is made unemployable.
In looking at the study, there are really only a handful of "news" sources that are the worst offenders of supplying fake news, making this a rather finite problem. Instead of targeting/making fun of the victims in a study, is there a reason they did not focus efforts on eradicating the fucking problem instead?
The solution for Facebook is rather simple, assuming they actually give a shit about the problem in the first place. Every news source who wishes to advertise on Facebook starts out in good standing with a 100 credibility rating. When fake news is reported and verified to be fake, you reduce the sources credibility score. If it falls below a certain threshold, they are banned from Facebook advertising. You can make that a temporary ban initially with repeat offenders getting a more permanent ban.
This problem is not hard. The real problem is convincing Facebook to step away from the money and focus on quality content.
As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.
Kids need to remember this fact. This isn't just "stupid old people who can't use a computer". This will be you in your golden years.
As automation and AI eradicate the concept of human employment...
Sure, whatever. Jobs have been automated away for the last 300 years... yet we have a full employment economy.
So go get your "personal fulfillment", and let your robot earn your income. Good luck.
Robot earn your income? Surely you're joking with that one. The concept of ownership (of anything) is becoming more and more extinct with every passing year. And there is no way in hell those who are looking to replace you with a robot are going to let you own that asset, nor are they going to pay you for the robots work. The unemployable masses will sit at home barely surviving on whatever "UBI" Welfare solution we convince the rich to sustain human life with, and "personal fulfillment" will be limited to whatever people can afford, which won't be much. Not sure why you feel you would be given the gift of income by robot proxy in the face of capitalistic greed.
>The West has grown very soft when it comes to crime
Have you SEEN our incarceration statistics? I mean, "for-profit prison industry" is pretty self-explanatory.
The only thing self explanatory about a for-profit prison system is the profit part. Prioritizing criminals to be incarcerated for life instead of championing the death sentence when justified IS a sign of going soft on crime. We may be known as the Incarcerated States of America, but that sure as hell doesn't equate to a country with exceedingly low crime rates. That for-profit criminal system we have isn't deterring jack shit. Hell, it's viewed by many as a place where you can get three square meals a day and a place to sleep, so bringing forth incarceration numbers is essentially meaningless when talking about how "hard" we are on crime. Even those awaiting a death sentence can enjoy decades of life behind bars, which tends to make "death" row a joke.
The first commercially-available computer was the UNIVAC I priced at $159,000 in 1951 ($1.5M 2018 dollars). Compare that cost to the computer you're using now. ANY new technology starts prohibitively high-cost and decreases as the state of the art improves, or patents expire, or competition increases.
It's a shame that cancer treatments are so expensive, and it's a shame that the costs aren't decreasing more quickly, but that's how it is.
Your analogy is invalid for one very obvious reason; the price of treating cancer is not going to decrease to any reasonable level that still doesn't amount to financial death for 99.999% of humans. Ever. You know this, and so do I. This is also the reason we'll never cure cancer.
And competition is not the goal; eradicating it via patents is. Sure patents will eventually expire, but your insurance company isn't going to support those "old" patent-expired treatments anymore, because the Cancer Industrial Complex will lobby and push insurance companies to only support the latest treatments (a.k.a the most profitable ones), so even patent expiration is a moot point.
And it's not just a "shame" that cancer treatments are so expensive and will not get cheaper, it's a damn crime. But it's by design, because governments need both deaths and profits to occur. All the time. Otherwise, we're left dealing with yet another growing problem in the world; overpopulation.
not mind seeing malicious hacking become a death sentence. Ditto rape, child molestation, selling drugs to minors, and many others.
Sorry, but hacking is not as "ditto" simple as the other crimes you list here. Rape, child molestation, and selling drugs all usually require concrete physical evidence. I'm not going to face a fucking firing squad because some script kiddie was smart enough to spoof MY IP address when committing an electronic crime. And I'm not about to rely on some dinosaur judge rapping the gavel of fate to understand what IP spoofing is, and why I'm innocent. Fuck that legal nightmare.
OTOH, if the degrees and certifications are being sold as personal enrichment, then that's a different matter...
Nobody should be taking on debt for "personal enrichment". If you need to borrow money to go to college, then you need a degree that justifies the expense.
