The entire point of that essay is to point out that the functioning of (human) brains and electronic computers is fundamentally different. I never claimed otherwise, The core of the point of the essay is summed up by the phrase: "Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not"
Obviously this is true. No-one is claming that something honed over millions of years of biological evolution and trial and error is identical in its functioning to man-built machines. It does not however mean that the overall point I made about intelligence and machines is incorrect, The human brain is capable of processing data and making predictions, otherwise we wouldn't have any science at all. Computers are capable of the same thing though they achieve it in a different way.
In other words your brain and the computer process an image entirely difefrently, but it's possible for both human braiuns and computers to use images and visual data to make predictions about what's going to happen, and this is what is at the core of intelligence. Just because my brain performs the calculation 1+1=2 without using bytes and a binary base, doesn't mean that me performing this calculation requires any more or less intelligence than a computer doing the same.
All of these "AI" claims are just programs. AI doesn't exist.
This has always weirded me out as an argument. Intelligence is simply information processing in physical systems. What humans do when they make intelligent decisions is take in data from the environment and process it to make predictions. So when a doctor looks at the same data as the machine and makes a conclusion about treatment, he is making an intelligent decision, but when the machine does the same it's not intelligence it's 'just a program'? When a human being operates a motor vehicle and adapts his/her behavior to react to oncoming traffic he/she is using intelligence but when a machine does it it's 'just a program'? What?
This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations. Right now brains are still able to cross-reference data better than computers, making humans as a whole more intelligent than computers but we're already at a point in which computer programs are able to take in data and adapt their behavior to meet a goal, whether it's driving a car or anything else, with better results than your standard humans, but somehow the platform that the program is being run on determines which of these 2 actions is categorized as 'intelligent'. This is nonsensical.
Intelligence is a scale, not a binary thing. The confusion about AI these days is people read 'AI' and they immediately equate that to either 'human level intelligence' and/or 'consciousness', neither of which are required for a system to be intelligent. A dog is more intelligent than a rat, a monkey is more intelligent than a dog, a human is more intelligent than a monkey and so far overall humans are also more intelligent than computers, but it doesn't mean that computers don't have a level of intelligence already, even though you cannot (yet) have a discussion/debate with the computer.
Imagine a few decades into the future wherein these systems are able to recognize speech so that a physician is able to consult with it during an operation. Or when they get to the point that the computers themselves are able to perform autonomous surgeries on people and react to complications on the fly. This is the direction we're headed to and getting there does not require the computers to become self-aware.
You can call it 'just a program' all you want, but using that definition the years of training and practice going on in the surgeon's head as he's trying to figure out the best way to cut the tumor out without causing a hemorrhage is also 'just a program'. The platform on which the program is being run may be wetware or hardware but it does not affect the intelligence of the program.
In the first industrial revolution it took generations for workers to recover from crippling job losses due to new machinery. These are not short term dislocations. There may be a nearly unlimited amount of work to be done, but not an unlimited amount of work which produces enough economic value to support someone financially. I would like someone to clean my home office, for instance, but I'm not paying $15/hr for it.
Exactly.
Another problem is demand: even if the productivity of an individual worker supporter by AI is so high that a single human being is able to run an entire factory, this does not mean there will be enough demand to keep everyone employed.People miss this when they talk about the rise in efficiency brought on by technology. We cannot assume that getting more efficient at producing things automatically leads to people needing, wanting, or being able to afford more things.
It looks likely that in the short-to-mid term unemployment will rise drastically as employers are able to cut costs due to automation. This means the consumers will have less money to spend. Now, sinvce manufacturing is going to be more efficient, it means the prices of the goods (and services) produced with increased automation will be cheaper. This means even the people who're unemployed can afford (relatively) more things than they can now. But the open question is:can we really honestly assume consumption will go up so much that new jobs will be generated to offset those that have been lost? In either case, even though items maybe cheaper to buy, the amount of money people have to spend on items and services overall will go up, not down, when people are laid off or fired to streamline production, so I find this assumption that new jobs will spring out as the result of massive efficiency increase without a clear explanation of how the demand is going to work with reduced purchasing power to be highly suspect.
Not saying is wrong per se, just saying that we shouldn't be looking this problem on the supply-side only.
Hello, comrade anonymous, your response time is admirable. Keep it up and surely you will be rewarded. How many comments do they require you write per day these days? How's the pay?
Seriously though, what I said is in no way in dispute with what Russia is quite openly doing, so speaking of 'correcting the record' when I'm just pointing out what's currently going on is a weak-ass attempt to muddy the waters.
If you wanna troll, at least put some effort into it.
