That is not "hacking". That is called campaigning.
Well, yes, sure. But it should still be alarming to you that foreign powers are 'campaigning' - rather successfully it seems - for one side. You can already see the effects as the Trump administration seems to want to do everything to divert attention and discussions from the Russians. The Russians helped them bring Hillary down with the hacks, but that also means that they probably have the means to bring Trump.
I'm not American, I'm a Finn, and as such I'm acutely aware of the Russian mentality of indirect control. During the cold war we were not a Soviet satellite exactly, but as the threat of soviet invasion was quite real, there was widespread self-censorship. Fearing the reaction of the Soviet leadership, both politicians and the media avoided in public saying anything that could be deemed too critical in Moscow and be used to justify either disrupting trade (of which we did a lot with them) or military action. This was so characteristic of Finnish politics during the cold war that the term is now named after us: finlandization.
As I look at the way the white house behaves currently, it does resemble this to an extent: while there's obviously no need for the US to fear direct Russian invasion so the media can still freely discuss about these issues, there's been a noted change in tone towards Russia already. The 'alternative media' seems to be pushing a narrative according to which this whole investigation is in fact due to 'the mainstream media' disliking Russia purely because Hillary/dems are against Russia and want to drive a wedge between US-Russian relations, I was watching a video yesterday about the joking comment Lavrov made when asked about the firing of Comey (he said: "He was fired? You're kidding?!" barely containing his laughter) and one of the top comments on the video was; "CNN won't be happy until we nuke Russia or they nuke us." Think about what this implies: it implies that by reporting on these events, the media is guilty of provoking the Russians. It implies that Lavrov and the Russians' motives/actions should never be questioned because the mere act of questioning jeopardizes peace and stability and puts you in risk of war. The Trump-base has been effectively sold the idea that this whole deal is in fact not the fault of Russians seeking political influence over the US leadership, but a conspiracy to tarnish the good and friendly, peace-loving Russians,
Think if this has happened in the Bush or Obama eras; how different would the reaction of republicans have been if Obama was under investigation by the FBI over ties to Russia (or any other country) and he'd have sacked the director? You think they'd have been as calm about it as they're now? This is exactly what the Russians are looking for with this trick: they don't care about how they're perceived, they don't care that you guys bombed an airstrip (and warned them in advance), it's trivial for them. They care about positioning themselves in such a way so that the ruling party cannot act unilaterally on any issue important to Moscow without considering first whether or not the Russians will retaliate by leaking evidence (real or fabricated) about their possible collaboration with the administration and hence bringing about significant political damage. Furthermore this allows them to disrupt US domestic politics: the more infighting, confusion and paranoia there exists in Washington over whose side everyone is on and who can be trusted, the better for them, In the end they probably won't bother to even try and 'save' Trump if he's impeached, in fact they may do the opposite and help throw him under the bus, because they can then amp up the above mentioned rhetoric and convince Trump's base that he's been a victim of a massive conspiracy by the establishment and 'mainstream media' and further increase chaos and division in american politics. The more divided a country is int
Quantum mechanics fails because it defies causality creating paradoxes they ignore. Ignoring basic conflicts in reasoning to support a theory make QM a religion not a science.
The fuck?
You are aware quantum physics involves actual tests that can - and have been performed . Quantum electro-dynamics produces results that are so accurate they have lead many to call it the most precisely tested theory in the history of science
the precision of the measurements in QED is more impressive. Experimental tests of relativity measure tiny shifts, but to only a few decimal places. Experimental tests of QED measure small shifts, but to an absurd number of decimal places. The most impressive of these is the “anomalous magnetic moment of the electron,” expressed is terms of a number g whose best measured value is:
g/2 = 1.001 159 652 180 73 (28)
Depending on how you want to count it, that’s either 11 or 14 digits of precision (the value you would expect without QED is exactly 1, so in some sense, the shift really starts with the first non-zero decimal place), which is just incredible. And QED correctly predicts all those decimal places (at least to within the measurement uncertainty, given by the two digits in parentheses at the end of that).
'Causality' is not ignored, it's just a matter of fact that observable evidence from quantum physics demonstrates that there are in fact acausal events on the quantum scale. Just because you - and most people - don't understand the physics involved using common sense does not mean the theory fails.
But they all dwarf compared to the Dutch East-India Company (VOC), 1602-1800, the first publicly traded company in the world, which had a market cap of over SEVEN TRILLION inflation-adjusted dollars at its peak.
This is correct but it's good to remember that these colonial megacorps were essentially quasi-nations which had their own armies and in the case of VOC even the power to administer capital punishment, so while they're the first publicly traded companies they're also not exactly comparable in their power to the megacorps of today.
While the ratings are high, apparently some people want it canceled. Something about it bringing the whole network down.
"I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment." -Steve Bannon
It's been some time since Lenin has been brought up in the west as an exemplary leader but it has happened not too long ago: "Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight." -Joseph Goebbels
Goebbels and his ilk also had great ratings for a while but I've seen that movie and I'd like to avoid a remake, they tend to be even worse than the originals.
There is a "magical" (read: effective) fix which absolutely no one is talking about instituting: tariffs on goods made with slave labor
Well, yes and no. Done correctly tariffs may bring some manufacturing back, but the jobs are mostly gone in any case because if it's more economic to manufacture something in the west, then it always means you're going to favor highly automated production.
Automation and outsourcing (to africa in fact) are already gaining ground in China as well because even at pay grades that are a fraction of that in the west, once the volume of production is high enough, investing in automation is often still cost effective.
Put another way: even if we imagine a situation in which the cost of labor would be equal globally this issue would still be there because the so called 'slave labor' is just a cheap/worse form of automation.
Problem is, it's pretty hard to win votes when you tell ol' Jim-Bob that his skills are totally worthless in the economy of the future.
This is true, however the added problem is that the alternative is lying to these people.
This is the underlying issue with right-wing populism: it's easy to score points and votes by telling people that somehow high-paying manufacturing jos are going to come back and everything is going to be okay but it doesn't make it any more true. However low-skilled/uneducated workers who're most affected by this also often lack the education to understand why this is so, making them the easiest segment of the population to deceive into voting against their own interests.
This is difficult to oppose bevause doing so means talking about realities of the global economy and that makes you an easy target for 'globalist elite' -type of attacks. There's an ongoing attempt in narrative across the entire west according to which there's one side fighting for domestic jobs and the other side is taking them away. Both ends of the left-right --spectrum have their own varieties of this narrative:
The left is making the point that in the name of free trade the right cares about nothing else than maximizing profits and is thus helping companies take jobs away via trade-agreements and so on. The right is making the argument that the jobs are going because of high-taxation and leftist policies and to remain comptetitive the tax burden has to be cut so companies will bring jobs back.
The thing to realize is both of these arguments are missing the point: the jobs are not going to come back for the simple reason that the standard of living in the west has risen so high that unskilled manufacturing labor is massively expensive (and hence, inefficient) in the west compared to outsourcing and automation. The people who think that there's some magical fix with which american or european workers will suddenly become cost-efficient compared to someone in China making less than 10 dollars a day, or an automated production line with an even lower cost, are deluded.
The problem is jobs and employment have been at the core of politics and political debates for so long neither side can fess up and say we need to start to consider the rather unavoidable fact that full-employment in the 21st century does not seem like a reachable goal and we need to start talking about options to deal with that. But this inevitably means income-distribution policies like basic income, which if mentioned in the american landscape will brand you a communist and an 'enemy of free enterprise". This despite the fact that the current development of increasing automation and decreasing need for labor is itself a direct result of free enterprises and the market doing what the market does: favoring efficiency and cutting production costs.
So there exists this negative feedback-loop in which both sides are continuing to talk about jobs and bringing back jobs because that's the mantra that they know will appeal to the voters most negatively affected by current ongoing trends but that doesn't mean the proposed solutions are actually going to work, and thus the politicians and the voters in tandem keep digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole. Honest discussion is needed about the future modern automation means for us as a species. Currently the situation reminds me of a schizophrenic who at the same time wants cheap and powerful electronics and consumer goods and at the same time wants to be paid a lot for manufacturing said products. In other words our desires as consumers (cheap commodities and high pay) are in direct conflict with the current technological development that's pretty much unstoppable,
We've created the economy to answer to our material needs and desires as efficiently as possible, and now that that efficiency means taking ourselves off the production line and letting machines do most of the work we recoil, because production is valued so much t
The people owning the companies can trade *with each other* and completely forgo this dance of money being taken from them, handed out to the beggars, who then pretend they have purchasing power because they have something their collective government stole for them.