The art history and philosophy degrees are for students with rich parents.
No personal enrichment? As automation and AI eradicate the concept of human employment, what else are humans going to do with their lives other than sit around and admire art and philosophically discuss how the world was before automation and AI destroyed justifications for educating humans?
A six-year old child was recently caught by his parents for using Amazon Alexa to do his math homework. Finding the answers to Life, The Universe, and Everything isn't exactly some kind of guarded secret only college graduates know about.
"and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation"
That just sounds like slavery with extra steps.
You may not actually be chained to your desk at work, but theoretically you probably are. Don't see much of a difference.
And slaves were not traditionally gifted a valued education first and then asked to pay back that owed debt, so in that sense it's not like slavery at all.
Someone has to create these drugs and they are not doing it out of charity.
On the flip side, someone is also profiting from selling the many causes of cancer, but oddly I don't see much research going into eradicating that.
We've gone from trying to cure cancer to now marketing cancer as some kind of human inevitability. Cancer existed in 1 out of 100 humans a century ago. Yes, I understand advancements in cancer research and detection has obviously affected that statistic, but it's now down to 1 in 3, and we blindly accept this, and pour trillions into the Cancer Industrial Complex without addressing root-cause at all? Sorry, but that's bullshit. We have questioned for a long damn time now if cancer is too profitable to cure. That question sure as hell hasn't diminished, so you're damn right I'm going to question motive. The worst kind of cancer in society is the one that puts profits over lives every time.
Your whine is how do we roll it out to everybody. Murdering the profit motive murders yourself.
Murder? I wonder if you are you aware that medical error kills almost as many Americans every year as tobacco does. The very industry who purports to save lives should not also be one of Americas leading causes of death, and yet it is. Pretty sad when you have to weigh the risks of entering a hospital against whatever malady is driving you there. Are cancer treatments more about saving lives or making money? Since you or I cannot easily answer that question, you know why we should question motive.
Regardless if people want to believe or accept it, death is by design, and supported by government. I'm glad you identified the motive properly as "profit", because saving lives comes secondary in this particular corner of capitalism The best way we can "murder" the profit motive is to support research as to what causes so much cancer in the world today, and look to eradicate those causes as a more permanent fix instead of simply dismissing cancer as some kind of human inevitability. The problem with my logical approach is it's not profitable or deadly enough. As I said before, death is by design, and supported by government, which is also the reason a cure for cancer will never be allowed to see the light of day. Perpetuating death and profits are far more important.
And you seem to have missed the part where, when the rich have paid for the R&D, the treatment comes off patent and is available to the majority of the population.
I fail to see your point here. At all. You and I both know the total cost of eradicating cancer in a human far exceeds any argument related to patents expiring on drugs, which is akin to being handed a 10% off coupon on your cancer bill.
And when medical error ends up killing as many Americans as cigarettes do, I question the actual value of R&D no matter who is paying for it.
Amazon and Google dominated the show.
As usual apple was there only to steal things.
That "thief" is one of the most successful and valuable companies in the history of capitalism. They appear to be doing something right, as hundreds of millions of consumers continue to buy and support "stolen" products.
I have a friend who works in oncology (he is a surgeon). He basically said that immunotherapy is incredible, and within 5 years he believes that those with enough money will be treated for many types of cancer by customised immunotherapy. They will go in every two weeks and a team will adjust the therapy based on the cancer's response until the cancer is gone. Add to this the work being done on early detection, and cancer could soon become nothing more than a strain on your bank account.
Everyone else will continue to get cut, burn and poison. Having said that, this is how the economy has always progressed, and in 20 years when patents have run out and the treatments have become more mature, we can all look forward to this sort of thing.
Certainly an exciting time to be alive.
It's certainly an exciting time to be alive if you're rich.
Seems you forgot that rather important caveat, which is hard to believe since your entire post was centered around the fact that cancer could be reduced to "nothing more" than a $500,000 expense in the near future. Needless to say, those who can't afford that will die, which is still the overwhelming majority of humans.
And customized immunotherapy will most likely be designed so treatments will never end. If you can afford treatments, you can afford a lifetime subscription to them. THAT is how the Greed within the Medical Industrial Complex works. There are no more cures, only perpetual treatments.