And while the EU may rise as the primary economic hub if they can get their fractured budgets and banking in order, their political influence is dubious when it comes to contentious issues as the EU is unable to speak as a single voice.
As a European I wholeheartedly agree with this. This is also the reason Russia likes nothing more than to see the rise of age-old nationalism in the Union countries, and they're in fact funding - directy or indirectly - many nationalist media and pseudomedia (ie. propaganda) outlets. They've been trying to fund Le Pen in France but the problems faced by Russian banks seem to be preventing that for the moment.
The fact that the nationalists are blindly going along with this, some of them even openly embracing putin as a model of leadership, without realizing that especially for bordering states favoring nation-states instead of a strong unified Union essentially means they're trying to roll back the clock to the era of the Cold war, when Finlandization was going strong and even the countries not directly in the soviet union had to essentially make sure their actions would be agreeable to Russia/CCCP.
Now, with a lot of the former soviet satellites now in NATO the board looks slightly different than it did 50 years ago, but with Trump's stance on the role of NATO and hence the future of the entire alliance still unclear, right now the primarily right-wing nationalist uprising happening across the continent benefits Russia the most, and China as well.
and the DO expect it to have stored audio that might aid their investigation
The summary says:
While the Echo records only after hearing the wake word, police are hoping that ambient noise or background chatter could have accidentally triggered the device, leading to some more clues.
So no, they're not expecting it to have anything on it, they're just checking to make sure in case it was accidentally activated.
To me, this is no different than them making sure the background noise of a recorded call doesn't contain anything useful for the investigation.
Im referring to a relatively small number of tones combonations that all cultures use
The small amount of them makes not a single difference to your argument being wrong. Even if there were only 2 possible tones in existence, it would be possible to create endless original/unique combinations with these tones.
That is, the amount of new/original songs is not limited because the amount of tones is limited.
How? They're doing their best to navigate the landscape of music business. They have to pay the record companies if they want to stay in business, and getting the price per play higher means increasing the price of their service which at this point will drive away customers to other similarly priced services further leading to reduced revenue and thus even less money for the artists,
What they should do is allow people to voluntarily pay more to support the artists. I've been a paying member of spotify for years. I'd gladly pay double the price if it was guaranteed that the added money goes straight to the artists.
I've also bought albums I'd have no idea even existed if I didn't get exposed to them via Spotify, again something that your 'exposure is irrelevant' argument completely ignores. Putting your stuff on Spotify as an indie makes it instantly accessible to about a hundred million people. If none of those people deem your music worth supporting by buying albums/merch or coming to your show, then it's very likely the music is not good to begin with.
Historical examples are not good in this case, because in the history of automation we've previously been only dealing with 'dumb' machines. We're now facing a system wherein the ever increasing intelligence of machines and software is cutting humans out from the loop entirely. The problem with your comparison is that previously there were a lot of fields into which the employees that were freed up from agriculture by automation could then transition to with relative ease (it. moving from a farm to work in factory didn't require massive education).
Neither of this is true with machine learning and the modern automation. Sooner or later all professional drivers and most data-input workers, fast food workers, etc. will have been replaced by more efficient machines and solutions, but there is no field visible into which this workforce could then migrate because the automation this time effects all simple jobs, not just simple jobs in one field like agriculture.
In 2016, economic activity is already highly automated. If your assertion were correct, the amount of automation in place today would have already caused an economic collapse
This is nonsensical. We're not highly automated because even the processses such as invoicing which are semi-automated still require humans in the loop for now, but that's about to change. That is, the situation we're in now in which machine learning is still in very limited use, is not comparable to a situation in which selflearning systems become widespread and capable of doping something like data entry at speeds and accuracy faster to humans. There's currently still good reasons to keep human workers in an office, and there will also be in the future, but the amount required will drop greatly as the actual data entry and processing will be handled by machines and the few humans around will be there just for oversight and problem situations.
You in fact agree with this, to a large extent, because you said:
(The concept of a "standard 40-hour workweek" needs to be discarded, and fast.)
This is true. However you then go on to make this statement:
As the multiplier on what one employee can accomplish grows ever bigger, so does the number of employed people.
This does not follow. You see, If I have a company doing manufacturing, and I used to employ 50 people. I automate the whole thing, and I need to keep 5 people employed to do maintenance and oversight. Okay. How then, in your opinion does this translate to companies needing more labor, when what's happening is that 1 person working likely less than 40 hours a week is now capable of performing the labor that used to take 10 people 400 hours? For more jobs to appear to employ the 45 now unemployed people, demand needs to go up. But for demand to go up, people need to have money to spend to create the demand, and it's not clear or automatic under future scenarios that such an increase in demand will happen.
