The brexit poll wasn't even binding. Which makes the current situation even more absurd.
I'm aware it wasn't legally binding, but that's in essence irrelevant. The poll was hyped up to such a height, and 'the will of the people' brought up so many times that the vote was de facto binding. That is, the conservatives themselves had made it clear prior to the election that the result would be followed, so a failure to do so would have (in their minds) destroyed the party.
Well I'd say it goes under the 'stuff that matters' part of the slogan. As a European one of the reasons I like political stories on Slashdot, especially political stories from outisde the US is that it's interesting to read american commentary on these matters. I mean, I often do not agree but it doesn't matter, it gives me a perspective on the matters that I feel I do not get from simply reading something like CNN or other american news sources.
In case there are others who feel the same and for what it's worth here's my take on this topic: The British right has effectively sunk their own ship. The Brexit campaign was never meant to succeed, but rather it was meant to be used as a PR-campaign for Farage and his ilk in preparation for the next eelctions. Pretty much everyone, on the right and the left, assumed people would vote remain. This lead to 2 things that started this cascade of clusterfucks: 1. The Brexit side felt they could make pretty much any claims they wanted. After all, they weren't actually going to win, so while they're at it might as well take it over the top for maximal visibility. Hence the absurd claims that by resigning they'd be able to pour hundreds of millions more into health care, or maintain complete control of their borders while still being free to trade with the Union like before, and so on. 2. The Remain side, equally convinced that they'd win easily - after all, who'd be stupid enough to fall for the extravagant hyperbole of the Brexit camp - did not do a solid campaign at all. Granted, I'm, not a Brit but I was left with the impression that they were totally unable to craft a message of their own, other than essentially trying to signal "leaving the Union would be bad for reasons X, Y and Z". This is when I knew they were screwed. You're essentially up against a populists wet dream: an popular vote where the other side gets to wrap themselves in a flag and talk about 'freedom'. That's really hard to counter, because the nuanced arguments about the benefits of a trade union are trumped by the idealistic talk.
These two effects combined were enough to tilt the scales and now they're left in a situation that no-one really wanted. The Brexit camp has mostly ran to the hills and scattered, realizing well ahead of time that they've scored a massive pyrrhic victory and that by the time the effects of a brexit hit they don't want to be anywhere near responsibilities. This leaves the political establishment in a weird spot, where the resignation process has to be overseen by people who didn't really want to resign in the first place. May, herself a remainer, looked at all of this and probably figured that since she lost to raging populist she might as well do a full u-turn and attempt to go 'full populist' to solidify support for the conservatives. So she adopted a hardline stance on Brexit where they're trying to strongarm the Union into giving them everything they want even though from a purely realpolitik/game theory point of view the UK is at a massive disadvantage in these negotiations, so trying to play hardball is an insanely stupid move. She also called the elections in an attempt to gather support for her newly found stance of 'brexit means brexit' and 'no deal is better than a bad deal' -stance.
However by this time most of Brittain seems to have realized how much they were in fact duped by the Brexit campaign. That indeed, the majority of the claims made by the campaign about the benefits of resigning are outright lies. Many are feeling remorseful, and indeed it seems based on the polls if the vote was held today Remain would win
What can we learn from this? Well, the number one issue to be learned is that putting decisions of this scale to a binding popular vote with a simple majority is a suicidal move because people aren't really that well informed on complex matters like the role of the Union, which allows populists (from both sides) to essentially ma
The problem with all online mass surveillance schemes is that data has no nationality. From the standpoint of those doing the surveillance they're interested in the origin of the data and its destination. A big deal is made out of this in PR. The same hassle is currently going on here in Finland with the government discussing granting additional rights to the authorities for a wider range of powers to collect information to counter terrorism and Russian cyberactivity, and the respective authorities have kept hammering how they'd only use it to target data coming in from abroad. However there's really no such thing as data 'inside' and 'outside' Finland. Most of the traffic that people send to each other within the country will at some point in the chain cross the border and circulate outside the country before it comes back, and upon re-entry it'd be susceptible to collection.
It's my understanding based on the Snowden leaks that the US does pretty much the same thing by having the Brits to gather data of US nationals that crosses the border and then they get the data from them, allowing them to claim that they never themselves technically 'collected' any of it.
There's no such thing as 'targeted' mass surveillance or 'mass surveillance only for foreigners' because the net is by its very design a borderless environment. Hell, even non tech-savy people these days understand this principle as the use of VPNs to circumvent geoblocking is widespread. so why would anyone still seriously think that agencies and authorities would respect non-existent borders in cyberspace?
Linking Finland and Tallinn is a perfect application for this. There are already fleets of ferry ships linking the two, as it's an exceedingly popular route.
Yes, linking us here in Helsinki to Tallin with a tunnel may be smart. However, using Hyperloop to do it makes no sense to me as a Finn that travels to Estonia several times a year. Why? The travel time on the fastest ferries is already down to below couple hours, and they're currently looking into the option of building a rail tunnel in between the cities. which would cut the travel time down to 45 minutes. Benefits of a rail system over something like the hyperloop at this point are enormous: first off, trains are a technology we have mastered and the project does not require maintaining a near-vacuum, second of all trains have a higher capacity than hyperloop and are very likely cheaper to maintain*.
The Hyperloop test track which was about a mile long is so far the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in the world after NASA's. The Hyperloop tech is probably on the order of decades from being commercially viable. Even the planning of a regular underwater tunnel takes years, the estimated completion time of the rail tunnel is in 2038. Infrastructure projects like this take massive amounts of time and money to plan an execute and the planning needs to be started years in advance so it's near impossible that a technology like Hyperloop in such an early stage of innovation will even be considered for the Helsinki-Tallin route. The upsides are not worth the increased risks.
Even the rail tunnel is not a certainty due to the cost factors involved. At 92 kilometers - nearly twice the English channel tunnel - It'd be the longest rail tunnel in the world and underwater, making it extremely expensive (current estimates are in the ballpark of 13 billion euros). With the ferry traffic being cheap (you can get tickets for less than 10 euros), plentiful and fast it may well be the case that the tunnel is never implemented. Not to mention that the ferry companies are major players in the baltic regional economy, and this wield significant political lobbying power both here and in Estonia. Tallink-Silja is one of the largest companies in the Baltics, coming 2nd or 3rd behind only banks.
So to summarize: would it make sense to establish a faster connection between Helsinki and Tallinn? Possibly, I'll wait for more info before saying that for sure. If it is done, what are the chances of hyperloop being used to do it? Practically zero.
Playing Mod Roulette because you can never tell when the mods on Slashdot will allow different points of view especially evil Disabled Christian Conservatives like me.
As a disabled leftist European liberal this opening alone compelled me to answer to you.
As an example, the Paris agreement that Trump exited was non-binding. Get it, NON-Binding as in no penalties if a country breaks the rules. So what is the point besides a feel good measure.
The point is to agree and plan together to reduce the emissions. The reason it's not binding is that big players like the US, China and Russia will not agree to a binding treaty. But the general point is getting everyone on board and realizing that things need to be done to curb emissions globally.
China and India can build all kinds of coal plants and pollution factories without penalty until what 2030 and then what, they promise to be good???
First off, 2030 is the target year at which china is supposed to reach its peak emissions. That is, their total emissions (including traffic) will grow in absolute terms until the year 2030 at which point they're supposed to start going down. Look at what they're actually planning to do:
China’s NDC’s targets, if reached, would result in GHG emission levels of roughly 12.8–14.3 GtCO2e in 2030, a 64%–70% reduction of emissions intensity below 2005 levels (using the latest projections on GDP development (IEA, 2016b)). The NDC carbon intensity targets on their own would lead to 2030 emission levels of 14.0–16.0 GtCO2e. As the intensity targets are likely to be reached automatically if the non-fossil targets are achieved, and our rating is based on achieving all NDC targets, we do not address the intensity targets separately here. (In earlier assessments, we explicitly noted that China’s INDC target on its own would result in an “inadequate” rating.)