Except they can't because forgoing the consumers takes away the vast majority of demand for their products. I mean, millionaires and billionaires sure do drink Coke, but without the consumer class there's no way coke's going to be able to continue selling the amounts it currently is. Same for all other everyday commodities. Demand matters, and the amount of demand is directly affected by the disposable income of consumers.
They don't need to, they need to work in their niche, supplying people on their social strata with the solutions those people need.
My point is that the vast amount of trade is done between consumers and multinational megacorps. Small retailelers reprsent a shrinking share of trade, so the idea that there's somehow enough demand for everyone made unemployed by automation to start thriving small companies is not realistic. What do you suggest all these people start selling that cannot be already acquired more cheaply from a larger manufacturer?
If the prices are so low that there is no way to make them any lower, how do you expect to tax anybody based on any profits from such prices, where are those 'profits'?
The point is that, as you yourself just admitted, even if the prices can be made lower, it's near impossible they can be made lower by small companies with very limited capital. I mean in order to compete with highly automated manufacturing you need to setup equally automated factories. This can be done, but as it often requires investments of hundreds of thousands or millions up-front,. it's not like someone who's been fired from a data entry or some other menial task due to automation can just setup their own soft drink factory and start competing with Coke and Pepsi.
But that large manyfacturers still ste their prices to be proftable, which means they can still be taxed. The whole point of this is that currently the price of a product involves a significant chunk of labor costs, and a smaller portion of taxes on top. As automation removes jobs and hence drives labor costs dowen, the tax can be increased without the market price of the good changing at all.
o just as a crude example, envision a product manufactured now, with the following cost-structure
Raw materials: 15 % Manufacturing and storafe (including labor): 50 % Marketing: 15 % Taxes: 20 %
If this manufacturing process is completely automated the labor costs drop, how much depends on the type of product but the point is, if manufacturing costs drop say 20 % due to labor costs disappearing, you can increase taxes by anywhere up to that amount without the total price of the product changing.
The real money is created by work, so it is the business that creates money, not consumers. Consumers can only have money in their pockets as long as they are *also* producers.
Here's where you're wrong. As I said: in mid-to-long term thanks to increasing automation and advancing AI pretty much everyone will eventually be outperformed by machines. There is no job imaginable which a human level AI cannot handle more effeciently than people, after all that's the vbery reason these machines and programs are being constantly developed. Once this situation is reached, we'll produce everything more effeciently with machinery, at which point exactly no-one in advanced economies as an individual is producing anything.
Plenty of consumers in advanced economies already gain income without being producers in income-transfers because advanced economies recognize that letting unemployed people starve to death is not sensible or good for anyone. What's going to happen as I've b
This is enough that they can identify what ads to show you to influence your opinion (Candidate X strongly supports issue Y), but more importantly they can share this info with canvassers who can target the undecided votes in a constituency and knock on their doors and say 'have you thought about [issue that we know is your number one priority], are you aware that our candidate believes [exactly what you believe]?
Yup. And this isn't even the worst of it, they can also do the opposite and create targeted attack ads. "Did you know the other candidate is doing [thing that you're strongly opposed to]?" And it doesn't even need to be true because these can be masked by creating blogs on 'alternative media' and conspiracy sites with no official link to the campaign. In other words. this sort of targeting allows targeted deception of the voterbase with little to no actual consequences.
The French government doesn’t collect statistics by religion, so it is impossible to say what the precise fertility rates among different religious groups in France are.
But no country on earth has such a high fertility rate, and in Algeria and Morocco, the two nations which send the largest numbers of Muslim immigrants to France, the fertility rate is 2.38, according to the UN’s 2008 figures. - -
"In the Netherlands, 50% of all newborns are Muslim."
As of 2004, Muslims comprised about 5.8% of the population of the Netherlands. In order for this small percentage of the population to account for “50% of all newborns,” Muslim women in the Netherlands would have to be giving birth, on average, to about 14 to 16 times as many babies each as non-Muslim women. - -
"Currently in Belgium, 25% of the population and 50% of all newborns are Muslim."
Muslims are the second-largest religious group in Belgium, but they still only account for about 4%-5% of the population. And, as noted above, for that small a segment of the population to be accounting for “50% of all newborns” in the country, Muslim women would have to be giving birth to incredibly large numbers of children each. - -
One fact that gets lost among distractions is that the birthrates of Muslim women in Europe — and around the world — have been falling significantly for some time. [S]harp reductions in fertility among Muslim immigrants reflect important cultural shifts, which include universal female education, rising living standards, the inculcation of local mores, and widespread availability of contraception. Broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations.
The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon. Most analysts have focused on the remarkably high proportion of people under age 25 in the Arab countries, which has inspired some crude forecasts about what this implies for the future. Yet recent UN data suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply.
The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies Immigrant mothers account for part of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly, many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years.
There are valid concerns with regards to immigration and integration of immigrants from everywhere (including eastern Europe) but this assumption that somehow the muslims will 'outbreed' other Europeans is statistically entirely unfounded and based on numbers that the far.right blogosphere has pulled out of their ass.
Care to share your photos of irrigated fruit, vegetable, and grain crops stretching off to the horizon in Finland's fertile Central Valley?
I never claimed we have such. Agriculture here uses a lot less water than in most countries because we don't need irrigation nearly at all thanks to the amount of rainfall. Industry is the heaviest consumer of water.
Of course climate effects consumption, which is why the US food production takes so much more water, understandably. We also import more food than the US, and of the total water footprint of Finns, about 47 % is 'hidden' abroad. How much that number is for the US I'm not sure, but probably smaller.
My whole point was just that the simplification of "more water available equals more water used" is not true, because other factors, especially climate, effect the need for water a lot.
Also, countries that have more water use more water.
Not always so. The UAE consumption is about 3 times what it is here in Finland and we've got roughly 733 times the amount of renewable water resources than UAE thanks to a high amount of freshwater lakes and rainfall. The population sizes are also roughly the same (5,5 million here here, 5,8 in the UAE).
Adjusted for population size we've also got over double the renewable water resources compared to the USA, yet we use about 1/5th of what the Americans use.
Any time someone is proclaiming doom now I look for the agenda behind it - and sadly these days it is always there.
Any and all statements made have an agenda. What you just did is take a single anecdote about this story, namely that the permafrost layer is not constant (which no-one anywhere has ever claimed to begin with), and used that to arrive to the unfounded conclusion that there cannot possibly be a problem with the observed thawing of the permafrost layers across the arctic regions:
The study published in Nature Climate Change and led by Northern Arizona University assistant research professor, Christina Schädel, analysed 25 Arctic soil incubation studies and discovered that the majority of that carbon emitted was in the form of carbon dioxide even in the low oxygen conditions, with only five per cent of the total anaerobic products being methane.
This means that even though methane packs 34 times the climate warming punch of carbon dioxide, methane fluxes were not high enough to compensate for the smaller total quantity of carbon released under low oxygen conditions in wet soils.
Dr Hartley said: "In different boreal and arctic ecosystems, permafrost thaw can expose previously-frozen organic matter to very different soil conditions. The results of our study indicate that where the soils remain dry there is much greater potential for large amounts of carbon to be released to the atmosphere and for there to a positive feedback to climate change."
Scientists in the international Permafrost Carbon Network that Schädel co-leads with Northern Arizona University professor of ecosystem ecology, Ted Schuur, provided much of the data.
Dr Schädel said: "Our results show that increasing temperatures have a large effect on carbon release from permafrost but that changes in soil moisture conditions have an even greater effect," says Schädel. "We conclude that the permafrost carbon feedback will be stronger when a larger percentage of the permafrost zone undergoes thaw in a dry and oxygen-rich environment."
As the permafrost thaws, microbes wake up and begin digesting the newly available remains of ancient plants and animals stored as carbon in the soil. This digestion produces either carbon dioxide or methane, depending on soil conditions. Scientists want to understand the ratio of carbon dioxide to methane gas released by this process because it affects the strength of the permafrost carbon feedback loop: greenhouse gases released due to thawing permafrost cause temperatures to rise, leading to even more thawing and carbon release. Furthermore, the Arctic permafrost is like a vast underground storage tank of carbon, holding almost twice as much as the atmosphere. At that scale, small changes in how the carbon is released will have big effects.
Yeah, those infernal scientists with their nasty 'agenda' of trying to understand the ecosystem better so we can actually do something about the issue. Surely all the data must be irrelevant, after all it'd be unfathomable to think that permafrost can still form in some places whilst its total amount is going down, and this entire process could still have vast negative feedback-loop effects because its self-accelerating. Everyone knows after all that either it's warming universally everywhere making frozen reindeer impossible, or it's not warming at all! Checkmate.