With both of your examples, the farming and the aqueducts, we're talking about making 1 defined time-intensive task much easier to handle. That's again not what's happening here, we're talking about making ALL tasks that an untrained, non-specialized human can do so much faster that there's simply no need for untrained labor in the near future.
Again tell me: where do you expect all the office workers, taxi-drivers, truck-drives and so on to go and get employed? They do not have a useful skillset that's needed by anyone. Some of them will retrain and work in the new supervisory/tech roles, but again assuming that making the entire chain of production more efficient will somehow magically create jobs for everyone it leaves unemployed is not accurate or correct. We already have more people than we have jobs for. globally speaking, and the value of unskilled labor is dropping and dropping. So why do you expect this trend to suddenly reverse as we get better and better with gett
When a corporation reduces its workforce as a result of introducing additional automation, its costs decrease. This is a beneficial, first-order effect. A temporary reduction in sales (to its former employees who have not yet found other employment) is, at best, a third-order effect.
You managed to miss the point completely. We're not talking about cases of singular companies automating here, we're talking about the disappearance of entire fields of employment that can be easily automated in the coming decades. Low-skiled workers across the board will be replaced by machinery and automation, leading to an increase in unemployment as the people who used to drive cabs or do simple office jobs such as invoicing/other form handling etc will be without job opportunities.
Sure, automation also creates some jobs, but always less than it takes away. It's not as if all the former can drivers, invoicing personel etc will all retrain themselves as engineers or machine learning specialists and get employment that way because even if they were all capable of educating themselves to that level (which they are not) there will simply not be an equivalent amount of these positions around.
This being the case, unless we provide these people with some form of guaranteed income,l major chunk of the consumer class will be without income, which means demand for consumer goods will drop across the board because these people will have nothing to buy with.
I'm not advocating to shun labor saving devices such as automation, and frankly I don't know how you managed to get that idea from the post. I'm talking about the fact that we're getting so good at making labor-saving devices that the need for human labor will decrease and decrease as untrained workforce will no longer be required. This has to be dealt with unless we want to create a massive class of people living in permanent poverty, and since as you rightfully pointed out we cannot address it by opposing automation we have to solve it by providing these people income in another way, ie. through something like BI.
Eliminate the ones not producing. Forced sterilization and procreation limits will fix this in the long term..
Except it will not. The amount of people 'not producing' will keep growing as automation grows, and when we hit AI* the machines will be more skilled and efficient in doing ALL work, including all intellectual work, at which point according to your great 'solution' humanity would have to go extinct.
Which is not to say all limits on population growth are a bad thing, and might certainly be required in such a situation, but the core of the problems is we're so good at encoding and improving the learning capabilities and intelligence of our machines and software that we will eventually engineer human intelligence out of the loop.
*=if someone still thinks general AI cannot be reached then as Sam Harris points out here you must find something wrong with the following three premises:
1. Intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems 2. We will keep improving the information processing/intelligence of our machines 3. We (homo sapiens sapiens) are not near the summit of possible intelligence
Whether it takes 50 years or a 150 years is another matter, but seeing the pace of advances currently being made, unless technological advancement is brought to halt entirely by a global catastrophe/war, we will eventually be capable of developing a human level AI at which point it will take over its own development and surpass us quickly, at which point if we went by your fancy idea we'd have to commit species-wide suicide because none of us have to be 'productive' again and that apparently somehow means we lose all value/meaning in life if we don't get to enjoy the wonders of working 8 hours a day.
No, no it isn't. The whole point of BI is to simplify the already existing models of social security. The people in this experiment are currently on unemployment benefit which this will replace. The whole point about BI as others have pointed out is that it's created essentially as a negative income-tax bracket. That is, not everyone across the board will get X amount of euros more (which would be what you describe: a blatant increase in inflation and nothing more). The BI will be taxed away from people making above a a certain amount, thus making it a modified version of the already existing benefits we have here.
Have a look at this chart, it's one of the proposed models for basic income by the Finnish Green Party. Now, I might not entirely agree with the numbers therein but this gives you an idea of how these systems are imagined. The leftmost column is the basic income, same for all income groups. The column after that is income from work, and the column after that is taxes paid for on the income for work (41 % for those making less than 4200, and 49 % for those making above it). The column after that is net income after taxes, and the column after that is total income (net income + basic income), the rightmost column is the effective tax-rate. Now you can see that for the two lowest classes, even though the nominal taxrate is high (41) the effective tax-rate is indeed negative due to the basic income, and only 4 % on those who make 1500.