However, this range also implies that China’s NDC and its national actions are not yet consistent with limiting warming to below 2C, let alone 1.5C unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort than China. We therefore rate the emission levels estimated for 2025 and 2030 resulting from the most ambitious aspects of the NDC as “medium.”
Our analysis shows that China will achieve both its 2020 pledge and its 2030 plans. Current policy projections show that emissions in 2030 could lie in the range of 12.2–13.7 GtCO2e, implying that China may well overachieve the target levels implied by its NDC with its current policies.
China is implementing significant policies to address climate change, most recently aiming to restrict coal consumption, which may well have already peaked, based on recent estimates. China’s 13th Five-Year-Plan stipulates a maximum 58% share of coal in national energy consumption by 2020 (NDRC, 2016). The CAT assesses two scenarios of future developments in coal consumption: a continued coal abatement scenarios well as a stalled coal abatement scenario:
Under the “continued coal abatement” scenario, where the recent decreases in coal consumption continue at a similar pace for the next few years—forming the lower range of the 2030 projections—CO2 emissions would already have plateaued in 2015, and will decrease substantially up to 2030, reaching the NDC peaking target around ten years early.
In the “stalled coal abatement” scenario, total coal consumption stabilises after the recent decreases and remains constant through the decade 2020–2030 (see Current Policy section for more detail).
However, total GHG emissions are likely to continue increasing until 2030, as China has not yet implemented sufficient policies addressing non-CO2 GHG emissions (CH4, N2O, HFCs etc
The US has an inexorable trend toward laziness and unproductivity.
Using time and resources to make employees who could just as well work from home come sit in an office is the very opposite of productive.
Working from home, for those who can, is often more efficient. I handle most meetings via skype anyway, so whether I'm sitting home or at the office as I'm taking part in those makes no difference.
It's like the US is turning into the EU
Shorter work weeks and more paid holiday with a higher GDP than the US currently has? How's that a bad thing, exactly?
If Putin is stooping to make fake posts on Slashdot, he's doing a thorough job of it.
Oh you can be sure he is. How do I know? There are Russian professional trolls even in Finnish news articles and forums which have a readership that's a fraction of Slashdot's. The estimates on how many people are actively working for the so called troll brigades vary, but we're probably talking at least a couple hundred. It's an extremely well orchestrated global operation:
Today, FAN forms the core of a media empire consisting of 16 news websites. Collectively, they employ over 200 full-time journalists and editors whose content attracts more that 30 million pageviews every month.
The monthly cost of running FAN and its sister sites is in the area of 20 million rubles ($350,000), RBC estimates. The source of the funding is unclear too, but most of the websites in the empire attract little if any ad revenue. Allegedly, the group has a mysterious sponsor, believed to be Yevgeni Prigozhin, who also known as “Putin’s Cook.”
Everyday, the sites churn out dozens of articles every day that praise Putin, cast Ukraine as a failed nazi state and expose the nefarious machinations of the United States. Still, FAN stands out. It exploits the unstable media labor market to lure in journalists from other publications with salaries above the market average. FAN even employs foreign reporters — RBC reports they are the most likely to be sent to Syria to provide coverage.
- -
At least one popular pro-Trump, anti-Clinton Facebook group called Secured Borders, says RBC, is managed from the St. Petersburg troll factory.
RBC claims it obtained a screenshot of the group’s advertisement statistics (available only to a Facebook group’s administrator) from someone who claims to be its owner, which confirmed that the group is managed from St. Petersburg.
Secured Borders boasts 140 thousand subscribers, and just one of its posts published at the height of the election campaign and heavily advertised on Facebook, reached 4 million people on Facebook, was “liked” more than 300 thousand times and shared more than 80 thousand times. RBC also reported that a right-wing Twitter account called Tea Party News, which is followed by 22 thousand other accounts, is also run from the St. Petersburg hub.
All in all, RBC’s sources say that at the zenith of the U.S. election campaign, the troll factory’s accounts across different social media platforms would churn out as many as 50 million posts a month, with anti-Clinton messages getting the most attention.
The Russians have an upper hand in this struggle of propaganda at the moment because they can generate any number of conspiratorial blog posts and 'alternative news' and then circulate them throughout social media through different fronts and groups as well as bot-accounts. The thing that makes this so effective is the level of precision in targeting that modern social media platforms allow them to have: you can craft several entirely different or even contradictory attack ads about someone and then target those so that they're only shown to people who're most likely to be influenced by said points.
So for example you can target people for whom gun rights are important and run,material saying the opposing candidate is going to take your guns away. Meanwhile for the liberal crowd that doesn't care as much about gun rights you can use the 'in bed with bankers' card Etc.
It doesn't have to be true. The point is to flood the key areas/states with enough disinformation and misinformation to tip the balance over to the preferred side. And if you look at the amount of voters that secured him the win in the key states, we're talking about
What does a computer playing a game with a strict set of rules have to do with self-driving cars? Nothing
Wrong. In fact, massively so.
The whole reason that Go is so signifficant as a milestone for AI is because despite the ruleset being simple and straightforward, the amount of possible board configurations exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe.
Ask a good chess player why he made a certain move and he'll be able to give you a very well defined answer. "I moved the knight there because by doing so I have a guaranteed mate in 5 moves" or some such. Now go to a pro Go player and ask the same thing and they won't give you the same answer, they'll often give some variety of 'it felt right'. You cannot number crunch Go in the same fashion you can many other games simply due to the fact that the complexity and amount of possible plays far exceeds what even the current top of the line algorithms, let alone a human brain can handle. Thus there's a huge component of essentially intuition involved in Go.
This is why even a couple years ago people were still saying it's not possible for computers to beat humans at Go because it requires actually learning to evaluate moves entirely differently from chess. It requires a level of essentially creative thinking.
You are one of those AI nutters who thinks just because computers get more powerful every year it will continue indefinitely.
Most people do not think the progress will continue indefinitely but it doesn't have to do so in order for for computers to a) achieve human level general intelligence or b) achieve consciousness.
Digital computers are not going to get faster and faster indefinitely. Already we are seeing that processor speed is only marginally improving year over year.
What he was trying to point out is precisely that these days the key developments are happening in the software, not the hardware.
That's the whole reason alphaGo is a good example. It's not that google beat Go because they suddenly got a slightly faster supercomputer able top crunch even more numbers, it's that they beat it by creating better algorithms that ran on existing hardware and learned to play the game better than humans.
Self-driving cars are the exact same thing. You're trying to teach a computerized system to play a game (traffic) which has fairly simple rules that even relatively stupid people manage to follow but has an almost infinite amount of possible outcomes (comparable to the amount of board positions in Go). the problems that remain to be solved are not related to processor power. We already have more than enough processing power in self-driving cars to vastly exceed the capacity of any human. The challenges to be solved have to do with machine learning and actually teaching that cars to become good drivers in various different weather and road conditions.
And just like with Go the car will also have to know how to deal with entirely new/unforeseen situations and pick the best move with no prior experience of such a situation.
That's why it's relevant. The key to AI is first and foremost the algorithms used, and those algorithms are improving at a pace which vastly exceeds the linear pace of hardware improvement, as evidenced by alphaGo.
Drug addicts aren't all cracked-out fast food junkies like you see on COPS. There are many people with professional jobs that are drug addicts.
Sure, I never claimed they're all working low-income jobs.
But the thing is that doesn't matter in the context of the point I was responding to: the investment bankers making millions and snorting coke off the boobs of strippers are not going to suddenly switch to a life on basic income of a few hundred if such is made available to them because they've grown accustomed to a level of income that's far above anything that an UBI would offer-
The people OP was talking about,. people who'd in his opinion stop working altogether if UBI came about have to by necessity be people who's level of income would not drastically change if they seized working, so we're talking about low-income workers in this case and hence jobs that are about to disappear in the near future in any case. That's the reason for my wording, and I stand by it, even though you're entirely correct that addiction affects all income-classes
People that currently work to afford drug and alcohol addictions would now have no need to work, so society as a whole gains a dependent class at the expense of those who want to produce.