I was convinced of this based on all the data and research, but your astute observation that 75 years ago a patch in Siberia was cold enough to freeze (gasp!) has totally changed my mind on peer-reviewed research. The clever scientists thought they could get away by making silly claims about the climate being a complex system which can have extreme temperatures on both ends of the scale even as the total energy of the system is going up, but NO MORE thanks to brave warriors like you!
The people who own productive capacity have no reason to provide their productive output to people who produce nothing, that is not an exchange,
Yes, yes they do. Currently around 90 % of people gain their income primarily as wages. These people already gain the bulk of their money from corporations and the spend that money on products produced by corporations. The bulk of the money in circulation in the consumer economy alrteady moves from pockets of one major company to another via the hands of consumers.
If the 90 % of people are suddenly made obsolote as factors of production and they have no other source of income, the consumer economy as we know it will collapse. The companies will lose their ability to play the game they're currently paying if people have no money to spend.
If I run a company selling a product, I do not care if the money someone is using to buy said product comes from wages or income transfers. Put simply: if you abolish wages entirely and replace them with an equal amount of income transfers, the game is still as valid as it is now. That is, there is still just as much profit to be made for said companies as there is now, even if the money is moved from the corporations to the consumers in taxes instead of wages.
The alternative is that large consumer companies (think coke, walmart, mcdonald's, nike, adidas, car companies, etc.) ie. the bulk of the entire economy will collapse if there is no money for consumers to spend, which will make the situation worse for even the people that own the productive capacity, because owning vast automated factories meant to produce consumer goods does not benefit you one bit if 99,99 % of all potential consumers have starved to death.
Automation by its very nature means if we want to maintain economies in their current fashion we cannot continue to measure the worth of an individual in terms of productivity, because eventually all of us (including the very top managers in charge of overseeing production) will be outperformed by machines, and in that stage no-one should be paid anything if we keep using this metric.
The alternative is to remove the taxes and laws that were set up before automation was widespread. These taxes and laws now prevent people from taking care of themselves by starting their own businesses
This is not a realistic alternative. The idea that the 90 % (or more) of people who will be made unemployed by automation will just all start companies of their own and sustain themselves that way is flawed in mulltiple ways: first, without income they have no capital to start companies. Second, the vast majority of people do not posses the skills to run a company that's capable of efficiently competing with large corporations that can take advantage of sheer scale of production (and hence, automation) to keep prices low. Thirdly, even if all of them started companies, without income from labor, these companies still will not have any customers and hence no revenue. Good luck trying to start your own company with next to no money and trying to compete with multinational manufacturers. And as for the service side: it doesn't help if I start a bar if there are no people with money to spend in said bar.
The logistical chains involved in current global markets simply do not support the idea that we can suddenly transform our economies to such that 1 % are running multibillion dollar global megacorps, while the rest 99 % are all somehow running small corporations and no-one (or nearly no-one) is paid in wages.
Automation is a meme the media have promoted to undermine efforts against outsourcing.
No, automation is a real observable phenomenon that's actually occurring, more and more so because it's often even more cost efficient than outsourcing. If outsourcing was not happening at all, automation would proceed at an even faster rate, because the benefit of replacing N highly paid western workers with a machine is far greater than replacing N workers of the same skill set working in some less developed country with a fraction of the pay.
You think industrial companies have just been sitting around for the last 50 years and only just discovered the concept or something?
No-one's been claiming that. Of course the concept of automation is not new, but the way automation can and is implemented has changed entirely with modern computers and data-driven manufacturing and production optimization.
A lot of industry has ALREADY been automated. Low hanging fruit is well plucked since the time of the power loom.
A lot has been automated already, but it's nothing compared to what can and will be automated. The definition of 'low-hanging fruit' has also changed: data entry jobs were not too long ago considered impossible to automate. That's changed completely, and pretty soon the masses of people whose primary day-to-day work has been copying information from one place to another will be made obsolete by machines.
Go to any mid-sized SME or hell, any large enterprise and tell me how many of those jobs can be automated? Go to a small business. Which are automatable there?
How many jobs can be automated now != how many jobs can be automated within the next couple of decades. If you told people in 1990 that in 30 or so years self-driving cars will start to emerge and threaten the jobs of drivers you'd have been laughed at by most. Similarly if you told them that call-.center jobs are being replaced by automated speech recognition and synthesis bots. Both are already happening, and are only going to keep going.
Oh. A $500,000 machine with repayments and $40,000 a year maintainance retainers that flips burgers 99% of the time except when it breaks down or junks up or needs cleaning or the burgers start tasting like shit. Yeah. Automation is a meme. We're all supposed to roll over while the 1% continue grinding us into prole paste.
The up-front and maintenance cost by themselves are irrelevant. What mattes is how much performance you can get from the system per hour compared to humans. If said machine replaces 10 people working around the clock at 8 dollars an hour it will have paid for its acquisition in less than a year. After that at 40 000 a year it's massively cheaper than having all those people there.
You seem to be under the deluded impression that humans can somehow compere with increasingly efficient automation, even though said automation is the result of millions of hours of human engineering and designing with the specific intent of making computers that are more cost-efficient than humans at performing tasks..
It's not a meme, it's an undeniable reality of modern day life, and it doesn't have to mean the '1 % will grind us to paste', that only happens if we don't implement political changes that address the effects of increasing automation and decreasing employment, namely systems like basic income, changing taxation so that the 1 % making billions on their automated manufacturing will provide the rest of the society with money to be able to live and buy their products. Without consumers with purchasing power the consumer economy collapses which is not good for anyone, including the ultra-rich.
I'm sick of the media.
No, you seem more like someone sick from cognitive dissonance: on one hand recognizing the fact that increasing automat
but we tax personal income, which will go away, so some replacement tax has to pay for it.
Indeed. The core problem brought by increasing automation (which is inevitable) is that the marginal utility of labor decreases.
However taxing 'robots' to solve this seems unwise. Robotics and machine learning powered automation increase efficiency, allowing higher productivity, As the companies' labor cost decline as a result, their profits can be taxed more without the overall tax burden on them increasing (as you're essentially replacing diminishing income taxes with other forms of tax) to fund basic income (or other equivalent systems) to maintain a standard of living for those individuals whose skillset has become obsolete due to automation and for whom retraining is not possible.
Pretty much all industrialized economies use progressive taxation on income. With income taxation losing ground as automation advances, I think a more apt direction would be to consider introducing some form of progression to corporate taxes. Why should say, a multinational, multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company with profit margins above 20 % or even above 50 % pay the same rate of tax as a small family business?
Implementation of such systems in the current situation is not possible because of the existence of tax-havens, and the relative ease with which larger companies can relocate their books to different nations, but this question is one which will have to be answered in the coming decades: as it looks more and more likely that the global business will be dominated by larger players taking advantage of their ability to implement automation at a large scale, we will have to come together as a planer to figure out how these entities are taxed, or we're faced with a situation in which the hoarding of money to the top 0,1 % will keep on going while the income from labor plummets and large segments of previously well-off people are plunged into poverty without any ability to compete with said large players due to lack of capital.
This is often waived off as a 'leftist' fear, but we're talking about a core capitalist principle, namely the wage share. The wage share fluctuates, but currently it looks to be trending downwards, as an ever increasing amount of profits goes to capital and re-investment, while labor costs are going down. Note that this does not mean the share of wages will ever actually reach zero, but that doesn't eliminate the problem; if nothing is done to change taxation to compensate for the plummeting wage share, consumption will collapse as the majority of the consumer base - currently gaining their income mostly in wages - will be without any income and hence without any purchasing power and we're left in a situation in which companies have immense and efficient production capabilities but no-one to buy their products, which is a highly undesirable scenario regardless of whether one's on the left or on the right.
Yes, but not for the same reasons. What the net is allowing companies to do is charge different prices for the same exact product based on their assessment of the consumer. Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
What dipshit anti-capitalist doesn't realize is that there are websites and tools that consumers can use to maximize they buying power to get the best price.
"Sir, if you don't like to pay 50 euros for that loaf of bread, I'd like you to know there are tools you can use to look for cheaper deals on bread. Just make sure to clean your cookies and log out of any social networks and put a bag over your head to avoid facial recognition, and remember to enter the store in between 10 and 11:30 and you'll get the maximal discount. But don't be late, the rush hour of bread begins at 11:35 and prices double, or triple for those with a higher education."
Would you be fine with companies treating consumers like this in the physical world? That instead of a price tag on a product conveying the price information openly to everyone the tags would be empty codes that you scan and then get the price, 'tailored just for you' on your phone?