What exactly do the truck drivers think they’re accomplishing? And what do they think they’re protesting?
I realize these guys are likely not the brightest bulbs in the box... but seriously, they must have at least a vaguely-defined reason they are choosing to do this.
"For the fuck of it."
"Hold my beer."
That's probably some of the more popular reasons they have, but I'm sure I could reference any You Might Be a Redneck guide for a few hundred more.
Even the dullest bulbs in the box, make fun of these kinds of idiots.
Repeat after me: Paying for a service does not guarantee privacy.
Let's assume Facebook cost $10/mo and everyone was paying that today, do you think that would stop them selling your data? The goal in business is to maximize profit.
As long as you continue to use Facebook, you are the product no matter what they charge for it.
There is a happy medium that doesn't require you to become the product; buy your own damn domain, and stand up your own public website. That was my entire point with the cost. The problem is people are way too damn cheap these days to even pay minimal costs to own a domain and host it somewhere.
They would prefer to be digital whores. You get what you pay for still rings true in many ways.
And if privacy is the goal, then don't stand up a public website. Or secure it behind authentication and encryption.
LOL.. Replace Facebook with personal websites eh? Isn't that how this whole internet thing got started back when I was in college?
Yeah, but the main difference is now everyone demands all that domain/web hosting shit be provided for free, which is exactly how consumers made the jump from using a product to becoming the product.
This isn't "Microsoft sending", this is Bing's algorithm categorizing that search result.
I'm assuming you are not aware of who created, owns, and maintains Bing and its algorithms (Hint: it starts with "Micro" and ends with "soft")
This is not news. If I were to list all the "_________ download" searches that listed a torrent or instructions for how to find something for free as the first item, this would be a long post.
I think the reason this justifies an article is the comedy of errors that I've already highlighted. It's rather pathetic when the same company who maintains the search engine algorithms cannot properly police some of their own flagship product search results. One would think that a search like "office 2019 download" would be damn near hard-coded in Bing to provide the proper source, making it a hell of a lot harder for a pirate site to rise to the top of search results.
Compare with lithium batteries that are not yet to the same standard of safety. We see lithium batteries spontaneously ignite under normal operations pretty frequently still. That isn't to say that we won't figure out safe lithium battery operations, but we aren't quite there, yet.
So your comparison isn't very fair.
OK, let's be realistic here and look at the numbers. I'd say there are a few billion lithium ion batteries running at this very moment. There have been many more billions constructed throughout history. Out of those billions, exactly how many of them have reported as catching fire for unknown reasons? There are about the same number of smartphones in the US as passenger cars, and yet we have over 150,000 cars catch fire every year (less than 5% of those are due to collision). Should I really believe we've achieved some fantastic standard of safety in automotive design with those numbers? I guess I don't see how lithium ion fires are happening pretty frequently.
..."Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
This kind of reminds me of when I hear about new and exciting discoveries regarding habitable planets that are "only" a few light-years away. (The caveat being we have no way of traveling at 186,000 miles per second or faster to get there.)
Slashdot Mirror
Fast-forward to 2040. ... Today may be scary, but the future will be FAR worse, and it won't be just those old people who will believe this crap.
I hate to break this to you, sonny boy, but in 21 years you will be somewhere between middle aged and old!
You'll be one of "those old people who will believe this crap."
Well sonny boy, you missed my entire point, which was centered around the fact that this study assumes only "old people" are gullible. Technology will eventually become so good that NO human at any age will be able to discern the difference between real or fake. It won't matter how old ANY of us are by the time this happens. And it won't just be bullshit politics or fake porn videos we have to worry about. It'll be innocent people getting framed for crimes with video "evidence". Good luck defending yourself in the legal system when this kind of technology is available. We can't even get the dinosaurs behind the bench to understand how IP spoofing can make an innocent person look guilty. Fat chance you're going to convince a judge that HD-quality video clearly showing you committing a crime is fake.