The thing is, people whop work just to get money to fund an addiction are most likely working jobs that are going to be gone anyway in the next couople of decades. That is, someone working a warehousing or a fast food job just to be able to afford booze is not going to be able to find work in the future regardless because automation is already making such jobs obsolete and is only going to keep going.
Those that want to produce will simply stop producing when they can't receive the fruits of their labor because it's going to a massive welfare state.
Bullshit. The very poiint of this story for example is to point out that the people who can work will not work any less under UBI because you still get more money if you work rather than just being on the UBI. The incentive to work if you can and those raise your standard of living is still there,
If Socialist utopias worked, Venezuela would be a paradise right now instead of the hellhole it is. Massive amounts of people would be fighting to get into Cuba, China, Russia, the DPRK, and all of the other "Socialist (also known as communism without so many government guns)" countries.
Ah, this argument again. I live in Finland, you know, one of those 'socialist' that offers free healthcare and education with tax money. We have an extensive welfare system already and are also trialing UBI to replace/modernize the wellfare system to make it more flexible. Other countries that have similar systems include but are not limited to: sweden, norway, denmark, Germany, France, etc And last I checked, the US has a social security system also funded by taxes.
There's some sort of weird american myopia, in which the only alternatives seem to be an massive oligarchy á la Russia or modern day US where the top 0,1 % is doing insanely well, the next 9,9 % are doing alright and then the middle and low-income classes are going down, or a 3rd world hellhole. This is just one giant strawman and the age old 'no social policies can ever work because the soviet union' -argument which is utter BS. The advanced European economies have been working as de facto socialist states for the better part of half a century, yet somehow conveniently we are always ignored in these conversations even though we've been far more successful in the implementation of these policies than the 3rd world countries that you just listed. We outperform the US in basic education and health, people are happier, there's less violent crime, less corruption etc. Quoting the study on happiness:
The USA is a story of reduced happiness. In 2007 the USA ranked 3rd among the OECD countries; in 2016 it came 19th. The reasons are declining social support and increased corruption (chapter 7) and it is these same factors that explain why the Nordic countries do so much better.
But sure, keep looking at Venezuela if it makes you feel good.
They are not doing so, they are all trying to get to the most free countries in the world with Capitalist economies (closest representations at least) and representative democratic Governments.
We have both a capitalistic system (a capitalistic economy does not prevent strong social policies) and a multi-party representational democracy. And if I had to choose, I'd much rather stay here (on in any other
The Democrats had the White House, the House of Representatives, and a filibuster-proof super majority in the Senate.
My bad. I did not remember that they had the ability to evade a filibuster. Thanks for pointing this out.
Obamacare's failures are entirely on Democrats.
Yes, I sit corrected on this. It is their fault.
That being said, the Republican "plans" for fixing Obamacare have thus far seemed like a bunch of clueless idiots trying to extinguish a fire by pouring oil on it.
Democrats were either hopelessly incompetent or they were deliberately destroying the US health care system so their next step could be single-payer.
As I recall, the bill in its original form contained much sensible features such as a public option for all which would count as the 'medicare expansion' that you just blasted Trump for not doing though he promised he would. It was republicans who opposed Obamacare at every turn that caused the law to be so disfugured from its original form (pretty much a Romneycare copy) and leading to a whole host of the current issues.
You can't blame the democrats for incompetence with regards to Obamacare when they were intentionally sabotaged by republicans, with the exact plan of leading to a dysfunctional Obamacare that they could then replace with something even more dysfunctional for health production and more suited towards the will of their corporate owners.
As someone working for the single-payer health care system of Finland: if your intention is to provide first world level advanced care to everyone with lower cost, single-payer is the way to go, we know this from looking at the expenditure stats and results. The US currently spend anywhere from 2-3 times as much money as most economies on health care and you're the only advanced country that lacks universal coverage. That's not just a failure of grand proportions; for the richest country on the planet that's a fucking disgrace.
So yes, I agree that the current system is a flaming trainwreck from a national health point of view but in the 10 or so years I've been following american politics it has been the republican party that's been leading the charge of fucking the american public over and driving through senseless laws because they serve corporate america way more than the interest of their voters.
Islam is as much a political idea as a religious one, if not more so. Their stated goal is and have always been conquest. The average Yusef-schmoe may not know this, or admit to this, but their so called "scholars" and IS knows this.
Islamists should be extended the same courtesy as non-islamic religions get in saudi arabia.
All islamists are muslims, not all muslims are islamists.
There once was a time when christianity was a political idea as much as a religious one (and in some places it still is). In fact, pick ANY organized religion and I can offer you numerous examples of said religion being used as an extension of politics to support violence, subjugation of non-believers and military expansion. It just so happens that when the starting point of a belief is '$OUR_GROUP has access to Ultimate Truth(tm) about the universe and who do not agree with us are wrong by definition' that can be easily used to instigate tribal conflicts.
I fully agree that islamist groups ought to be tolerated no more than any other groups seeking to overthrow freedom of religion and other core values of civilized societies, but you cannot get from that to 'therefore all muslims are evil' any more than I can get from the fact that there are christian dominionists in the US who'd like to establish a 'christian nation' to saying all the lutherans here in Finland must also be raging theocrats that need to be opposed.
Western leaders know full well that bringing in masses of poorly-vetted Muslim refugees is dangerous and will lead to conflict. That's the goal. Just look at TFA. Crisis => invasions of privacy.
Also, the sun rises each day after the rooster crows, so therefore it's blatantly obvious that the rooster is causing the sun to rise, right?
The origin point of the current refugee crisis lies in US-lead ME politics. The actions of the US throughout the region in the 2000s have created several power vacuums (Iraq, Libya) which have allowed for the formation of several violent groups to rise and cause massive havoc.
Now obviously the reasons for the US involvement in the middle-east are complex but I for one do not agree with this idea of a 'master plan' wherein all the leaders of the west somehow planned all this from the beginning with the intention of a massive crisis just to be used as an excuse to bring in more refugees so they can tighten surveillance laws. I mean countries throughout the west have been amping up surveillance of their citizens with the pretense of combating 'terrorism' entirely successfully without the refugees. Terrorism and these kinds of attacks have happened and been used as an excuse to strip rights away from people way before the current migrant crisis began.
The west, especially those countries in the west that have the capability to exert military power, has a sort of god-complex where we have such belief in our capabilities to do pretty much anything, including removing despots from countries and installing democracy and human rights and western values to countries on different continents without problems, that we seem to be unable to accept that we can in fact fuck up and make huge mistakes. So in comes the conspiratorial mindset and tries to get us to believe that in fact we never fail, we never make stupid and arrogant plans based on incorrect assumptions and planning and end up creating messes that are worse than the ones we originally wanted to solve but that it must all be planned. Everything happens for a reason and the military industrial complex works in mysterious ways. This must be precisely the desired outcome because the powers that be make no mistakes, ever.
Let's borrow the razor from mr. Occam and ask, which of the following 2 scenarios is more likely and takes fewer assumptions:
1. The leaders of the western military machine are imperfect and not all knowing and prone to errors in judgement. They make calls based on their ideological beliefs about 'national interests'. Therefore outcomes of military interventions are not always the desired ones and often fail in achieving their desired goals and making the situation worse, 2. The leaders of the west are in fact completely in control and incapable of making mistakes. They're involved in a shadowy cabal that plans conflicts years or decades in advance just so that the conflicts can be used as an excuse to create chaos in their own countries and pass legislation.
Look at history: men in charge of gigantic military machines have always been highly prone to wishful thinking. Hitler invaded the soviet union under the firm (and entirely delusional) belief that the entire soviet army would be defeated in 6 weeks. It never happened. The soviets believed they could occupy the whole of Finland in 2 weeks, they never did. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (for both the soviets and Americans) etc...
All examples of scenarios where the overconfident people in charge are seemingly convinced that because of the numerical/technological advantage the conflict they're about to undertake will be short and over quickly.