The problem is most people don't realize that this is even happening so many people think the price they're getting from say, some flight booking site is the same as it is for everyone else. They've no idea that the price may well be affected by their past searches on the site and other online behavior.
Currently on products and services using this kind of pricing there's no way for a consumer to know the true 'base price' of the product they're buying. This means that a lot of the price information is completely lost, meaning that the price mechanism no longer functions as it used to. Discount information is always shown to the customer obviously, but under these systems it's possible that even the supposed 'discounted price' you're getting is higher than what the guy next door is paying without any discounts if the price before discount for you was set higher based on your identifier information.
Price search services themselves are not a magical solution to this because they do not remove this issue. You still have no way of knowing whether or not the 'cheapest price' given to you by a search engine is the same as the 'cheapest price' given to someone else using a different operating system or a device and who hasn't queried the same product a couple times before.
I'm no anti-capitalist, but in the name of a free and fair trade I do believe consumers are entitled to equal treatment and transparency when it comes to prices. I'm not saying it's wrong for a company to charge you less/more because of X, Y or Z. I'm saying if that is done you should have access to those modifiers and see why they're charging that extra or giving that discount for you. It's likely true that many of the sites would lose business doing this, but that in and of itself should highlight you the problem at hand: keeping the modifiers secret currently only benefits the sellers and weakens the position of the consumer on the market by hiding information.
eventually they're just going to say "fuck it, I have to survive somehow"....and start just taking all those pretty coins that robotics have allowed you to save... This is just a basic fact of life, you can't make people poor and expect them to just sit there and take it.
There's nothing about increasing efficiency and cutting humans out as factors of påroduction that inherently means people will be plunged into poverty. Businesses need customers to operate. Imagine the day in not too distant future where close to 100 % of all menial jobs such as warehousing are automated. This will bring immense savings and increased efficiency for large companies like Amazon, but if all the millions of people made unemployed by these innovations have no source of income allowing them to buy items from Amazon, then they may very well end up losing money.
The structure of the consumer economy is such that companies compete for the money that consumers have. They really don't care where that money originates from: salary, dividends, social security, doesn't matter. If you have disposable income companies are going to try to get you to give some of it to them. Currently the majority of people gain their money as income from a job, so work is the mechanism by which money is moved from the top (=the wealthiest) to the bottom, so these people can then move it back into the top by buying goods and services. What's going to happen as automation takes more and more jobs away from people if the ownership class doesn't want consumer demand to come crashing down and start hurting their bottom lines is that as the labor costs will come down, tax-costs will increase as systems like basic income are developed and implemented. Right now many see this as an impossible because it seems like this would require hardcore capitalists embracing some socialist principles. But what people fail to see is that these income redistribution principles can (and will) be embraced for entirely selfish, profit-motivated reasons. Unless the loss of income caused by automation is offset with new sources of income the consumer economy will collapse, which in turn will drag the whole economy down.
That is, the wealthy class will eventually have to look at the situation and think which is easier: letting the masses dwell in poverty and watch their profits go down as people resort to crime for their survival as you put it, or start giving them income that will not only help them survive but keep competition and demand alive.
There's a lot more profit to be made in the latter scenario.
The true addiction to cure for many, is an addiction to narcissism. The kind that social media has created. Perhaps it's time to re-think the religion of social media, and realize just how damaging it can be.
Social media has not created it. Hollywood created it long time ago by starting celebrity-worship and reality formats long before social media. Social media is responding to this by saying "you're all performers now, you can all become as popular as the celebrity you like if you just post enough".
It should not be a surprise to anyone that when an industry with billions to spend on marketing and focus-group testing has been intentionally creating fandom cults for decades that the natural evolution of this behavior is kids wanting to mimic the success of these cults by leading one themselves. They're not narcissists, they're mimicking behavior that the entire media is telling them is desirable, because with fame comes adoration and money and happiness.
You can't treat this by treating the symptom (social media), you need to treat the root cause, but that's easier said than done because the entire culture of entertainment needs to be changed to something less worshiping of popularity based on mainly external traits instead of intellect or ideas.
You're right, but there are many conditions for which the brain is the problem. I've have cerebral palsy (more specifically spastic diplegia) as a result of a brain injury caused by oxygen loss during a premature birth. Through various surgeries addressing orthopedic and muscular issues I've reached a point wherein I can now even stand still without any external support. Walking is possible with canes or as little support as one finger to hold onto with both of my hands. The core of the issue is that the part of the motor cortex that processes incoming information from the balance organs and muscles about the posture of the body is partially dead, so the brain is unable to regulate balance accordingly. Outside stem cells or other such theoretical ways of regenerating nerve tissue, implants are the only thing that may one day solve this.
The biggest problems are; Would the government hack it if they could, yes. Would Corporation hack it if they could, yes.
A hypothetical implant for something like my case of CP would be just a chip that sits on top of the brain and does the calculations that the dead part of the cortex would normally do. It doesn't have to be connected to the external world, and should I ever get to see a day where such an implant is a reality, I certainly would not accept one that was. I'm 26 now and realistically speaking I don't expect to see this tech becoming widespread during my lifetime, nor will I volunteer as a test subject because I've reached a point wherein I can live by myself, work and drive a vehicle, so my quality of life is pretty much as close to normal as is currently feasible for people with CP, thanks in large part to the medical expertise of the university of Helsinki hospital, so my disability does not bother me nearly enough for me to desire to try experimental high risk treatments. But having seen the already very promising results that for example deep brain stimulation has had for people with Parkinson's etc I do think this kind of solution is far more feasible after some more decades of advances than most people currently think.
Skepticism is not such a bad thing to have when faced with neither research nor journalism with an objective, critical eye.
You're entirely correct. However, in general the reasons for the cars being safer (reaction times, better situational awareness) are such that they can - and must - be objectively demonstrated before mass market release. That is, we're not going to take the companies' word for it, obviously the cars need to be tested by outside/3rd parties before being put on sale.
My general point is that there's a whole host of reasons why computerized monitoring of traffic is safer than relying on a single human. I don't really see a logical reason for why a self-driving vehicles wouldn't be less-error prone simply due to the fact that human drivers make a lot of errors as is. That is, the bar for being a better driver than even an above-average driver is not nearly as high as people think.
This is a pipe dream shared by the techno dreamer amonsgst us, much like air cars or robot servants.
No, no it isn't. The sensory tech to make cars self-driving is already there. Google has millions of miles of successful testing under their belt. I myself have been riding in a Tesla going 120 km/h while the driver was doing nothing. Now Tesla's solution is not fully automatic and requires you to still pay attention to the road, but this if anything should point out to you that we're much, much closer to self-driving cars than most people think. There are issues to solve still before the tech is ready to hit the market widely, but these obstacles (handing of weather conditions etc) are things which can be solved with existing technology and innovations.
I don't know anyone who has a self driving car or who has any intention of getting a self driving car.
I will get one as soon as the price is right. I'd much rather climb onto the car, tell it to get me to wherever, and sleep/eat/do work/whatever else with my time rather than drive,
Most people would never trust their lives to this kind of technology.
All existing data from ongoing self-driving car pilots, including Google's, point to self-driving cars being vastly safer than human piloted vehicles. The cars have technology allowing them to have a far superior understanding of their surroundings than any driver ever can. Google is using radar. The car can see and know the location of vehicles, pedestrians and obstacles far outside the reach of a humans vision. The car is able to do real-time physics calculation and actually figure out the smartest way to for example evade stuff. Humans take about a second to a second and a half to even react to a sudden emergency. In that second the computer has not only detected the obstacle/danger but processed through the different alternatives it has (ie. it has figured out whether or not to do perform an emergency braking maneuver or whether it's better to evade, and in which direction) to respond to that and has started to take action far before human reaction times even kick in. Literally in the time it takes for the human brain to go "OH FUCK A MOOSE!", the self-driving car has already mapped a solution and began implementation taking into factor numerous things (brake-force per tire, road surface conditions, etc) that the human never could. And if a crash is unavoidable, the car can calculate a way/place to crash the in a way that does minimal damage to the passengers and start dialing emergency services immediately, even rely to them crash data so that the dispatched emergency staff will know what kind of injuries to prepare to treat.
Computers are simply better suited to handle the chaotic nature of traffic. It can track and predict the movement of all of those vehicles and pedestrians simultaneously. This video showcases that well at around the 12 minute mark: the cars are all stopped at a crossing, and there's a cyclist that's about to blow through a red-light. The human-operated vehicles all miss this and start to move forwards on a green light as the cyclist hits the crosswalk, nearly hitting him. The self-driving car has known (based on speed and trajectory of the cyclist from LADAR) that the cyclist is going to blow through the red light before he even does so and doesn't start to move until the cyclist has crossed the road safely.