And realistically, my estimate is probably inaccurate as hell. It won't take until 2040 for this to happen. I see it within the next 5-10 years.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
I guess you don't know this, but at least since 2016 (I remember that year because of the US presidential election) American right wingers have been saying that Snopes itself isn't trustworthy and is a liberal front for the Democratic Party whose goal is to knock down conservatives and the Republican Party. I grew up in a small town where lots of people i went to school with are now very conservative Republicans. I've seen them blast Snopes as being unreliable when someone, usually on the left, usually Snopes to point out that some article they shared on Facebook is false. This seems to be based on one story that was some kind of joke that Snopes fell for and called a hoax when it was actually just a joke and pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it was just a joke. So some devious conservatives realized that the best way to fight Snopes is to accuse them of lying and being Democratic shills because conservatives will believe it. There's a lot more dishonesty in the US right now from the right than the left, so a large part of what Snopes debunks is lies from the right and conservatives just use that as "proof" that Snopes is a front for the Democratic Party and can't be trusted either.
I get that this study was centered around an election timeframe, but the fake news problem isn't limited strictly to politics. It's merely fashionable right now to join the left or the right and bash the living shit out of the other side by any means necessary. Professional Victim and SJW are valid professions these days. Lies from the right aren't any easier to deal with than mass ignorance from the left (as Evergreen State can attest). A name-calling shit-show between those two groups in recent times isn't exactly what I would define as justification to discredit sites like Snopes. If either the right or the left were actually interested in preserving truth over all, they would work to support fact-checking services, not destroy them.
Scary thing is that this kind of crap is believed as news...I guess it makes for better headlines to call it 'Fake News' instead of 'Dumb-ass People Believing Everything They Read'
(Fast-forward to 2040. Deepfake AI exists. Humans can no longer discern reality in video)
I guess it makes it for better headlines to call it 'Fake Videos' instead of 'Old fuckers who refuse to get their optical AI implant'
Today may be scary, but the future will be FAR worse, and it won't be just those old people who will believe this crap.
...After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.
First off, I agree with your various statements here, but wanted to talk about this specific one to gain another viewpoint. Resource management is a responsibility of every government on the planet, and since we've carved this planet up into countries with borders (a.k.a. "yours" and "mine"), those resources are finite. Failing to create policies that control the population within that country would be a failure of resource management. This is why a product as deadly as tobacco is legal in the US. It creates both massive profits and death, which is a win-win for any capitalist country.
TL; DR - You see a problem to solve. Others see an expected end result and by design.
The solution you suggest hides the problem instead. We already have a problem of gang-trolling and "mis-"reporting real news as 'hate-speech' etc. and have it deleted. Your solution exacerbates this problem.
Once again, for clarity:
...When fake news is reported and verified to be fake
If you care enough to present factual news on your platform, you will do the due diligence and verify and validate news properly and thoroughly, not fall for more "gang-trolling" bullshit peddlers.
And filtering/deleting fake news isn't "hiding the problem". I guarantee you don't feel that way about your email SPAM filter, which operates on the exact same principle. It's a bullshit filter. Don't care if it's manual, automated, or a hybrid of both. When justified, it's certainly better than little or no filter.
My solution also proposes education for the gullible masses too. There's a reason Snopes is still a valued service after 25 years. People DO need to step up and not exacerbate the problem due to not knowing or understanding how to use data validation services.
Yeah right. We can barely make software that works reliably, but AI is right around the corner, right?
A statement that ignorant tends to invalidate any wisdom that might be inferred by your low UID.
When was the last time you had to search for a driver for the OS to detect the hard drive to start installing? (assuming you had the cylinder-head-track detail to program into BIOS first)
When was the last time you installed an OS and then had to go hunting for hours for a dozen hardware drivers?
And assuming you're talking more about Windows, are you trying to say that Windows XP was less reliable than Windows ME? Linux hasn't improved since Mandrake? Give me a break.
And when I say AI is closer than you think, remember the majority of the planet was dialing up to the internet 20 years ago, and a 20GB hard drive was massive, and more than enough for anyone. And no one could have predicted Gigabit connections to our homes back then. We've come a LONG way in 20 years, and we humans generally suck at predicting the future, so best not remain ignorant of it. It will only take "good enough" AI to replace humans at their jobs, and automation is working now to remove the lower-end jobs that enable people to educate themselves for the jobs that will be replaced by AI later, so mere automation is enough to start creating an impact on human employment. We will see how corporate greed handles that balancing act, since it's hard to sell product and thrive when your customer base is made unemployable.