I find it hard to look at the chain of events that's unraveled in the middle-east and find it any different: men with relatively narrow perspectives and understanding of the region and what's actually at stake being confident in their military advisors who tell them that it will all be very clean and quick. Does it mean there are no components o
There are (at least) two major problems with this line of reasoning. One is that the tests had a cultural bias. This can be as simple as people with English as a second language not understanding the instructions, or just lack of familiarity with the types of questions being asked. Another is neglecting the contribution of environment: the testees may in fact be less intelligent, but because of impoverished childhood rather than inferior genes.
A good example of this second point is height. Height is more heritable than IQ, but is also affected by childhood nutrition. As a people become affluent, average height increases, even though the genes are not changing.
Excellent points. The same topic came up towards the end of a recent podcast of Sam Harris (link, the discussion about IQ starts sometime after the 1 hour 30 minute mark) which had as a guest the cancer physician and researcher. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The point made by Mukherjee is that available evidence suggests that IQ is heritable but not inherited. So genetic factors certainly play into shaping an individuals IQ, but it doesn't mean the offspring of someone with high or really high IQ will inherit that trait.
And even if it turns out that genes account for 100 % of IQ variation that still does not eliminate the role of the environment and upbringing on how those genes (and hence, IQ) are expressed:
Unfortunately there is frequent confusion about the meaning of heritability. The most frequent misunderstanding is the purpose of twin studies. Heritability estimates are about understanding sources of similarities and differences in traits between members of a particular population. The results apply only to that population. The purpose is not to determine how much any particular individual’s traits are due to his or her genes or his or her environment. Behavioral geneticists are well aware that all of our traits develop through a combination of both nature and nurture. Heritability estimates are about explaining differences among people, not explaining individual development. The question on the table for them is this: In a particular population of individuals, what factors make those individuals the same as each other, and which factors make them different?
Therefore, twin studies aren’t designed to investigate human development. In recent years developmental psychologists, including L. Todd Rose, Kurt Fischer, Peter Molenaar, and Cynthia Campbell, have been developing exciting new techniques to study intraindividual variation. 12 Intraindividual variation focuses on a single person and looks at how an integrated dynamic system of behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and other psychological processes change across time and situations. New intraindividual techniques allow researchers to focus on a single twin pair and see how nature and nurture interact in nonlinear ways to explain both their similarities and their differences. 13 Both levels of analysis— twin studies and developmental analysis— are informative, but the results from the one do not apply to the other. 14
Many people also confuse heritability with immutability. They hear the word “heritable” and immediately think of “genes,” which then conjures up pictures of a fixed trait that can’t be altered by external forces. In contrast, many people hear the word “environment” and breathe a sigh of relief, thinking the trait is easily modifiable. This requires quite a strong faith in social engineering!
Just because a trait is heritable (and virtually all of our psychological traits are heritable) doesn’t necessarily mean that the trait is fixed or can’t be developed. Virtually all of our traits are substantially genetically influenced and are influenced by environm
I just don't believe that medical error is the third greatest cause of death.That's just stupid. Nobody in his right mind would ever go to a doctor if the odds were that high.
Introduction to game theory. Suppose you have cancer that needs to be operated. The chances of you dying from complications of the operation can be quite high, in double digits even. However the chances of you dying from untreated cancer is 100 %. It's not a difficult choice to make.
Same for every other scenario: you get into a car crash and are rushed into an ER. Is there a chance something critical like internal bleeding is missed causing you to die? Yes, absolutely there's a chance that happens, but again, does that mean you'd rather prefer to be left to the site of the accident untreated to face a certain death?
Medicine is the science of trying to prevent people from dying. It should come as no surprise to people that when medicine fails, people often die but you cannot get from that to 'well medicine is useless/dangerous then'.
Imagine if and when we're likely to improve treatments for common causes of death like heart disease and cancers. It may well be the case within our lifetimes that medical errors jump higher on the list not because we're getting worse at medicine, but because we're getting better. The more people we can successfully treat, the less people will die from the diseases themselves, hence leading to medical errors becoming more prominent as a cause of death.
I work in this field. There's a disconnect between what the hospitals are actually doing and what the researchers are proposing.
The researchers are proposing opaque systems based on deep learning. Mark my words: you will never see this in wide-spread use at hospitals. Doctors aren't comfortable with it (nor should they be).
Of course the deep learning systems are not yet at a point that they could be even considered for widespread use, but that's a long way from never.
Medical diagnoses involve high amounts of variables which is why right now the best way we can use machines is to work with probabilities. However there's nothing about the diagnostic process itself which would make it likely that human beings are forever going to be the best at it.
If we have systems in the future which have access to all the same amount of information as the human physicians do, then it's just a matter of training them to handle/cross-reference the data. If the machines knows the vitals of the patient from the time of his/her admission, every med he/she has been given, operation that have been done, imaging (there are already systems in use that can read images and these are being developed rapidly), and so on, there's absolutely no barrier preventing these systems from achieving and eventually exceeding human capabilities and accuracy in diagnostic work.
None of these means the results are to be blindly trusted, but it's just shortsighted to assume we should aim to keep humans in the loop forever, when it's by all accounts likely that we can build systems that will become better and more reliable at diagnosing than humans are, and no patients need to be risked in developing these because we can use the accumulating data from human physicians to train the algorithms until their accuracy is on par with the human doctors.
Poisoned? You do know that every single substance, including water itself, is potentially lethal if ingested in excess?
That's the thing really. It's the dosage that makes something either healthy or unhealthy. The world health organization recommends a level of fluoride of 0,5 mg to 1.0 mg per litre because fluoride has proven benefits for dental healthat low doses..
Referring to a common salt of fluoride, sodium fluoride (NaF), the lethal dose for most adult humans is estimated at 5 to 10 g (which is equivalent to 32 to 64 mg/kg elemental fluoride/kg body weight).[1][2][3] Ingestion of fluoride can produce gastrointestinal discomfort at doses at least 15 to 20 times lower (0.2–0.3 mg/kg or 10 to 15 mg for a 50 kg person) than lethal doses.
So to even get to the lower bound of gastrointestinal discomfort, someone would have to think anywhere from 10-30 litres of water, and to get to the lethal dose the number goes up to 30-60 litres. At that quantity you're in life danger even if you're drinking fluoride free water because of water intoxication.
There are understandable reasons for not drinking tap water in certain areas (taste, purity, etc). but fluoride is not one of them. The tap water here in Finland ranks among the best in the world and bottled water consumption is low compared to most western nations, yet do we see cases of people dropping because of the added fluoride? No.
A joke is not just a string of words. A joke is delivery, context, relevance to history/current events, etc
You're correct but then you contradict yourself a moment later by saying:
No, you can't copyright a joke.
Because you most certainly can. Stand-up comedians are professional joke-tellers who copyright their performances and sell them off to publisher like Netflix all the time. The entire joke/performance itself is the artist's property.
I cannot go to a stand.up show, film it and sell the recording for money without breaking the law and being subject to fines. I can however memorize the entire script of the joke and tell it on camera myself but then it's not the same joke.
We're able to produce flint axeheads far more efficiently than we could in the Neolithic. Therefore the demand for flint axeheads is vastly greater.
You obviously did not understand the paradox. We've made great improvements in cutting technology. Axes have been replaced by powertools and harvesters far more efficient than any axe type in cutting down wood, but simultanously the demand for wood has increased massively since the Neolithic.
The point is not that new, more efficient technologies don't surpass the old, but that these new technologies, despite being superior in efficiency do not reduce the overall demand for the raw materials they're used to process.
Tech needs almost nothing to produce since it includes software
Uhm... what? You do know that increased demand for tech has caused the demand for raw materials involved in making tech, such as rare-earth minerals, to skyrocket?