Couple that with the fact that the cars can communicate with each other. A car that spots something like a tree or an accident on road can relay this info to other vehicles which can take this into consideration immediately and re-route far ahead of time.
People need to get their heads out of their sci-fi asses and understand that there are enormous legal and regulatory hurdles here.
It is an invasion. They will never go. It is an invasion. They will never go. Why the hell would they give up welfare, free phones, free homes, and immunity from prosecution for sex crimes?
Stop drinking the kool-aid. First of all it's not up to their choice. What OP was saying is that the way asylums work is that they're not eternal. People fleeing a war are given asylum until the war ends, after which it's revoked and they're returned to their country of origin. They're not given a choice in the matter. Secondly, immigrants do not have immunity from prosecution, and if you think so you haven't been looking at actual convictions.
There will be another genocide in Europe, and it will be conducted under the banner of diversity, and sanctioned through the implementation of political Islam.
C'mon. The amount of muslims in all european countries is so small they have next to no actual political influence to begin with, and the one's that have gone through to politics for example here in Finland have done so under mainstream parties like the Green party which obviously is not supporting political islam or sharia.
It's one thing to point out that there are legitimate issues with the handling of refugees and the asylum-process in general (the thing that incidents like this one highlight is that it may be necessary to detain the refugees whose asylum is rejected until they can be deported) but the claim that Europe faces some threat of becoming a caliphate is simply unfounded in reality and mindless fear-mongering, which the right keeps pumping out (with hefty help from Russian 'alternative facts' sources).
European political history is no stranger to fears of muslim invasion, which has been one of the long time boogiemen since the middle-ages, altering in the role of the 'imminent menace about to destroy the whole of europe' together with communism and occasionally the jews. It didn't happen back when the caliphate actually had vast standing armies, it's certainly not going to happen now.
Numerous, totally credible reports at Russia Today
Totally credible and Russia Today are not words that can really be fit into the same sentence.
this gas event was an unfortunate consequence of Assad using conventional weapons against an arms depot where the rebels had stockpiled significant quantities of the compound. These reports are definitely not propaganda.
Except that claim in itself is complete bullshit because Sarin/other chemical agents are not generaly speaking stored so that firing on them would release the chemical:
However, Jerry Smith, the operations chief of the UN team that supervised the surrender of Syria’s sarin stockpiles after more than 1,000 people were killed by the nerve agent in August 2013, said the components of the gas were almost always stored separately until they were about to be used.
“The Assad regime had two final precursors that would only be mixed just before use,” he said. “This scenario is that it was premade sarin in a store and, as a result of being hit, it has dispersed. This is plausible, but it requires a lot of things to align.”
What's mean by 'a lot of things lining up' is that not only would you you have to be hitting a premixed storage of Sarin which is not typically how it's stored, you'd also have to hit in in a very spesific way to disperse the gas. A direct hit will burn the gas, destroying the toxin.
So let's recap: one one side you have 'totally credible' reports from Russian and Syrian source which have a vested interest in not telling the truth if Assad is behind this saying that this happened by accident, and on the other hand you have chemical weapons experts that actually have knowledge of the Syrian chemicals weapons arsenal telling you that it's very unlikely based on their knowledge that Assad's explanation is plausible, And for some inexplicable reason you choose to trust Russians on this.
Your standards of evidence are truly low if all it takes is for RT to run a report saying 'nope, totally an accident assad would never lie to us;)' and go "yeah, seems legit."
Your claim that Saddam was the guy that held the entire middle east together is a fucking joke, right?
Saddam held iraq together. With despotism and an iron fist for sure, but he did keep it together. The removal of him and failure to provide Iraq with a functional government lead to the formation if Isis, which together, combined with factors you listed has made the current geopolitical situation as complicated and as bloody as it is.
No-one is saying that without Saddam's removal there'd be total peace in Syria/middle-east, but it should be pretty obvious that the way Iraq was handled has contributed to the situation in a major, major way.
the Arab spring, is a result of something older than any significant American interference in the region. The spring provides the manpower that enables our interference.
The US did not singlehandedly cause Arab spring obviously, but their geopolitics and interference in the region amplified the effects and not for the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes, sure. But it should still be alarming to you that foreign powers are 'campaigning' - rather successfully it seems - for one side. You can already see the effects as the Trump administration seems to want to do everything to divert attention and discussions from the Russians. The Russians helped them bring Hillary down with the hacks, but that also means that they probably have the means to bring Trump.
I'm not American, I'm a Finn, and as such I'm acutely aware of the Russian mentality of indirect control. During the cold war we were not a Soviet satellite exactly, but as the threat of soviet invasion was quite real, there was widespread self-censorship. Fearing the reaction of the Soviet leadership, both politicians and the media avoided in public saying anything that could be deemed too critical in Moscow and be used to justify either disrupting trade (of which we did a lot with them) or military action. This was so characteristic of Finnish politics during the cold war that the term is now named after us: finlandization.
As I look at the way the white house behaves currently, it does resemble this to an extent: while there's obviously no need for the US to fear direct Russian invasion so the media can still freely discuss about these issues, there's been a noted change in tone towards Russia already. The 'alternative media' seems to be pushing a narrative according to which this whole investigation is in fact due to 'the mainstream media' disliking Russia purely because Hillary/dems are against Russia and want to drive a wedge between US-Russian relations, I was watching a video yesterday about the joking comment Lavrov made when asked about the firing of Comey (he said: "He was fired? You're kidding?!" barely containing his laughter) and one of the top comments on the video was; "CNN won't be happy until we nuke Russia or they nuke us." Think about what this implies: it implies that by reporting on these events, the media is guilty of provoking the Russians. It implies that Lavrov and the Russians' motives/actions should never be questioned because the mere act of questioning jeopardizes peace and stability and puts you in risk of war. The Trump-base has been effectively sold the idea that this whole deal is in fact not the fault of Russians seeking political influence over the US leadership, but a conspiracy to tarnish the good and friendly, peace-loving Russians,
Think if this has happened in the Bush or Obama eras; how different would the reaction of republicans have been if Obama was under investigation by the FBI over ties to Russia (or any other country) and he'd have sacked the director? You think they'd have been as calm about it as they're now? This is exactly what the Russians are looking for with this trick: they don't care about how they're perceived, they don't care that you guys bombed an airstrip (and warned them in advance), it's trivial for them. They care about positioning themselves in such a way so that the ruling party cannot act unilaterally on any issue important to Moscow without considering first whether or not the Russians will retaliate by leaking evidence (real or fabricated) about their possible collaboration with the administration and hence bringing about significant political damage. Furthermore this allows them to disrupt US domestic politics: the more infighting, confusion and paranoia there exists in Washington over whose side everyone is on and who can be trusted, the better for them, In the end they probably won't bother to even try and 'save' Trump if he's impeached, in fact they may do the opposite and help throw him under the bus, because they can then amp up the above mentioned rhetoric and convince Trump's base that he's been a victim of a massive conspiracy by the establishment and 'mainstream media' and further increase chaos and division in american politics. The more divided a country is int
The fuck?
You are aware quantum physics involves actual tests that can - and have been performed . Quantum electro-dynamics produces results that are so accurate they have lead many to call it the most precisely tested theory in the history of science
'Causality' is not ignored, it's just a matter of fact that observable evidence from quantum physics demonstrates that there are in fact acausal events on the quantum scale. Just because you - and most people - don't understand the physics involved using common sense does not mean the theory fails.
This is correct but it's good to remember that these colonial megacorps were essentially quasi-nations which had their own armies and in the case of VOC even the power to administer capital punishment, so while they're the first publicly traded companies they're also not exactly comparable in their power to the megacorps of today.
"I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment." -Steve Bannon
It's been some time since Lenin has been brought up in the west as an exemplary leader but it has happened not too long ago: "Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight." -Joseph Goebbels
Goebbels and his ilk also had great ratings for a while but I've seen that movie and I'd like to avoid a remake, they tend to be even worse than the originals.
Well, yes and no. Done correctly tariffs may bring some manufacturing back, but the jobs are mostly gone in any case because if it's more economic to manufacture something in the west, then it always means you're going to favor highly automated production.
Automation and outsourcing (to africa in fact) are already gaining ground in China as well because even at pay grades that are a fraction of that in the west, once the volume of production is high enough, investing in automation is often still cost effective.
Put another way: even if we imagine a situation in which the cost of labor would be equal globally this issue would still be there because the so called 'slave labor' is just a cheap/worse form of automation.
This is true, however the added problem is that the alternative is lying to these people.