This model (and most UBI models floated around here) would actually lower taxes on middle and low income earners. The cost to moving to a model like this from the current system would actually be relatively small, as we already have a both heavily progressive taxation system as well as a wide-variety of different types of social benefits that this would replace,
The whole problem with the old-fashioned social-security systems currently in use here (in Finland) and elsewhere is that the amount of terms and conditions involved with them create a trap: people cannot for example accept part-time or gig jobs as that basically stops the for receiving the unemployment benefits for awhile and they have to re-apply for it, effectively meaning that taking say a 3-4 days job offer will often lose you more money when you factor in the loss of the unemployment benefit for a fixed amount after that.
This makes no sense, as it's trapping unemployed people into a situation where they're afraid to take part-time jobs because they cannot for certain know they'll be able to survive the interrim period between the part time job ending, and the umemployment benefit starting to run again.
This is one of the scenarios in which BI is meant to help and is actually what this experiment is meant to test: what they're looking at is whether or not allowing people the same amount of income as they're currently getting in the form of the current unemployment benefit but guaranteeing that they will not lose it if they take a part-time job offer, whether or not this increases the people's willingness to take up short/part-time contracts, knowing that their income will be secured and will not be disrupted by this.
Since the amount in this experiment is no different from the existing unemployment benefits, it cannot be argued that this will drive inflation up, as we've had hundreds of thousands of people receiving the exact same amount of money in the form of unemployment benefits for years, and that has not driven up inflation.
With automation taking more and more jobs systems like UBI are a necessity for the future: if we want to keep the economies running, if we want to maintain a consumer-base of people who have money to spend on goods and services in a future in which their labor will be either of very little or no value (because they've been made obsolete by machines), we must provi
Apple has VERY Liberal folks running it... thus Apple is very liberal
It doesn't matter whether the people running it claim to be conservative or liberal, if they're running the company against liberal positions (tax-evasion and shitty treatment of employees for example) then they - and hence the company itself - are not liberal.
Funny how these San Francisco Liberal do gooders lecture those of us to the right of center about the ethics of "paying our fair share" when we lament the high taxes, but when the shoe is on the other foot and it is their turn to pay up, they fight it like crazy
Eh... Are you seriously equivocating Apple, a multibillion dollar global megacorp with 'liberal do gooders'? Really? Yeah I get it, plenty of liberals use Apple products, but I've never seen people - on the right or on the left - claim that Apple as a company is in any sense liberal. Their tax-evasion as well as lack of any charity work whatsoever are quite well known, so I don't know where this notion of Apple as a 'liberal' company is coming from.
If anything, stories like this further go on to prove that Apple is just as unethical and uncaring as most other companies of their size.
While I'm touched and moved that you care enough about my time to complain to me about how I choose to spend it I can honestly say I wouldn't have normally bothered responding to such bullshit, but as I have an hour or so to waste at work while I'm waiting for certain updates to be applied and so on I had nothing better to do.
Besides of which, I've debunked this ancap-BS so many times at this point it's almost a routine, took me about 7 minutes, so even if nobody bothers to read it, it's not a massive loss.
Seems to me you did, and failing to find anything to comment of actual substance you chose to whine. Whatever suits you, mr. Anonymous OP.;)
I don't want to live in a nanny state that makes me and my family dependant on government hand outs. I want zero government.
Yes, the evil government mandating and enforcing food and safety regulations, running the justice system, and doing all these evil things. Corporations should be free to add addicting substances to their products to hook consumers to their products, and if you go ahead and buy them (obviously there'll be no mention of the opiates added because that'd be EVIL GOVERNMENT intervening again) then it's your own personal choice and you should have funded your own laboratory to make sure what you're buying hasn't been messed around with.
It becomes easier to afford to send my kids to the best schools when that money isn't stolen from me.
'Stolen' implies you don't use publicly funded utilities and services to be able to work and thus make your money. The infrastructure provided for by taxes is the basis for most commercial operations in most economies, so to say that the money used for its upkeep allowing you to continue working iss 'stolen' from you is just asinine.
Property rights are not natural rights. The whole concept of "your property" and "my property" only exists because societies have come together and drafted a set of rules (=laws) which define ownership of goods and how they may be transferred or not. If the government stops existing you no longer have any property, you just have stuff which I can take away at any minute if I have enough muscle to do so. I cannot be prosecuted for it as that would require a court-system, also itself an extension of government and society that you oppose. Therefore claiming that you have some magical right to be entitled to 100 % of your salary and that any form of taxation is 'theft', when 'theft' itself is a concept defined by the society that you oppose is just idiotic.
Moreover, do you understand that we're headed into an age where the vast majority of people will not be able to trade their labor into money because for most menial tasks the constantly improving machines will be so much more cost-effective that corporations will have no need to hire low-skill workers anymore. You're essentially arguing for a future in which the vast majority of folks will be left to starve or commit crimes for their own survival.