Take, for instance, one of the world’s fastest-improving technologies: silicon-based semiconductors. Over the last few decades, technological improvements in the efficiency of semiconductors have greatly reduced the amount of material needed to make a single transistor. As a result, today’s smartphones, tablets, and computers are far more powerful and compact than computers built in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the researchers find that consumers’ demand for silicon has outpaced the rate of its technological change, and that the world’s consumption of silicon has grown by 345 percent over the last four decades. As others have found, by 2005, there were more transistors used than printed text characters. “Despite how fast technology is racing, there’s actually more silicon used today, because we now just put more stuff on, like movies, and photos, and things we couldn’t even think of 20 years ago,” says Christopher Magee, a professor of the practice of engineering systems in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “So we’re still using a little more material all the time.” The researchers found similar trends in 56 other materials, goods, and services, from basic resources such as aluminum and formaldehyde to hardware and energy technologies such as hard disk drives, transistors, wind energy, and photovoltaics. In all cases, they found no evidence of dematerialization, or an overall reduction in their use, despite technological improvements to their performance. “There is a techno-optimist’s position that says technological change will fix the environment,” Magee observes. “This says, probably not.” - -
“[Technology] will get us to a sustainable world — it has to,” says J. Doyne Farmer, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the research. “I say this not only because we need it, but because there is only so much we can suck out of the Earth, and eventually we will be forced into a sustainable world, one way or another. The question is whether we can do that without great pain. Magee’s paper shows that we need to expect more pain than some of us thought.”
Chips don't grow on trees. This is a classic case of the Jevon's paradox which has been noticed since the very beginning of industrialization: as you increase the efficiency of a technology, whether it's coal plants, internal combustion engines or microchips, the demand for said technology goes up.
We have a limited amount of raw-materials in the ground and the extraction of the remaining resources will grow increasingly difficult and expensive with time, which means recycling of old electronics more efficiently is the only sustainable option in the long run. Same goes for plastics: we currently dump billions of dollars worth of plastic to dumps and the oceans but as the cost of oil keeps rising and plastics become more expensive, we should start to see the market turn towards a greener economy not because they care about the environment but because picking floating plastic out of the sea and reprocessing it will at one point (hopefully soon) become more cost-efficient than making new plastics out of a perishing resource.
Man I wish we had some vigilante hackers that would shut down wikileaks, they are the Enemy. Giving secrets to them is giving them to the enemy which is all the spyware writers in North Korea.
Do you not think the other agencies don't have access to such tools and information already? Exploits are sold and distributed in the darkweb on a daily basis, you can even these days buy malware as a service. It's a highly advanced, highly lucrative industry with professionals at work on all sides. And not all the players are state actors, plenty of them have commercial interests in mind and these people don't care who's buying.
Now, someone else said it well in a recent story about WannaCry: the lesson of this story is not just 'guard your weapons better' but also 'make better armor'
Putting these exploits out there allows for people to defend themselves against them. Following the mentality of 'well let's just not tell anyone of this exploit we found and no $BAD GUYS will ever find it" is arrogant and stupid because there are billions of dollars involved in the industry of seeking out and taking advantage of these exploits. There are millions of people across the planet right now working for criminal enterprises whose day-to-day job it is to seek these security holes out, with or without sites like WikiLeaks.
I personally think the whole tactic of not informing companies of serious security flaws in their products in the hopes of one day being able to use said exploits to target $BAD GUYS, is incredibly stupid and shortsighted because it simultaneously puts EVERYONE running these systems in the US/west at risk of being attacked by whoever else has found the same exploit. It's literally the same as finding out a vaccine for a deadly virus but trying to keep it a secret in case one day you decide to start full-scale biological war against $BAD GUYS; if your population is not vaccinated and is hit first by the enemy, you're fucked. The risk-reward ration is absurd.
But then again, I'm not american, so that must mean I'm the enemy, right?
The problem here is you really can't spread yourself too thin. We've still got Afghanistan going on, the whole ISIS thing, Syria, Turkey being stupid, Yemen, Iran, North Korea, China and their island building silliness, Philippine leadership being retarded, Venezuela, and probably a few others I can't think of off the top of my head. There IS a limit to what we can juggle without dropping anything.
Absolutely, 100 % agreed.
Besides, you know what a direct confrontation with Russian forces in Ukraine will do.
I do yes, and I'm not saying that should be done. I mean hell, we've got the longest land border in Europe with the Russians so I'm by no means a hawkish fan of a direct US-Russia conflict, far from it.
However my point is that the Russians increasing their influence over US administration is bad for the general security of the area because it gives them more space to maneuver. The people in the Baltics are genuinely suspicious over the willingness of Trump and co to actually help them (despite them being in NATO) if something shady does happen. And keep in mind, this being the Russians they won't make it seem like a direct invasion. Much like in Crimea, the doctrine is to make it seem like an internal conflict. The fear is that they will go to Trump and say: "Don't meddle in the internal affairs of Lithuania' and then be able to pretty much do what they want there, even though they won't obviously try to annex these regions in the same way as they did with Crimea.
Putin is trying to turn back the clock to the days of the iron curtain when eastern Europe was his backyard. He doesn't need - nor does he desire - a full-on conflict with the Americans to achieve this.
I personally think this is their main problem. Right now the focus of all industrialized nations should be on ditching the use of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. Nuclear power is an effective way of producing energy to cover up for what cannot be produced by renewables. Right now as they're adamant on ditching nuclear as well, their CO2 emissions are rising and they're unlikely to meet their emission goals, because increased demand has to be met with increased used of natural gas, which, while better than coal for sure, is not as good emissions wise as nuclear.
Now don't get me wrong, I think nuclear is not a permanent solution so the idea of going fully renewable is good. I just think their implementation and schedule is slightly foolish. If they kept some of the nuclear and used that to provide the rest of what they need, they wouldn't have to use natural gas, or import as much energy from abroad.
The main reason I stopped voting for the Green party here in Finland was their illogical opposition to the use of nuclear energy as part of a strategy to cut down on emissions. Because the 'green' crowd has absurd fears of nuclear due to radiation they end up favoring policies which in the short-to-mid term drive emissions up, all in the name of protecting the environment.
The challenges with storing nuclear waste are much easier to solve than the challenges we're going to amass by continuing to release CO2 in current amounts, which is why I don't favor adopting the German approach even though we do have the same goal in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware it wasn't legally binding, but that's in essence irrelevant. The poll was hyped up to such a height, and 'the will of the people' brought up so many times that the vote was de facto binding. That is, the conservatives themselves had made it clear prior to the election that the result would be followed, so a failure to do so would have (in their minds) destroyed the party.
Well I'd say it goes under the 'stuff that matters' part of the slogan. As a European one of the reasons I like political stories on Slashdot, especially political stories from outisde the US is that it's interesting to read american commentary on these matters. I mean, I often do not agree but it doesn't matter, it gives me a perspective on the matters that I feel I do not get from simply reading something like CNN or other american news sources.
In case there are others who feel the same and for what it's worth here's my take on this topic: The British right has effectively sunk their own ship. The Brexit campaign was never meant to succeed, but rather it was meant to be used as a PR-campaign for Farage and his ilk in preparation for the next eelctions. Pretty much everyone, on the right and the left, assumed people would vote remain. This lead to 2 things that started this cascade of clusterfucks:
1. The Brexit side felt they could make pretty much any claims they wanted. After all, they weren't actually going to win, so while they're at it might as well take it over the top for maximal visibility. Hence the absurd claims that by resigning they'd be able to pour hundreds of millions more into health care, or maintain complete control of their borders while still being free to trade with the Union like before, and so on.
2. The Remain side, equally convinced that they'd win easily - after all, who'd be stupid enough to fall for the extravagant hyperbole of the Brexit camp - did not do a solid campaign at all. Granted, I'm, not a Brit but I was left with the impression that they were totally unable to craft a message of their own, other than essentially trying to signal "leaving the Union would be bad for reasons X, Y and Z". This is when I knew they were screwed. You're essentially up against a populists wet dream: an popular vote where the other side gets to wrap themselves in a flag and talk about 'freedom'. That's really hard to counter, because the nuanced arguments about the benefits of a trade union are trumped by the idealistic talk.