This is the underlying issue with right-wing populism: it's easy to score points and votes by telling people that somehow high-paying manufacturing jos are going to come back and everything is going to be okay but it doesn't make it any more true. However low-skilled/uneducated workers who're most affected by this also often lack the education to understand why this is so, making them the easiest segment of the population to deceive into voting against their own interests.
This is difficult to oppose bevause doing so means talking about realities of the global economy and that makes you an easy target for 'globalist elite' -type of attacks. There's an ongoing attempt in narrative across the entire west according to which there's one side fighting for domestic jobs and the other side is taking them away. Both ends of the left-right --spectrum have their own varieties of this narrative:
The left is making the point that in the name of free trade the right cares about nothing else than maximizing profits and is thus helping companies take jobs away via trade-agreements and so on.
The right is making the argument that the jobs are going because of high-taxation and leftist policies and to remain comptetitive the tax burden has to be cut so companies will bring jobs back.
The thing to realize is both of these arguments are missing the point: the jobs are not going to come back for the simple reason that the standard of living in the west has risen so high that unskilled manufacturing labor is massively expensive (and hence, inefficient) in the west compared to outsourcing and automation. The people who think that there's some magical fix with which american or european workers will suddenly become cost-efficient compared to someone in China making less than 10 dollars a day, or an automated production line with an even lower cost, are deluded.
The problem is jobs and employment have been at the core of politics and political debates for so long neither side can fess up and say we need to start to consider the rather unavoidable fact that full-employment in the 21st century does not seem like a reachable goal and we need to start talking about options to deal with that. But this inevitably means income-distribution policies like basic income, which if mentioned in the american landscape will brand you a communist and an 'enemy of free enterprise". This despite the fact that the current development of increasing automation and decreasing need for labor is itself a direct result of free enterprises and the market doing what the market does: favoring efficiency and cutting production costs.
So there exists this negative feedback-loop in which both sides are continuing to talk about jobs and bringing back jobs because that's the mantra that they know will appeal to the voters most negatively affected by current ongoing trends but that doesn't mean the proposed solutions are actually going to work, and thus the politicians and the voters in tandem keep digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole. Honest discussion is needed about the future modern automation means for us as a species. Currently the situation reminds me of a schizophrenic who at the same time wants cheap and powerful electronics and consumer goods and at the same time wants to be paid a lot for manufacturing said products. In other words our desires as consumers (cheap commodities and high pay) are in direct conflict with the current technological development that's pretty much unstoppable,
We've created the economy to answer to our material needs and desires as efficiently as possible, and now that that efficiency means taking ourselves off the production line and letting machines do most of the work we recoil, because production is valued so much t
Except they can't because forgoing the consumers takes away the vast majority of demand for their products. I mean, millionaires and billionaires sure do drink Coke, but without the consumer class there's no way coke's going to be able to continue selling the amounts it currently is. Same for all other everyday commodities. Demand matters, and the amount of demand is directly affected by the disposable income of consumers.
My point is that the vast amount of trade is done between consumers and multinational megacorps. Small retailelers reprsent a shrinking share of trade, so the idea that there's somehow enough demand for everyone made unemployed by automation to start thriving small companies is not realistic. What do you suggest all these people start selling that cannot be already acquired more cheaply from a larger manufacturer?
The point is that, as you yourself just admitted, even if the prices can be made lower, it's near impossible they can be made lower by small companies with very limited capital. I mean in order to compete with highly automated manufacturing you need to setup equally automated factories. This can be done, but as it often requires investments of hundreds of thousands or millions up-front,. it's not like someone who's been fired from a data entry or some other menial task due to automation can just setup their own soft drink factory and start competing with Coke and Pepsi.
But that large manyfacturers still ste their prices to be proftable, which means they can still be taxed. The whole point of this is that currently the price of a product involves a significant chunk of labor costs, and a smaller portion of taxes on top. As automation removes jobs and hence drives labor costs dowen, the tax can be increased without the market price of the good changing at all.
o just as a crude example, envision a product manufactured now, with the following cost-structure
Raw materials: 15 %
Manufacturing and storafe (including labor): 50 %
Marketing: 15 %
Taxes: 20 %
If this manufacturing process is completely automated the labor costs drop, how much depends on the type of product but the point is, if manufacturing costs drop say 20 % due to labor costs disappearing, you can increase taxes by anywhere up to that amount without the total price of the product changing.
Here's where you're wrong. As I said: in mid-to-long term thanks to increasing automation and advancing AI pretty much everyone will eventually be outperformed by machines. There is no job imaginable which a human level AI cannot handle more effeciently than people, after all that's the vbery reason these machines and programs are being constantly developed. Once this situation is reached, we'll produce everything more effeciently with machinery, at which point exactly no-one in advanced economies as an individual is producing anything.
Plenty of consumers in advanced economies already gain income without being producers in income-transfers because advanced economies recognize that letting unemployed people starve to death is not sensible or good for anyone. What's going to happen as I've b
Yup. And this isn't even the worst of it, they can also do the opposite and create targeted attack ads. "Did you know the other candidate is doing [thing that you're strongly opposed to]?" And it doesn't even need to be true because these can be masked by creating blogs on 'alternative media' and conspiracy sites with no official link to the campaign. In other words. this sort of targeting allows targeted deception of the voterbase with little to no actual consequences.
This argument is so unfounded in reality that it now has its own Snopes aricle detailing why it's BS, quoting a couple relevant parts:
There are valid concerns with regards to immigration and integration of immigrants from everywhere (including eastern Europe) but this assumption that somehow the muslims will 'outbreed' other Europeans is statistically entirely unfounded and based on numbers that the far.right blogosphere has pulled out of their ass.
I never claimed we have such. Agriculture here uses a lot less water than in most countries because we don't need irrigation nearly at all thanks to the amount of rainfall. Industry is the heaviest consumer of water.
Of course climate effects consumption, which is why the US food production takes so much more water, understandably. We also import more food than the US, and of the total water footprint of Finns, about 47 % is 'hidden' abroad. How much that number is for the US I'm not sure, but probably smaller.
My whole point was just that the simplification of "more water available equals more water used" is not true, because other factors, especially climate, effect the need for water a lot.
Not always so. The UAE consumption is about 3 times what it is here in Finland and we've got roughly 733 times the amount of renewable water resources than UAE thanks to a high amount of freshwater lakes and rainfall. The population sizes are also roughly the same (5,5 million here here, 5,8 in the UAE).
Adjusted for population size we've also got over double the renewable water resources compared to the USA, yet we use about 1/5th of what the Americans use.
I did not. it's an excellent post and I fully agree with it. It doesn't mean that the increasing thaw of permafrost is not an issue.
No, no it isn't, but apparently my attempt in sarcastic responding was.
Any and all statements made have an agenda. What you just did is take a single anecdote about this story, namely that the permafrost layer is not constant (which no-one anywhere has ever claimed to begin with), and used that to arrive to the unfounded conclusion that there cannot possibly be a problem with the observed thawing of the permafrost layers across the arctic regions:
Yeah, those infernal scientists with their nasty 'agenda' of trying to understand the ecosystem better so we can actually do something about the issue. Surely all the data must be irrelevant, after all it'd be unfathomable to think that permafrost can still form in some places whilst its total amount is going down, and this entire process could still have vast negative feedback-loop effects because its self-accelerating. Everyone knows after all that either it's warming universally everywhere making frozen reindeer impossible, or it's not warming at all! Checkmate.
I was convinced of this based on all the data and research, but your astute observation that 75 years ago a patch in Siberia was cold enough to freeze (gasp!) has totally changed my mind on peer-reviewed research. The clever scientists thought they could get away by making silly claims about the climate being a complex system which can have extreme temperatures on both ends of the scale even as the total energy of the system is going up, but NO MORE thanks to brave warriors like you!
This singul
Yes, yes they do. Currently around 90 % of people gain their income primarily as wages. These people already gain the bulk of their money from corporations and the spend that money on products produced by corporations. The bulk of the money in circulation in the consumer economy alrteady moves from pockets of one major company to another via the hands of consumers.
If the 90 % of people are suddenly made obsolote as factors of production and they have no other source of income, the consumer economy as we know it will collapse. The companies will lose their ability to play the game they're currently paying if people have no money to spend.
If I run a company selling a product, I do not care if the money someone is using to buy said product comes from wages or income transfers. Put simply: if you abolish wages entirely and replace them with an equal amount of income transfers, the game is still as valid as it is now. That is, there is still just as much profit to be made for said companies as there is now, even if the money is moved from the corporations to the consumers in taxes instead of wages.