The developed economies are in the grips of a fast change: people are being made obsolete as factors of production. To deny this is to deny the technological progress that can be plainly seen by anyone. Automation creates some new jobs but never at the same rate at which it is taking them away, as the upkeep of an automated system always takes less personel than running the entire operation with human labor (to use the example of self-driving cars here_ automating the taxi-serivces for example will require an X amount of people to oversee the system and do maintenance, but that number will be vastly smaller than the amount of cab-drivers it will make jobless).
So with this in mind I'm amazed at the (mostly) american far-right mentality of "fuck the government, I wish to subject my life to the whims of corporations, because they truly care about me, as I'm a hard working man'. They don't. The corporations care about making money, they will throw you at and leave you to die the moment you no longer provide any value for them, and because of that civilized societies have come together and decided that since we're no longer living in the middle-ages, people should not be left out to starve and die if they cannot get employed or in fact cannot work at all because of an illness or disability or other factors.
But for some reason you seem convinced that such principles are needless, either because you're unable to see the long term consequences of having instances around that care for stuff other than making more wealth for themselves, or because you do in fact see it but are enough of a sociopath to not give a shit about the well be
What if I lose 100000$ to a hacker if all this time I haven't been hacked I save 1M$? - - what do they say? a buck today is worth more than a hundred tomorrow, or something?
They do indeed say that, but it is not exactly as straightforward. It can be argued that the raw up-front cost of securing the system is more expensive than the work you have to do to recreate lost data, though certainly this is not always the case. But the problem is that this hypothetical damage to the company from such a hack is really hard to measure accurately (especially beforehand) because if you're only looking at the number of hours you need to pour in to undo direct damages you're missing a part of the picture, and a big one, the brand.
They're not a huge multinational business, they're a midsize company that's geared towards a rather narrow corporate customer-base. The damage done by something like this in terms of future sales lost because this is entirely an unknown. It might be small enough to justify not securing it, but it also might be huge.People tend to suck at risk evaluation because in these types of 'high risk, high reward' situations that you're referring to what happens is that the rewards are overestimated and the risks are downplayed. I mean, with smaller companies that often have a few bigger clients, losing just one major client can make a huge dent in your cash-flow and send you spiraling down, Ignoring that potentiality in risk-analysis is foolish.
I mean, at the very least if it is a calculated risk instead of stonewalling their own workers the management should be able to present their numbers on which their risk-taking is based. If they would come up with solid math taking into consideration the projected indirect effects on future sales and brand, then maybe I'd give them a pass. But to just downright ignore the issue without a proper explanation is incompetent leadership because it sends a signal that it really doesn't matter if the employees give a shit about anything as the management apparently doesn't either.
don't have a backup regimen, and use Microsoft Operating Systems.
This actually is exactly what happened to a friend recently. They're running a lot of Linux servers, but as they were doing some sort of changes they were temporarily moving data from the linux machines to windows environment which got ransomwared and they got screwed. They have backups, but they're not up to date.
To my knowledge they have no intention of paying the ransom.
This is a perfect example of management having their heads up their asses. It's not that they don't have competent people who'd be more than willing to improve backups and general security (in fact the friend in question working as a systems analyst has been whining ever since he joined the company that their security is way too lax), it's that the upper management does not seem to care because they do not perceive the risks involved correctly.
As someone from a management background education-wise I believe this is incredibly incompetent leadership. The whole reason companies hire experts is (or should be) that you listen to the feedback of said experts. If the guy most in-tune with your systems is telling you for a couple years that you're essentially begging to get screwed over, ignoring his warnings and prioritizing cutting costs is something that should get you fired. Unfortunately this is a case where the manager in question has known the founder of the company for who knows how long, so he pretty much has a permanent position due to nepotism, and right now it's costing them a lot of money, customers and also competent people (my friend is currently looking for new job, and I can't blame him).
All said and done, the public payed about 900k per worker to keep their jobs in the US. It literally would have been cheaper to simply pay the workers their former wages and let their jobs go overseas. You lost money on that deal.
This is why economists like free trade. When you look at the big picture, everyone saves money and it's efficient.
Yes, but you see, that would be universal basic income: paying people who can no longer efficiently compete with massively cheaper foreign manufacturing jobs and automation so that they can keep living and being part of the economy. And that's something that will not fly in the american political climate. Tariffs on the other hand are something that have been used for centuries, so they're easier to pass as that sounds less like socialism, even though as you put it, it's just a worse/less efficient way of implementing socialism than directly paying the outsourced workers would be.