In looking at the study, there are really only a handful of "news" sources that are the worst offenders of supplying fake news, making this a rather finite problem. Instead of targeting/making fun of the victims in a study, is there a reason they did not focus efforts on eradicating the fucking problem instead?
The solution for Facebook is rather simple, assuming they actually give a shit about the problem in the first place. Every news source who wishes to advertise on Facebook starts out in good standing with a 100 credibility rating. When fake news is reported and verified to be fake, you reduce the sources credibility score. If it falls below a certain threshold, they are banned from Facebook advertising. You can make that a temporary ban initially with repeat offenders getting a more permanent ban.
This problem is not hard. The real problem is convincing Facebook to step away from the money and focus on quality content.
As for why, researchers believe older people lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts.
When snopes.com has been around since the days of dial-up internet, I find this excuse rather lame. It's not hard to teach someone to use something like Snopes. Perhaps we should start with teaching that young employee hired to validate Facebook articles, preferably before they are made public on the platform. You know, instead of wasting time on No-Shit-Sherlock grade studies that essentially provide the public with a precisely targeted punching bag group of people to make fun of. (and here I thought the anti-bullying mentality was actually popular).
They also say that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.
Kids need to remember this fact. This isn't just "stupid old people who can't use a computer". This will be you in your golden years.
As automation and AI eradicate the concept of human employment ...
Sure, whatever. Jobs have been automated away for the last 300 years ... yet we have a full employment economy.
So go get your "personal fulfillment", and let your robot earn your income. Good luck.
Robot earn your income? Surely you're joking with that one. The concept of ownership (of anything) is becoming more and more extinct with every passing year. And there is no way in hell those who are looking to replace you with a robot are going to let you own that asset, nor are they going to pay you for the robots work. The unemployable masses will sit at home barely surviving on whatever "UBI" Welfare solution we convince the rich to sustain human life with, and "personal fulfillment" will be limited to whatever people can afford, which won't be much. Not sure why you feel you would be given the gift of income by robot proxy in the face of capitalistic greed.
>The West has grown very soft when it comes to crime
Have you SEEN our incarceration statistics? I mean, "for-profit prison industry" is pretty self-explanatory.
The only thing self explanatory about a for-profit prison system is the profit part. Prioritizing criminals to be incarcerated for life instead of championing the death sentence when justified IS a sign of going soft on crime. We may be known as the Incarcerated States of America, but that sure as hell doesn't equate to a country with exceedingly low crime rates. That for-profit criminal system we have isn't deterring jack shit. Hell, it's viewed by many as a place where you can get three square meals a day and a place to sleep, so bringing forth incarceration numbers is essentially meaningless when talking about how "hard" we are on crime. Even those awaiting a death sentence can enjoy decades of life behind bars, which tends to make "death" row a joke.
I fail to see your point here. At all.
OK, let me try to make an analogy.
The first commercially-available computer was the UNIVAC I priced at $159,000 in 1951 ($1.5M 2018 dollars). Compare that cost to the computer you're using now. ANY new technology starts prohibitively high-cost and decreases as the state of the art improves, or patents expire, or competition increases.
It's a shame that cancer treatments are so expensive, and it's a shame that the costs aren't decreasing more quickly, but that's how it is.
Your analogy is invalid for one very obvious reason; the price of treating cancer is not going to decrease to any reasonable level that still doesn't amount to financial death for 99.999% of humans. Ever. You know this, and so do I. This is also the reason we'll never cure cancer.
And competition is not the goal; eradicating it via patents is. Sure patents will eventually expire, but your insurance company isn't going to support those "old" patent-expired treatments anymore, because the Cancer Industrial Complex will lobby and push insurance companies to only support the latest treatments (a.k.a the most profitable ones), so even patent expiration is a moot point.