The alternative is that large consumer companies (think coke, walmart, mcdonald's, nike, adidas, car companies, etc.) ie. the bulk of the entire economy will collapse if there is no money for consumers to spend, which will make the situation worse for even the people that own the productive capacity, because owning vast automated factories meant to produce consumer goods does not benefit you one bit if 99,99 % of all potential consumers have starved to death.
Automation by its very nature means if we want to maintain economies in their current fashion we cannot continue to measure the worth of an individual in terms of productivity, because eventually all of us (including the very top managers in charge of overseeing production) will be outperformed by machines, and in that stage no-one should be paid anything if we keep using this metric.
This is not a realistic alternative. The idea that the 90 % (or more) of people who will be made unemployed by automation will just all start companies of their own and sustain themselves that way is flawed in mulltiple ways: first, without income they have no capital to start companies. Second, the vast majority of people do not posses the skills to run a company that's capable of efficiently competing with large corporations that can take advantage of sheer scale of production (and hence, automation) to keep prices low. Thirdly, even if all of them started companies, without income from labor, these companies still will not have any customers and hence no revenue. Good luck trying to start your own company with next to no money and trying to compete with multinational manufacturers. And as for the service side: it doesn't help if I start a bar if there are no people with money to spend in said bar.
The logistical chains involved in current global markets simply do not support the idea that we can suddenly transform our economies to such that 1 % are running multibillion dollar global megacorps, while the rest 99 % are all somehow running small corporations and no-one (or nearly no-one) is paid in wages.
No, automation is a real observable phenomenon that's actually occurring, more and more so because it's often even more cost efficient than outsourcing. If outsourcing was not happening at all, automation would proceed at an even faster rate, because the benefit of replacing N highly paid western workers with a machine is far greater than replacing N workers of the same skill set working in some less developed country with a fraction of the pay.
No-one's been claiming that. Of course the concept of automation is not new, but the way automation can and is implemented has changed entirely with modern computers and data-driven manufacturing and production optimization.
A lot has been automated already, but it's nothing compared to what can and will be automated. The definition of 'low-hanging fruit' has also changed: data entry jobs were not too long ago considered impossible to automate. That's changed completely, and pretty soon the masses of people whose primary day-to-day work has been copying information from one place to another will be made obsolete by machines.
How many jobs can be automated now != how many jobs can be automated within the next couple of decades. If you told people in 1990 that in 30 or so years self-driving cars will start to emerge and threaten the jobs of drivers you'd have been laughed at by most. Similarly if you told them that call-.center jobs are being replaced by automated speech recognition and synthesis bots. Both are already happening, and are only going to keep going.
The up-front and maintenance cost by themselves are irrelevant. What mattes is how much performance you can get from the system per hour compared to humans. If said machine replaces 10 people working around the clock at 8 dollars an hour it will have paid for its acquisition in less than a year. After that at 40 000 a year it's massively cheaper than having all those people there.
You seem to be under the deluded impression that humans can somehow compere with increasingly efficient automation, even though said automation is the result of millions of hours of human engineering and designing with the specific intent of making computers that are more cost-efficient than humans at performing tasks..
It's not a meme, it's an undeniable reality of modern day life, and it doesn't have to mean the '1 % will grind us to paste', that only happens if we don't implement political changes that address the effects of increasing automation and decreasing employment, namely systems like basic income, changing taxation so that the 1 % making billions on their automated manufacturing will provide the rest of the society with money to be able to live and buy their products. Without consumers with purchasing power the consumer economy collapses which is not good for anyone, including the ultra-rich.
No, you seem more like someone sick from cognitive dissonance: on one hand recognizing the fact that increasing automat
Indeed. The core problem brought by increasing automation (which is inevitable) is that the marginal utility of labor decreases.
However taxing 'robots' to solve this seems unwise. Robotics and machine learning powered automation increase efficiency, allowing higher productivity, As the companies' labor cost decline as a result, their profits can be taxed more without the overall tax burden on them increasing (as you're essentially replacing diminishing income taxes with other forms of tax) to fund basic income (or other equivalent systems) to maintain a standard of living for those individuals whose skillset has become obsolete due to automation and for whom retraining is not possible.
Pretty much all industrialized economies use progressive taxation on income. With income taxation losing ground as automation advances, I think a more apt direction would be to consider introducing some form of progression to corporate taxes. Why should say, a multinational, multibillion dollar pharmaceutical company with profit margins above 20 % or even above 50 % pay the same rate of tax as a small family business?
Implementation of such systems in the current situation is not possible because of the existence of tax-havens, and the relative ease with which larger companies can relocate their books to different nations, but this question is one which will have to be answered in the coming decades: as it looks more and more likely that the global business will be dominated by larger players taking advantage of their ability to implement automation at a large scale, we will have to come together as a planer to figure out how these entities are taxed, or we're faced with a situation in which the hoarding of money to the top 0,1 % will keep on going while the income from labor plummets and large segments of previously well-off people are plunged into poverty without any ability to compete with said large players due to lack of capital.
This is often waived off as a 'leftist' fear, but we're talking about a core capitalist principle, namely the wage share. The wage share fluctuates, but currently it looks to be trending downwards, as an ever increasing amount of profits goes to capital and re-investment, while labor costs are going down. Note that this does not mean the share of wages will ever actually reach zero, but that doesn't eliminate the problem; if nothing is done to change taxation to compensate for the plummeting wage share, consumption will collapse as the majority of the consumer base - currently gaining their income mostly in wages - will be without any income and hence without any purchasing power and we're left in a situation in which companies have immense and efficient production capabilities but no-one to buy their products, which is a highly undesirable scenario regardless of whether one's on the left or on the right.
Yes, but not for the same reasons. What the net is allowing companies to do is charge different prices for the same exact product based on their assessment of the consumer. Would you accept a store charging you more for food because their magical sensor at the door (or in your fridge) has detected that your starving, or because they deduced from your clothes that you're more likely to pay more?
"Sir, if you don't like to pay 50 euros for that loaf of bread, I'd like you to know there are tools you can use to look for cheaper deals on bread. Just make sure to clean your cookies and log out of any social networks and put a bag over your head to avoid facial recognition, and remember to enter the store in between 10 and 11:30 and you'll get the maximal discount. But don't be late, the rush hour of bread begins at 11:35 and prices double, or triple for those with a higher education."
Would you be fine with companies treating consumers like this in the physical world? That instead of a price tag on a product conveying the price information openly to everyone the tags would be empty codes that you scan and then get the price, 'tailored just for you' on your phone?
The problem is most people don't realize that this is even happening so many people think the price they're getting from say, some flight booking site is the same as it is for everyone else. They've no idea that the price may well be affected by their past searches on the site and other online behavior.
Currently on products and services using this kind of pricing there's no way for a consumer to know the true 'base price' of the product they're buying. This means that a lot of the price information is completely lost, meaning that the price mechanism no longer functions as it used to. Discount information is always shown to the customer obviously, but under these systems it's possible that even the supposed 'discounted price' you're getting is higher than what the guy next door is paying without any discounts if the price before discount for you was set higher based on your identifier information.
Price search services themselves are not a magical solution to this because they do not remove this issue. You still have no way of knowing whether or not the 'cheapest price' given to you by a search engine is the same as the 'cheapest price' given to someone else using a different operating system or a device and who hasn't queried the same product a couple times before.
I'm no anti-capitalist, but in the name of a free and fair trade I do believe consumers are entitled to equal treatment and transparency when it comes to prices. I'm not saying it's wrong for a company to charge you less/more because of X, Y or Z. I'm saying if that is done you should have access to those modifiers and see why they're charging that extra or giving that discount for you. It's likely true that many of the sites would lose business doing this, but that in and of itself should highlight you the problem at hand: keeping the modifiers secret currently only benefits the sellers and weakens the position of the consumer on the market by hiding information.
There's nothing about increasing efficiency and cutting humans out as factors of påroduction that inherently means people will be plunged into poverty. Businesses need customers to operate. Imagine the day in not too distant future where close to 100 % of all menial jobs such as warehousing are automated. This will bring immense savings and increased efficiency for large companies like Amazon, but if all the millions of people made unemployed by these innovations have no source of income allowing them to buy items from Amazon, then they may very well end up losing money.
The structure of the consumer economy is such that companies compete for the money that consumers have. They really don't care where that money originates from: salary, dividends, social security, doesn't matter. If you have disposable income companies are going to try to get you to give some of it to them. Currently the majority of people gain their money as income from a job, so work is the mechanism by which money is moved from the top (=the wealthiest) to the bottom, so these people can then move it back into the top by buying goods and services. What's going to happen as automation takes more and more jobs away from people if the ownership class doesn't want consumer demand to come crashing down and start hurting their bottom lines is that as the labor costs will come down, tax-costs will increase as systems like basic income are developed and implemented. Right now many see this as an impossible because it seems like this would require hardcore capitalists embracing some socialist principles. But what people fail to see is that these income redistribution principles can (and will) be embraced for entirely selfish, profit-motivated reasons. Unless the loss of income caused by automation is offset with new sources of income the consumer economy will collapse, which in turn will drag the whole economy down.