If you increase efficiency by cutting manufacturing costs the money saved is taken from the workers whose jobs are outsourced or automated. Tariffs work to slow the rate of outsourcing but they will not be able to stop the same jobs from being automated entirely sooner or later, so regardless of which route one takes, sooner or later decisions have to be made as to what to do with the masses of people who can no longer compete for jobs because they're either too expensive or have been made obsolete entirely.
There's simply no way around the fact that the era of low-skilled but high paying jobs is coming to an end fast, and the developed economies will have to deal with ever rising unemployment rates and re-think their approach to income, because sticking our heads to the sand and thinking that somehow in 50 years people will still be paid what they currently are to do manufacturing or simple office jobs is not realistic. Likewise, thinking that all of the people currently working in these fields will go to study machine learning and work in programming or engineering is not realistic.
So we cannot continue to measure the value of individuals in terms of productivity. The idea that any man or woman can 'earn' their standard of living by exchanging their labor for money will simply no longer be viable in the future when their labor is massively inefficient compared to other alternatives.
because energy and industry and science have become politically tangled up with "ethics" and "saving the planet", in other words, science got mixed with values, it is now near impossible to say anything sensible and factual on the subject.
If we are to make sensible decisions as a species over our future, there's no way for science to not get mixed up with ethics. Science is the best and only reliable tool we have for gaining knowledge about the world. If scientists all seclude themselves from any discussion about what should be done to fix a given problem (be that climate change or anything else) then they're essentially leaving it to be decided by people who know nothing about the subject,
You're right that political decisions about energy policy are currently guided heavily by big investors. The only way away from this is to increase the amount of factual information to counter lobbying, and the only way to do that is to involve scientists more, not less.
Health insurance enabled health care's astronomical costs. It is cause and effect.
Insurance has certainly played a large part in the explosion of costs, but it is not the sole or even the main cause as much as it's a catalyst. Insurance is an added margin on top of the cost of care itself, but there are numerous countries which do use a partially insurance based system coupled with a public option and pricing controls that still achieve costs way lower costs than those of the US on equal level of care.
The US health market, both hospitals as well as insurers, is dominated by private commercial entities. This means even without insurers, the system would seek an equilibrium where it can extract the most money out of people because that is what corporations do, Even without insurer-middlemen, if a corporation can double the price of treatment and end up making more money, the fact that some people will now die because they can no longer afford the procedure is irrelevant, from the standpoint of shareholders. This is why pretty much every country outside the US heavily limits and controls health business.
Standard xray machines certainly don't cost anywhere near a million dollars.
Yeah I'm aware the standard versions are much cheaper, however this does not change the core of the argument: you cannot drive down cost by having several playes get expensive infrastructure for a service with a static demand while they all at the same time seek to make a profit on it.
It doesn't take a highly trained team to run one either.
I don't know about the US staff requirements, but in here radiological nurses go through around 4 years of training including physics having to do with radiation does calculations and so on. I'd say that's relatively highly trained. And again, even if you hire hobos from the street and pay them 5 $ an hour, this doesn't change the argument.
What we need is to do away with insurance completely, make people pay for their own health care.
Excellent plan. So now when someone gets say cancer, unless they happen to have tens or possibly hundreds of thousands stashed away for cancer-day, they can either try to apply for a loan or go the way of walter white. Advanced health care is so expensive, there is no practical way for most people to pay it out of pocket and the demand is inelastic (people who have a serious condition requiring immediate care do not have the time or the capabilities to compare prices and go to the other side of the country to get their treatment slightly cheaper) which make market based solutions terribly inefficient at providing it cheaply.
Moreover, since the demand is fairly static there's no way of effectively competing in a market with existing hospitals. Take something as simple as X-rays for example: a given area will have a fairly constant demand for xrays that's directly tied to the size of the population, let's say 10 000 as an example. But the machines and the staff to run x-ray machines cost a lot. The price of a simple machine is around a million. If we assume a life-span of 10 years for the device, that factors down to roughly 10 dollars an image as the base cost (+ staff costs + margins for the hospital). If someone else buys a device to compete with the first one, they too will have to try and recoup their costs, which will drive the base-price of an image up in both hospitals, raising the costs overall. If demand is split evenly between both it means the base-cost will double.
The infrastructure to provide advanced medical care cost enormous amounts of money, which acts both as a barrier to entry to the market, as well as making sure that increasing competition will lower the general efficiency of a system once you start getting more capacity than you'd actually need to satisfy the needs of a given population.
When that happens there will be an end to hospitals charging $100 an aspirin and the other medical nonsense that we have now.
Or, you could just do what most other developed economies have already done and institute direct controls on pricing. Just having a public option for insurance allowing the government to leverage its size and negotiate down prices would be a start. There's no justifiable reason for allowing companies to rake in gigantic profits on a life-saving service that pretty much everyone will need at some point in their life.