These two effects combined were enough to tilt the scales and now they're left in a situation that no-one really wanted. The Brexit camp has mostly ran to the hills and scattered, realizing well ahead of time that they've scored a massive pyrrhic victory and that by the time the effects of a brexit hit they don't want to be anywhere near responsibilities. This leaves the political establishment in a weird spot, where the resignation process has to be overseen by people who didn't really want to resign in the first place. May, herself a remainer, looked at all of this and probably figured that since she lost to raging populist she might as well do a full u-turn and attempt to go 'full populist' to solidify support for the conservatives. So she adopted a hardline stance on Brexit where they're trying to strongarm the Union into giving them everything they want even though from a purely realpolitik/game theory point of view the UK is at a massive disadvantage in these negotiations, so trying to play hardball is an insanely stupid move. She also called the elections in an attempt to gather support for her newly found stance of 'brexit means brexit' and 'no deal is better than a bad deal' -stance.
However by this time most of Brittain seems to have realized how much they were in fact duped by the Brexit campaign. That indeed, the majority of the claims made by the campaign about the benefits of resigning are outright lies. Many are feeling remorseful, and indeed it seems based on the polls if the vote was held today Remain would win
What can we learn from this? Well, the number one issue to be learned is that putting decisions of this scale to a binding popular vote with a simple majority is a suicidal move because people aren't really that well informed on complex matters like the role of the Union, which allows populists (from both sides) to essentially ma
The problem with all online mass surveillance schemes is that data has no nationality. From the standpoint of those doing the surveillance they're interested in the origin of the data and its destination. A big deal is made out of this in PR. The same hassle is currently going on here in Finland with the government discussing granting additional rights to the authorities for a wider range of powers to collect information to counter terrorism and Russian cyberactivity, and the respective authorities have kept hammering how they'd only use it to target data coming in from abroad. However there's really no such thing as data 'inside' and 'outside' Finland. Most of the traffic that people send to each other within the country will at some point in the chain cross the border and circulate outside the country before it comes back, and upon re-entry it'd be susceptible to collection.
It's my understanding based on the Snowden leaks that the US does pretty much the same thing by having the Brits to gather data of US nationals that crosses the border and then they get the data from them, allowing them to claim that they never themselves technically 'collected' any of it.
There's no such thing as 'targeted' mass surveillance or 'mass surveillance only for foreigners' because the net is by its very design a borderless environment. Hell, even non tech-savy people these days understand this principle as the use of VPNs to circumvent geoblocking is widespread. so why would anyone still seriously think that agencies and authorities would respect non-existent borders in cyberspace?
Yes, linking us here in Helsinki to Tallin with a tunnel may be smart. However, using Hyperloop to do it makes no sense to me as a Finn that travels to Estonia several times a year. Why? The travel time on the fastest ferries is already down to below couple hours, and they're currently looking into the option of building a rail tunnel in between the cities. which would cut the travel time down to 45 minutes. Benefits of a rail system over something like the hyperloop at this point are enormous: first off, trains are a technology we have mastered and the project does not require maintaining a near-vacuum, second of all trains have a higher capacity than hyperloop and are very likely cheaper to maintain*.
The Hyperloop test track which was about a mile long is so far the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in the world after NASA's. The Hyperloop tech is probably on the order of decades from being commercially viable. Even the planning of a regular underwater tunnel takes years, the estimated completion time of the rail tunnel is in 2038. Infrastructure projects like this take massive amounts of time and money to plan an execute and the planning needs to be started years in advance so it's near impossible that a technology like Hyperloop in such an early stage of innovation will even be considered for the Helsinki-Tallin route. The upsides are not worth the increased risks.
Even the rail tunnel is not a certainty due to the cost factors involved. At 92 kilometers - nearly twice the English channel tunnel - It'd be the longest rail tunnel in the world and underwater, making it extremely expensive (current estimates are in the ballpark of 13 billion euros). With the ferry traffic being cheap (you can get tickets for less than 10 euros), plentiful and fast it may well be the case that the tunnel is never implemented. Not to mention that the ferry companies are major players in the baltic regional economy, and this wield significant political lobbying power both here and in Estonia. Tallink-Silja is one of the largest companies in the Baltics, coming 2nd or 3rd behind only banks.
So to summarize: would it make sense to establish a faster connection between Helsinki and Tallinn? Possibly, I'll wait for more info before saying that for sure. If it is done, what are the chances of hyperloop being used to do it? Practically zero.
As a disabled leftist European liberal this opening alone compelled me to answer to you.
The point is to agree and plan together to reduce the emissions. The reason it's not binding is that big players like the US, China and Russia will not agree to a binding treaty. But the general point is getting everyone on board and realizing that things need to be done to curb emissions globally.
First off, 2030 is the target year at which china is supposed to reach its peak emissions. That is, their total emissions (including traffic) will grow in absolute terms until the year 2030 at which point they're supposed to start going down. Look at what they're actually planning to do:
Using time and resources to make employees who could just as well work from home come sit in an office is the very opposite of productive.
Working from home, for those who can, is often more efficient. I handle most meetings via skype anyway, so whether I'm sitting home or at the office as I'm taking part in those makes no difference.
Shorter work weeks and more paid holiday with a higher GDP than the US currently has? How's that a bad thing, exactly?
Oh you can be sure he is. How do I know? There are Russian professional trolls even in Finnish news articles and forums which have a readership that's a fraction of Slashdot's. The estimates on how many people are actively working for the so called troll brigades vary, but we're probably talking at least a couple hundred. It's an extremely well orchestrated global operation:
The Russians have an upper hand in this struggle of propaganda at the moment because they can generate any number of conspiratorial blog posts and 'alternative news' and then circulate them throughout social media through different fronts and groups as well as bot-accounts. The thing that makes this so effective is the level of precision in targeting that modern social media platforms allow them to have: you can craft several entirely different or even contradictory attack ads about someone and then target those so that they're only shown to people who're most likely to be influenced by said points.
So for example you can target people for whom gun rights are important and run ,material saying the opposing candidate is going to take your guns away. Meanwhile for the liberal crowd that doesn't care as much about gun rights you can use the 'in bed with bankers' card Etc.
It doesn't have to be true. The point is to flood the key areas/states with enough disinformation and misinformation to tip the balance over to the preferred side. And if you look at the amount of voters that secured him the win in the key states, we're talking about
Wrong. In fact, massively so.
The whole reason that Go is so signifficant as a milestone for AI is because despite the ruleset being simple and straightforward, the amount of possible board configurations exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe.
Ask a good chess player why he made a certain move and he'll be able to give you a very well defined answer. "I moved the knight there because by doing so I have a guaranteed mate in 5 moves" or some such. Now go to a pro Go player and ask the same thing and they won't give you the same answer, they'll often give some variety of 'it felt right'. You cannot number crunch Go in the same fashion you can many other games simply due to the fact that the complexity and amount of possible plays far exceeds what even the current top of the line algorithms, let alone a human brain can handle. Thus there's a huge component of essentially intuition involved in Go.
This is why even a couple years ago people were still saying it's not possible for computers to beat humans at Go because it requires actually learning to evaluate moves entirely differently from chess. It requires a level of essentially creative thinking.
Most people do not think the progress will continue indefinitely but it doesn't have to do so in order for for computers to a) achieve human level general intelligence or b) achieve consciousness.
What he was trying to point out is precisely that these days the key developments are happening in the software, not the hardware.
That's the whole reason alphaGo is a good example. It's not that google beat Go because they suddenly got a slightly faster supercomputer able top crunch even more numbers, it's that they beat it by creating better algorithms that ran on existing hardware and learned to play the game better than humans.
Self-driving cars are the exact same thing. You're trying to teach a computerized system to play a game (traffic) which has fairly simple rules that even relatively stupid people manage to follow but has an almost infinite amount of possible outcomes (comparable to the amount of board positions in Go). the problems that remain to be solved are not related to processor power. We already have more than enough processing power in self-driving cars to vastly exceed the capacity of any human. The challenges to be solved have to do with machine learning and actually teaching that cars to become good drivers in various different weather and road conditions.
And just like with Go the car will also have to know how to deal with entirely new/unforeseen situations and pick the best move with no prior experience of such a situation.
That's why it's relevant. The key to AI is first and foremost the algorithms used, and those algorithms are improving at a pace which vastly exceeds the linear pace of hardware improvement, as evidenced by alphaGo.