And it's not just a "shame" that cancer treatments are so expensive and will not get cheaper, it's a damn crime. But it's by design, because governments need both deaths and profits to occur. All the time. Otherwise, we're left dealing with yet another growing problem in the world; overpopulation.
not mind seeing malicious hacking become a death sentence. Ditto rape, child molestation, selling drugs to minors, and many others.
Sorry, but hacking is not as "ditto" simple as the other crimes you list here. Rape, child molestation, and selling drugs all usually require concrete physical evidence. I'm not going to face a fucking firing squad because some script kiddie was smart enough to spoof MY IP address when committing an electronic crime. And I'm not about to rely on some dinosaur judge rapping the gavel of fate to understand what IP spoofing is, and why I'm innocent. Fuck that legal nightmare.
OTOH, if the degrees and certifications are being sold as personal enrichment, then that's a different matter ...
Nobody should be taking on debt for "personal enrichment". If you need to borrow money to go to college, then you need a degree that justifies the expense.
The art history and philosophy degrees are for students with rich parents.
No personal enrichment? As automation and AI eradicate the concept of human employment, what else are humans going to do with their lives other than sit around and admire art and philosophically discuss how the world was before automation and AI destroyed justifications for educating humans?
A six-year old child was recently caught by his parents for using Amazon Alexa to do his math homework. Finding the answers to Life, The Universe, and Everything isn't exactly some kind of guarded secret only college graduates know about.
"and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation"
That just sounds like slavery with extra steps.
You may not actually be chained to your desk at work, but theoretically you probably are. Don't see much of a difference.
And slaves were not traditionally gifted a valued education first and then asked to pay back that owed debt, so in that sense it's not like slavery at all.
Someone has to create these drugs and they are not doing it out of charity.
On the flip side, someone is also profiting from selling the many causes of cancer, but oddly I don't see much research going into eradicating that.
We've gone from trying to cure cancer to now marketing cancer as some kind of human inevitability. Cancer existed in 1 out of 100 humans a century ago. Yes, I understand advancements in cancer research and detection has obviously affected that statistic, but it's now down to 1 in 3, and we blindly accept this, and pour trillions into the Cancer Industrial Complex without addressing root-cause at all? Sorry, but that's bullshit. We have questioned for a long damn time now if cancer is too profitable to cure. That question sure as hell hasn't diminished, so you're damn right I'm going to question motive. The worst kind of cancer in society is the one that puts profits over lives every time.
Your whine is how do we roll it out to everybody. Murdering the profit motive murders yourself.
Murder? I wonder if you are you aware that medical error kills almost as many Americans every year as tobacco does. The very industry who purports to save lives should not also be one of Americas leading causes of death, and yet it is. Pretty sad when you have to weigh the risks of entering a hospital against whatever malady is driving you there. Are cancer treatments more about saving lives or making money? Since you or I cannot easily answer that question, you know why we should question motive.
Regardless if people want to believe or accept it, death is by design, and supported by government. I'm glad you identified the motive properly as "profit", because saving lives comes secondary in this particular corner of capitalism The best way we can "murder" the profit motive is to support research as to what causes so much cancer in the world today, and look to eradicate those causes as a more permanent fix instead of simply dismissing cancer as some kind of human inevitability. The problem with my logical approach is it's not profitable or deadly enough. As I said before, death is by design, and supported by government, which is also the reason a cure for cancer will never be allowed to see the light of day. Perpetuating death and profits are far more important.
And you seem to have missed the part where, when the rich have paid for the R&D, the treatment comes off patent and is available to the majority of the population.
I fail to see your point here. At all. You and I both know the total cost of eradicating cancer in a human far exceeds any argument related to patents expiring on drugs, which is akin to being handed a 10% off coupon on your cancer bill.
And when medical error ends up killing as many Americans as cigarettes do, I question the actual value of R&D no matter who is paying for it.
Amazon and Google dominated the show. As usual apple was there only to steal things.
That "thief" is one of the most successful and valuable companies in the history of capitalism. They appear to be doing something right, as hundreds of millions of consumers continue to buy and support "stolen" products.
I have a friend who works in oncology (he is a surgeon). He basically said that immunotherapy is incredible, and within 5 years he believes that those with enough money will be treated for many types of cancer by customised immunotherapy. They will go in every two weeks and a team will adjust the therapy based on the cancer's response until the cancer is gone. Add to this the work being done on early detection, and cancer could soon become nothing more than a strain on your bank account.