To this day, I've never understood why the richest country on the planet allows its citizens to be left to die or saddled with massive debt over medical issues when there are several existing models of providing first world level advanced care at a much cheaper cost per capita (in fact, every single existing medical system is cheaper than the US one)..
But that requires treating health care as a right of citizens, not as a commercial commodity, which goes against the divine mantra of 'the free market is the solution to everything' that seems to dominate american politicians' discussion on health as if the only way to keep people healthy is to sell them health.
As a western liberal I of course object censorship in all of its forms, but at the same time I understand the mindset that the Chinese establishment has: they cannot prevent the inevitable spread of communication technology, so more and more Chinese people are becoming networked. This means that the potential for massive protests of millions of people over any number of subjects ranging from food prices to air quality to an outrage over public transit prices can occur more and more easily as these ideas are free to spread.
Take something like the 2013 Turkey protests as an example. The estimates of how many people were on streets ranger from 3,5 to 7,5 million people. As I was in a relationship with a Turkish woman at the time, I know the effect social media had. People were sharing the locations data with each other; locations of other protesters, riot cops, locations of where to get gas masks/first aid, and in general coordinating the movement of the masses to try and evade the rather over the top fascist measures that the government pretty much immediately chose to resort to. Now 3,5 million people is a lot, but percentage-wise it's less than 5 % of the total population. China has approximately 721 million online users and growing. Even if only 0,5 % of that population gets together and starts organizing protests movements, we're talking about over 3 and a half million people, around the same scale as the protests in Turkey.
From the perspective of the Chinese government the situation is tricky: lowering censorship would be a good PR move and make people happier, but it has the potential to trigger situations in which Tianmen square will look like a peaceful and orderly event. The path of least resistance is thus to allow people to yell about their dissatisfaction online, but just make sure the information never reaches a critical mass of people to trigger major social instability and havoc. Put another way: giving total freedom of communication to the Chinese people has the possibility of sending the country into major internal turmoil, possibly even civil war, because the internet can be used - both by ethical and unethical instances - to leverage the power of the mobs at much faster speeds than any other communication technology up until this point.
From this perspective I understand why they're doing it, even though I do not condone it.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire point of that essay is to point out that the functioning of (human) brains and electronic computers is fundamentally different. I never claimed otherwise, The core of the point of the essay is summed up by the phrase: "Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not"
Obviously this is true. No-one is claming that something honed over millions of years of biological evolution and trial and error is identical in its functioning to man-built machines. It does not however mean that the overall point I made about intelligence and machines is incorrect, The human brain is capable of processing data and making predictions, otherwise we wouldn't have any science at all. Computers are capable of the same thing though they achieve it in a different way.
In other words your brain and the computer process an image entirely difefrently, but it's possible for both human braiuns and computers to use images and visual data to make predictions about what's going to happen, and this is what is at the core of intelligence. Just because my brain performs the calculation 1+1=2 without using bytes and a binary base, doesn't mean that me performing this calculation requires any more or less intelligence than a computer doing the same.
This has always weirded me out as an argument. Intelligence is simply information processing in physical systems. What humans do when they make intelligent decisions is take in data from the environment and process it to make predictions. So when a doctor looks at the same data as the machine and makes a conclusion about treatment, he is making an intelligent decision, but when the machine does the same it's not intelligence it's 'just a program'? When a human being operates a motor vehicle and adapts his/her behavior to react to oncoming traffic he/she is using intelligence but when a machine does it it's 'just a program'? What?
This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations. Right now brains are still able to cross-reference data better than computers, making humans as a whole more intelligent than computers but we're already at a point in which computer programs are able to take in data and adapt their behavior to meet a goal, whether it's driving a car or anything else, with better results than your standard humans, but somehow the platform that the program is being run on determines which of these 2 actions is categorized as 'intelligent'. This is nonsensical.
Intelligence is a scale, not a binary thing. The confusion about AI these days is people read 'AI' and they immediately equate that to either 'human level intelligence' and/or 'consciousness', neither of which are required for a system to be intelligent. A dog is more intelligent than a rat, a monkey is more intelligent than a dog, a human is more intelligent than a monkey and so far overall humans are also more intelligent than computers, but it doesn't mean that computers don't have a level of intelligence already, even though you cannot (yet) have a discussion/debate with the computer.
Imagine a few decades into the future wherein these systems are able to recognize speech so that a physician is able to consult with it during an operation. Or when they get to the point that the computers themselves are able to perform autonomous surgeries on people and react to complications on the fly. This is the direction we're headed to and getting there does not require the computers to become self-aware.