Sure, I never claimed they're all working low-income jobs.
But the thing is that doesn't matter in the context of the point I was responding to: the investment bankers making millions and snorting coke off the boobs of strippers are not going to suddenly switch to a life on basic income of a few hundred if such is made available to them because they've grown accustomed to a level of income that's far above anything that an UBI would offer-
The people OP was talking about,. people who'd in his opinion stop working altogether if UBI came about have to by necessity be people who's level of income would not drastically change if they seized working, so we're talking about low-income workers in this case and hence jobs that are about to disappear in the near future in any case. That's the reason for my wording, and I stand by it, even though you're entirely correct that addiction affects all income-classes
The thing is, people whop work just to get money to fund an addiction are most likely working jobs that are going to be gone anyway in the next couople of decades. That is, someone working a warehousing or a fast food job just to be able to afford booze is not going to be able to find work in the future regardless because automation is already making such jobs obsolete and is only going to keep going.
Bullshit. The very poiint of this story for example is to point out that the people who can work will not work any less under UBI because you still get more money if you work rather than just being on the UBI. The incentive to work if you can and those raise your standard of living is still there,
Ah, this argument again. I live in Finland, you know, one of those 'socialist' that offers free healthcare and education with tax money. We have an extensive welfare system already and are also trialing UBI to replace/modernize the wellfare system to make it more flexible. Other countries that have similar systems include but are not limited to: sweden, norway, denmark, Germany, France, etc And last I checked, the US has a social security system also funded by taxes.
There's some sort of weird american myopia, in which the only alternatives seem to be an massive oligarchy á la Russia or modern day US where the top 0,1 % is doing insanely well, the next 9,9 % are doing alright and then the middle and low-income classes are going down, or a 3rd world hellhole. This is just one giant strawman and the age old 'no social policies can ever work because the soviet union' -argument which is utter BS. The advanced European economies have been working as de facto socialist states for the better part of half a century, yet somehow conveniently we are always ignored in these conversations even though we've been far more successful in the implementation of these policies than the 3rd world countries that you just listed. We outperform the US in basic education and health, people are happier, there's less violent crime, less corruption etc. Quoting the study on happiness:
But sure, keep looking at Venezuela if it makes you feel good.
We have both a capitalistic system (a capitalistic economy does not prevent strong social policies) and a multi-party representational democracy. And if I had to choose, I'd much rather stay here (on in any other
My bad. I did not remember that they had the ability to evade a filibuster. Thanks for pointing this out.
Yes, I sit corrected on this. It is their fault.
That being said, the Republican "plans" for fixing Obamacare have thus far seemed like a bunch of clueless idiots trying to extinguish a fire by pouring oil on it.
As I recall, the bill in its original form contained much sensible features such as a public option for all which would count as the 'medicare expansion' that you just blasted Trump for not doing though he promised he would. It was republicans who opposed Obamacare at every turn that caused the law to be so disfugured from its original form (pretty much a Romneycare copy) and leading to a whole host of the current issues.
You can't blame the democrats for incompetence with regards to Obamacare when they were intentionally sabotaged by republicans, with the exact plan of leading to a dysfunctional Obamacare that they could then replace with something even more dysfunctional for health production and more suited towards the will of their corporate owners.
As someone working for the single-payer health care system of Finland: if your intention is to provide first world level advanced care to everyone with lower cost, single-payer is the way to go, we know this from looking at the expenditure stats and results. The US currently spend anywhere from 2-3 times as much money as most economies on health care and you're the only advanced country that lacks universal coverage. That's not just a failure of grand proportions; for the richest country on the planet that's a fucking disgrace.
So yes, I agree that the current system is a flaming trainwreck from a national health point of view but in the 10 or so years I've been following american politics it has been the republican party that's been leading the charge of fucking the american public over and driving through senseless laws because they serve corporate america way more than the interest of their voters.
All islamists are muslims, not all muslims are islamists.
There once was a time when christianity was a political idea as much as a religious one (and in some places it still is). In fact, pick ANY organized religion and I can offer you numerous examples of said religion being used as an extension of politics to support violence, subjugation of non-believers and military expansion. It just so happens that when the starting point of a belief is '$OUR_GROUP has access to Ultimate Truth(tm) about the universe and who do not agree with us are wrong by definition' that can be easily used to instigate tribal conflicts.
I fully agree that islamist groups ought to be tolerated no more than any other groups seeking to overthrow freedom of religion and other core values of civilized societies, but you cannot get from that to 'therefore all muslims are evil' any more than I can get from the fact that there are christian dominionists in the US who'd like to establish a 'christian nation' to saying all the lutherans here in Finland must also be raging theocrats that need to be opposed.
Also, the sun rises each day after the rooster crows, so therefore it's blatantly obvious that the rooster is causing the sun to rise, right?
The origin point of the current refugee crisis lies in US-lead ME politics. The actions of the US throughout the region in the 2000s have created several power vacuums (Iraq, Libya) which have allowed for the formation of several violent groups to rise and cause massive havoc.
Now obviously the reasons for the US involvement in the middle-east are complex but I for one do not agree with this idea of a 'master plan' wherein all the leaders of the west somehow planned all this from the beginning with the intention of a massive crisis just to be used as an excuse to bring in more refugees so they can tighten surveillance laws. I mean countries throughout the west have been amping up surveillance of their citizens with the pretense of combating 'terrorism' entirely successfully without the refugees. Terrorism and these kinds of attacks have happened and been used as an excuse to strip rights away from people way before the current migrant crisis began.
The west, especially those countries in the west that have the capability to exert military power, has a sort of god-complex where we have such belief in our capabilities to do pretty much anything, including removing despots from countries and installing democracy and human rights and western values to countries on different continents without problems, that we seem to be unable to accept that we can in fact fuck up and make huge mistakes. So in comes the conspiratorial mindset and tries to get us to believe that in fact we never fail, we never make stupid and arrogant plans based on incorrect assumptions and planning and end up creating messes that are worse than the ones we originally wanted to solve but that it must all be planned. Everything happens for a reason and the military industrial complex works in mysterious ways. This must be precisely the desired outcome because the powers that be make no mistakes, ever.
Let's borrow the razor from mr. Occam and ask, which of the following 2 scenarios is more likely and takes fewer assumptions:
1. The leaders of the western military machine are imperfect and not all knowing and prone to errors in judgement. They make calls based on their ideological beliefs about 'national interests'. Therefore outcomes of military interventions are not always the desired ones and often fail in achieving their desired goals and making the situation worse,
2. The leaders of the west are in fact completely in control and incapable of making mistakes. They're involved in a shadowy cabal that plans conflicts years or decades in advance just so that the conflicts can be used as an excuse to create chaos in their own countries and pass legislation.
Look at history: men in charge of gigantic military machines have always been highly prone to wishful thinking. Hitler invaded the soviet union under the firm (and entirely delusional) belief that the entire soviet army would be defeated in 6 weeks. It never happened. The soviets believed they could occupy the whole of Finland in 2 weeks, they never did. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan (for both the soviets and Americans) etc...
All examples of scenarios where the overconfident people in charge are seemingly convinced that because of the numerical/technological advantage the conflict they're about to undertake will be short and over quickly.
I find it hard to look at the chain of events that's unraveled in the middle-east and find it any different: men with relatively narrow perspectives and understanding of the region and what's actually at stake being confident in their military advisors who tell them that it will all be very clean and quick. Does it mean there are no components o
Excellent points. The same topic came up towards the end of a recent podcast of Sam Harris (link, the discussion about IQ starts sometime after the 1 hour 30 minute mark) which had as a guest the cancer physician and researcher. Siddhartha Mukherjee. The point made by Mukherjee is that available evidence suggests that IQ is heritable but not inherited. So genetic factors certainly play into shaping an individuals IQ, but it doesn't mean the offspring of someone with high or really high IQ will inherit that trait.