Everyone else will continue to get cut, burn and poison. Having said that, this is how the economy has always progressed, and in 20 years when patents have run out and the treatments have become more mature, we can all look forward to this sort of thing.
Certainly an exciting time to be alive.
It's certainly an exciting time to be alive if you're rich.
Seems you forgot that rather important caveat, which is hard to believe since your entire post was centered around the fact that cancer could be reduced to "nothing more" than a $500,000 expense in the near future. Needless to say, those who can't afford that will die, which is still the overwhelming majority of humans.
And customized immunotherapy will most likely be designed so treatments will never end. If you can afford treatments, you can afford a lifetime subscription to them. THAT is how the Greed within the Medical Industrial Complex works. There are no more cures, only perpetual treatments.
What exactly do the truck drivers think they’re accomplishing? And what do they think they’re protesting?
I realize these guys are likely not the brightest bulbs in the box... but seriously, they must have at least a vaguely-defined reason they are choosing to do this.
"For the fuck of it."
"Hold my beer."
That's probably some of the more popular reasons they have, but I'm sure I could reference any You Might Be a Redneck guide for a few hundred more.
Even the dullest bulbs in the box, make fun of these kinds of idiots.
So Debian has now banned a package because its combination of letters triggers irrational things in peoples heads.
All words are just arbitrary combinations of letters that convey meanings.
That doesn't magically make them all appropriate for all environments.
You know what's not "appropriate" here? Acting like a child who's offended at an acronym.
People need to grow the fuck up already.
Repeat after me: Paying for a service does not guarantee privacy.
Let's assume Facebook cost $10/mo and everyone was paying that today, do you think that would stop them selling your data? The goal in business is to maximize profit.
As long as you continue to use Facebook, you are the product no matter what they charge for it.
There is a happy medium that doesn't require you to become the product; buy your own damn domain, and stand up your own public website. That was my entire point with the cost. The problem is people are way too damn cheap these days to even pay minimal costs to own a domain and host it somewhere. They would prefer to be digital whores. You get what you pay for still rings true in many ways.
And if privacy is the goal, then don't stand up a public website. Or secure it behind authentication and encryption.
LOL.. Replace Facebook with personal websites eh? Isn't that how this whole internet thing got started back when I was in college?
Yeah, but the main difference is now everyone demands all that domain/web hosting shit be provided for free, which is exactly how consumers made the jump from using a product to becoming the product.
This isn't "Microsoft sending", this is Bing's algorithm categorizing that search result.
I'm assuming you are not aware of who created, owns, and maintains Bing and its algorithms (Hint: it starts with "Micro" and ends with "soft")
This is not news. If I were to list all the "_________ download" searches that listed a torrent or instructions for how to find something for free as the first item, this would be a long post.
I think the reason this justifies an article is the comedy of errors that I've already highlighted. It's rather pathetic when the same company who maintains the search engine algorithms cannot properly police some of their own flagship product search results. One would think that a search like "office 2019 download" would be damn near hard-coded in Bing to provide the proper source, making it a hell of a lot harder for a pirate site to rise to the top of search results.
Compare with lithium batteries that are not yet to the same standard of safety. We see lithium batteries spontaneously ignite under normal operations pretty frequently still. That isn't to say that we won't figure out safe lithium battery operations, but we aren't quite there, yet.
So your comparison isn't very fair.
OK, let's be realistic here and look at the numbers. I'd say there are a few billion lithium ion batteries running at this very moment. There have been many more billions constructed throughout history. Out of those billions, exactly how many of them have reported as catching fire for unknown reasons? There are about the same number of smartphones in the US as passenger cars, and yet we have over 150,000 cars catch fire every year (less than 5% of those are due to collision). Should I really believe we've achieved some fantastic standard of safety in automotive design with those numbers? I guess I don't see how lithium ion fires are happening pretty frequently.
..."Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
This kind of reminds me of when I hear about new and exciting discoveries regarding habitable planets that are "only" a few light-years away. (The caveat being we have no way of traveling at 186,000 miles per second or faster to get there.)