That is, the wealthy class will eventually have to look at the situation and think which is easier: letting the masses dwell in poverty and watch their profits go down as people resort to crime for their survival as you put it, or start giving them income that will not only help them survive but keep competition and demand alive.
There's a lot more profit to be made in the latter scenario.
Social media has not created it. Hollywood created it long time ago by starting celebrity-worship and reality formats long before social media. Social media is responding to this by saying "you're all performers now, you can all become as popular as the celebrity you like if you just post enough".
It should not be a surprise to anyone that when an industry with billions to spend on marketing and focus-group testing has been intentionally creating fandom cults for decades that the natural evolution of this behavior is kids wanting to mimic the success of these cults by leading one themselves. They're not narcissists, they're mimicking behavior that the entire media is telling them is desirable, because with fame comes adoration and money and happiness.
You can't treat this by treating the symptom (social media), you need to treat the root cause, but that's easier said than done because the entire culture of entertainment needs to be changed to something less worshiping of popularity based on mainly external traits instead of intellect or ideas.
You're right, but there are many conditions for which the brain is the problem. I've have cerebral palsy (more specifically spastic diplegia) as a result of a brain injury caused by oxygen loss during a premature birth. Through various surgeries addressing orthopedic and muscular issues I've reached a point wherein I can now even stand still without any external support. Walking is possible with canes or as little support as one finger to hold onto with both of my hands. The core of the issue is that the part of the motor cortex that processes incoming information from the balance organs and muscles about the posture of the body is partially dead, so the brain is unable to regulate balance accordingly. Outside stem cells or other such theoretical ways of regenerating nerve tissue, implants are the only thing that may one day solve this.
A hypothetical implant for something like my case of CP would be just a chip that sits on top of the brain and does the calculations that the dead part of the cortex would normally do. It doesn't have to be connected to the external world, and should I ever get to see a day where such an implant is a reality, I certainly would not accept one that was. I'm 26 now and realistically speaking I don't expect to see this tech becoming widespread during my lifetime, nor will I volunteer as a test subject because I've reached a point wherein I can live by myself, work and drive a vehicle, so my quality of life is pretty much as close to normal as is currently feasible for people with CP, thanks in large part to the medical expertise of the university of Helsinki hospital, so my disability does not bother me nearly enough for me to desire to try experimental high risk treatments. But having seen the already very promising results that for example deep brain stimulation has had for people with Parkinson's etc I do think this kind of solution is far more feasible after some more decades of advances than most people currently think.
You're entirely correct. However, in general the reasons for the cars being safer (reaction times, better situational awareness) are such that they can - and must - be objectively demonstrated before mass market release. That is, we're not going to take the companies' word for it, obviously the cars need to be tested by outside/3rd parties before being put on sale.
My general point is that there's a whole host of reasons why computerized monitoring of traffic is safer than relying on a single human. I don't really see a logical reason for why a self-driving vehicles wouldn't be less-error prone simply due to the fact that human drivers make a lot of errors as is. That is, the bar for being a better driver than even an above-average driver is not nearly as high as people think.
No, no it isn't. The sensory tech to make cars self-driving is already there. Google has millions of miles of successful testing under their belt. I myself have been riding in a Tesla going 120 km/h while the driver was doing nothing. Now Tesla's solution is not fully automatic and requires you to still pay attention to the road, but this if anything should point out to you that we're much, much closer to self-driving cars than most people think. There are issues to solve still before the tech is ready to hit the market widely, but these obstacles (handing of weather conditions etc) are things which can be solved with existing technology and innovations.
I will get one as soon as the price is right. I'd much rather climb onto the car, tell it to get me to wherever, and sleep/eat/do work/whatever else with my time rather than drive,
All existing data from ongoing self-driving car pilots, including Google's, point to self-driving cars being vastly safer than human piloted vehicles. The cars have technology allowing them to have a far superior understanding of their surroundings than any driver ever can. Google is using radar. The car can see and know the location of vehicles, pedestrians and obstacles far outside the reach of a humans vision. The car is able to do real-time physics calculation and actually figure out the smartest way to for example evade stuff. Humans take about a second to a second and a half to even react to a sudden emergency. In that second the computer has not only detected the obstacle/danger but processed through the different alternatives it has (ie. it has figured out whether or not to do perform an emergency braking maneuver or whether it's better to evade, and in which direction) to respond to that and has started to take action far before human reaction times even kick in. Literally in the time it takes for the human brain to go "OH FUCK A MOOSE!", the self-driving car has already mapped a solution and began implementation taking into factor numerous things (brake-force per tire, road surface conditions, etc) that the human never could. And if a crash is unavoidable, the car can calculate a way/place to crash the in a way that does minimal damage to the passengers and start dialing emergency services immediately, even rely to them crash data so that the dispatched emergency staff will know what kind of injuries to prepare to treat.
Computers are simply better suited to handle the chaotic nature of traffic. It can track and predict the movement of all of those vehicles and pedestrians simultaneously. This video showcases that well at around the 12 minute mark: the cars are all stopped at a crossing, and there's a cyclist that's about to blow through a red-light. The human-operated vehicles all miss this and start to move forwards on a green light as the cyclist hits the crosswalk, nearly hitting him. The self-driving car has known (based on speed and trajectory of the cyclist from LADAR) that the cyclist is going to blow through the red light before he even does so and doesn't start to move until the cyclist has crossed the road safely.
Couple that with the fact that the cars can communicate with each other. A car that spots something like a tree or an accident on road can relay this info to other vehicles which can take this into consideration immediately and re-route far ahead of time.
Yes, but those can (and will) be sorted.
Stop drinking the kool-aid. First of all it's not up to their choice. What OP was saying is that the way asylums work is that they're not eternal. People fleeing a war are given asylum until the war ends, after which it's revoked and they're returned to their country of origin. They're not given a choice in the matter. Secondly, immigrants do not have immunity from prosecution, and if you think so you haven't been looking at actual convictions.
C'mon. The amount of muslims in all european countries is so small they have next to no actual political influence to begin with, and the one's that have gone through to politics for example here in Finland have done so under mainstream parties like the Green party which obviously is not supporting political islam or sharia.
It's one thing to point out that there are legitimate issues with the handling of refugees and the asylum-process in general (the thing that incidents like this one highlight is that it may be necessary to detain the refugees whose asylum is rejected until they can be deported) but the claim that Europe faces some threat of becoming a caliphate is simply unfounded in reality and mindless fear-mongering, which the right keeps pumping out (with hefty help from Russian 'alternative facts' sources).
European political history is no stranger to fears of muslim invasion, which has been one of the long time boogiemen since the middle-ages, altering in the role of the 'imminent menace about to destroy the whole of europe' together with communism and occasionally the jews. It didn't happen back when the caliphate actually had vast standing armies, it's certainly not going to happen now.
Totally credible and Russia Today are not words that can really be fit into the same sentence.
Except that claim in itself is complete bullshit because Sarin/other chemical agents are not generaly speaking stored so that firing on them would release the chemical:
(source)
What's mean by 'a lot of things lining up' is that not only would you you have to be hitting a premixed storage of Sarin which is not typically how it's stored, you'd also have to hit in in a very spesific way to disperse the gas. A direct hit will burn the gas, destroying the toxin.
So let's recap: one one side you have 'totally credible' reports from Russian and Syrian source which have a vested interest in not telling the truth if Assad is behind this saying that this happened by accident, and on the other hand you have chemical weapons experts that actually have knowledge of the Syrian chemicals weapons arsenal telling you that it's very unlikely based on their knowledge that Assad's explanation is plausible, And for some inexplicable reason you choose to trust Russians on this.
Your standards of evidence are truly low if all it takes is for RT to run a report saying 'nope, totally an accident assad would never lie to us ;)' and go "yeah, seems legit."
Saddam held iraq together. With despotism and an iron fist for sure, but he did keep it together. The removal of him and failure to provide Iraq with a functional government lead to the formation if Isis, which together, combined with factors you listed has made the current geopolitical situation as complicated and as bloody as it is.
No-one is saying that without Saddam's removal there'd be total peace in Syria/middle-east, but it should be pretty obvious that the way Iraq was handled has contributed to the situation in a major, major way.
The US did not singlehandedly cause Arab spring obviously, but their geopolitics and interference in the region amplified the effects and not for the better.