And even if it turns out that genes account for 100 % of IQ variation that still does not eliminate the role of the environment and upbringing on how those genes (and hence, IQ) are expressed:
Introduction to game theory. Suppose you have cancer that needs to be operated. The chances of you dying from complications of the operation can be quite high, in double digits even. However the chances of you dying from untreated cancer is 100 %. It's not a difficult choice to make.
Same for every other scenario: you get into a car crash and are rushed into an ER. Is there a chance something critical like internal bleeding is missed causing you to die? Yes, absolutely there's a chance that happens, but again, does that mean you'd rather prefer to be left to the site of the accident untreated to face a certain death?
Medicine is the science of trying to prevent people from dying. It should come as no surprise to people that when medicine fails, people often die but you cannot get from that to 'well medicine is useless/dangerous then'.
Imagine if and when we're likely to improve treatments for common causes of death like heart disease and cancers. It may well be the case within our lifetimes that medical errors jump higher on the list not because we're getting worse at medicine, but because we're getting better. The more people we can successfully treat, the less people will die from the diseases themselves, hence leading to medical errors becoming more prominent as a cause of death.
Of course the deep learning systems are not yet at a point that they could be even considered for widespread use, but that's a long way from never.
Medical diagnoses involve high amounts of variables which is why right now the best way we can use machines is to work with probabilities. However there's nothing about the diagnostic process itself which would make it likely that human beings are forever going to be the best at it.
If we have systems in the future which have access to all the same amount of information as the human physicians do, then it's just a matter of training them to handle/cross-reference the data. If the machines knows the vitals of the patient from the time of his/her admission, every med he/she has been given, operation that have been done, imaging (there are already systems in use that can read images and these are being developed rapidly), and so on, there's absolutely no barrier preventing these systems from achieving and eventually exceeding human capabilities and accuracy in diagnostic work.
None of these means the results are to be blindly trusted, but it's just shortsighted to assume we should aim to keep humans in the loop forever, when it's by all accounts likely that we can build systems that will become better and more reliable at diagnosing than humans are, and no patients need to be risked in developing these because we can use the accumulating data from human physicians to train the algorithms until their accuracy is on par with the human doctors.
Poisoned? You do know that every single substance, including water itself, is potentially lethal if ingested in excess?
That's the thing really. It's the dosage that makes something either healthy or unhealthy. The world health organization recommends a level of fluoride of 0,5 mg to 1.0 mg per litre because fluoride has proven benefits for dental health at low doses..
Now then, let's look at the numbers:
So to even get to the lower bound of gastrointestinal discomfort, someone would have to think anywhere from 10-30 litres of water, and to get to the lethal dose the number goes up to 30-60 litres. At that quantity you're in life danger even if you're drinking fluoride free water because of water intoxication.
There are understandable reasons for not drinking tap water in certain areas (taste, purity, etc). but fluoride is not one of them. The tap water here in Finland ranks among the best in the world and bottled water consumption is low compared to most western nations, yet do we see cases of people dropping because of the added fluoride? No.
You're correct but then you contradict yourself a moment later by saying:
Because you most certainly can. Stand-up comedians are professional joke-tellers who copyright their performances and sell them off to publisher like Netflix all the time. The entire joke/performance itself is the artist's property.
I cannot go to a stand.up show, film it and sell the recording for money without breaking the law and being subject to fines. I can however memorize the entire script of the joke and tell it on camera myself but then it's not the same joke.
Thanks.
You obviously did not understand the paradox. We've made great improvements in cutting technology. Axes have been replaced by powertools and harvesters far more efficient than any axe type in cutting down wood, but simultanously the demand for wood has increased massively since the Neolithic.
The point is not that new, more efficient technologies don't surpass the old, but that these new technologies, despite being superior in efficiency do not reduce the overall demand for the raw materials they're used to process.
Uhm... what? You do know that increased demand for tech has caused the demand for raw materials involved in making tech, such as rare-earth minerals, to skyrocket?
Chips don't grow on trees. This is a classic case of the Jevon's paradox which has been noticed since the very beginning of industrialization: as you increase the efficiency of a technology, whether it's coal plants, internal combustion engines or microchips, the demand for said technology goes up.
We have a limited amount of raw-materials in the ground and the extraction of the remaining resources will grow increasingly difficult and expensive with time, which means recycling of old electronics more efficiently is the only sustainable option in the long run. Same goes for plastics: we currently dump billions of dollars worth of plastic to dumps and the oceans but as the cost of oil keeps rising and plastics become more expensive, we should start to see the market turn towards a greener economy not because they care about the environment but because picking floating plastic out of the sea and reprocessing it will at one point (hopefully soon) become more cost-efficient than making new plastics out of a perishing resource.
Do you not think the other agencies don't have access to such tools and information already? Exploits are sold and distributed in the darkweb on a daily basis, you can even these days buy malware as a service. It's a highly advanced, highly lucrative industry with professionals at work on all sides. And not all the players are state actors, plenty of them have commercial interests in mind and these people don't care who's buying.
Now, someone else said it well in a recent story about WannaCry: the lesson of this story is not just 'guard your weapons better' but also 'make better armor'
Putting these exploits out there allows for people to defend themselves against them. Following the mentality of 'well let's just not tell anyone of this exploit we found and no $BAD GUYS will ever find it" is arrogant and stupid because there are billions of dollars involved in the industry of seeking out and taking advantage of these exploits. There are millions of people across the planet right now working for criminal enterprises whose day-to-day job it is to seek these security holes out, with or without sites like WikiLeaks.
I personally think the whole tactic of not informing companies of serious security flaws in their products in the hopes of one day being able to use said exploits to target $BAD GUYS, is incredibly stupid and shortsighted because it simultaneously puts EVERYONE running these systems in the US/west at risk of being attacked by whoever else has found the same exploit. It's literally the same as finding out a vaccine for a deadly virus but trying to keep it a secret in case one day you decide to start full-scale biological war against $BAD GUYS; if your population is not vaccinated and is hit first by the enemy, you're fucked. The risk-reward ration is absurd.
But then again, I'm not american, so that must mean I'm the enemy, right?
Absolutely, 100 % agreed.
I do yes, and I'm not saying that should be done. I mean hell, we've got the longest land border in Europe with the Russians so I'm by no means a hawkish fan of a direct US-Russia conflict, far from it.
However my point is that the Russians increasing their influence over US administration is bad for the general security of the area because it gives them more space to maneuver. The people in the Baltics are genuinely suspicious over the willingness of Trump and co to actually help them (despite them being in NATO) if something shady does happen. And keep in mind, this being the Russians they won't make it seem like a direct invasion. Much like in Crimea, the doctrine is to make it seem like an internal conflict. The fear is that they will go to Trump and say: "Don't meddle in the internal affairs of Lithuania' and then be able to pretty much do what they want there, even though they won't obviously try to annex these regions in the same way as they did with Crimea.
Putin is trying to turn back the clock to the days of the iron curtain when eastern Europe was his backyard. He doesn't need - nor does he desire - a full-on conflict with the Americans to achieve this.
I personally think this is their main problem. Right now the focus of all industrialized nations should be on ditching the use of fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. Nuclear power is an effective way of producing energy to cover up for what cannot be produced by renewables. Right now as they're adamant on ditching nuclear as well, their CO2 emissions are rising and they're unlikely to meet their emission goals, because increased demand has to be met with increased used of natural gas, which, while better than coal for sure, is not as good emissions wise as nuclear.
Now don't get me wrong, I think nuclear is not a permanent solution so the idea of going fully renewable is good. I just think their implementation and schedule is slightly foolish. If they kept some of the nuclear and used that to provide the rest of what they need, they wouldn't have to use natural gas, or import as much energy from abroad.
The main reason I stopped voting for the Green party here in Finland was their illogical opposition to the use of nuclear energy as part of a strategy to cut down on emissions. Because the 'green' crowd has absurd fears of nuclear due to radiation they end up favoring policies which in the short-to-mid term drive emissions up, all in the name of protecting the environment.
The challenges with storing nuclear waste are much easier to solve than the challenges we're going to amass by continuing to release CO2 in current amounts, which is why I don't favor adopting the German approach even though we do have the same goal in mind.