You can call it 'just a program' all you want, but using that definition the years of training and practice going on in the surgeon's head as he's trying to figure out the best way to cut the tumor out without causing a hemorrhage is also 'just a program'. The platform on which the program is being run may be wetware or hardware but it does not affect the intelligence of the program.
Exactly.
Another problem is demand: even if the productivity of an individual worker supporter by AI is so high that a single human being is able to run an entire factory, this does not mean there will be enough demand to keep everyone employed.People miss this when they talk about the rise in efficiency brought on by technology. We cannot assume that getting more efficient at producing things automatically leads to people needing, wanting, or being able to afford more things.
It looks likely that in the short-to-mid term unemployment will rise drastically as employers are able to cut costs due to automation. This means the consumers will have less money to spend. Now, sinvce manufacturing is going to be more efficient, it means the prices of the goods (and services) produced with increased automation will be cheaper. This means even the people who're unemployed can afford (relatively) more things than they can now. But the open question is:can we really honestly assume consumption will go up so much that new jobs will be generated to offset those that have been lost? In either case, even though items maybe cheaper to buy, the amount of money people have to spend on items and services overall will go up, not down, when people are laid off or fired to streamline production, so I find this assumption that new jobs will spring out as the result of massive efficiency increase without a clear explanation of how the demand is going to work with reduced purchasing power to be highly suspect.
Not saying is wrong per se, just saying that we shouldn't be looking this problem on the supply-side only.
Hello, comrade anonymous, your response time is admirable. Keep it up and surely you will be rewarded. How many comments do they require you write per day these days? How's the pay?
Seriously though, what I said is in no way in dispute with what Russia is quite openly doing, so speaking of 'correcting the record' when I'm just pointing out what's currently going on is a weak-ass attempt to muddy the waters.
If you wanna troll, at least put some effort into it.
As a European I wholeheartedly agree with this. This is also the reason Russia likes nothing more than to see the rise of age-old nationalism in the Union countries, and they're in fact funding - directy or indirectly - many nationalist media and pseudomedia (ie. propaganda) outlets. They've been trying to fund Le Pen in France but the problems faced by Russian banks seem to be preventing that for the moment.
The fact that the nationalists are blindly going along with this, some of them even openly embracing putin as a model of leadership, without realizing that especially for bordering states favoring nation-states instead of a strong unified Union essentially means they're trying to roll back the clock to the era of the Cold war, when Finlandization was going strong and even the countries not directly in the soviet union had to essentially make sure their actions would be agreeable to Russia/CCCP.
Now, with a lot of the former soviet satellites now in NATO the board looks slightly different than it did 50 years ago, but with Trump's stance on the role of NATO and hence the future of the entire alliance still unclear, right now the primarily right-wing nationalist uprising happening across the continent benefits Russia the most, and China as well.
The summary says:
So no, they're not expecting it to have anything on it, they're just checking to make sure in case it was accidentally activated.
To me, this is no different than them making sure the background noise of a recorded call doesn't contain anything useful for the investigation.
The small amount of them makes not a single difference to your argument being wrong. Even if there were only 2 possible tones in existence, it would be possible to create endless original/unique combinations with these tones.
That is, the amount of new/original songs is not limited because the amount of tones is limited.
How? They're doing their best to navigate the landscape of music business. They have to pay the record companies if they want to stay in business, and getting the price per play higher means increasing the price of their service which at this point will drive away customers to other similarly priced services further leading to reduced revenue and thus even less money for the artists,
What they should do is allow people to voluntarily pay more to support the artists. I've been a paying member of spotify for years. I'd gladly pay double the price if it was guaranteed that the added money goes straight to the artists.
I've also bought albums I'd have no idea even existed if I didn't get exposed to them via Spotify, again something that your 'exposure is irrelevant' argument completely ignores. Putting your stuff on Spotify as an indie makes it instantly accessible to about a hundred million people. If none of those people deem your music worth supporting by buying albums/merch or coming to your show, then it's very likely the music is not good to begin with.
'There's only a finite number of letter combinations that our eyes find pleasant'
'All the words have been written already at least once so there's no original works of literature anymore'
Your point is not valid because it's not true.
Historical examples are not good in this case, because in the history of automation we've previously been only dealing with 'dumb' machines. We're now facing a system wherein the ever increasing intelligence of machines and software is cutting humans out from the loop entirely. The problem with your comparison is that previously there were a lot of fields into which the employees that were freed up from agriculture by automation could then transition to with relative ease (it. moving from a farm to work in factory didn't require massive education).
Neither of this is true with machine learning and the modern automation. Sooner or later all professional drivers and most data-input workers, fast food workers, etc. will have been replaced by more efficient machines and solutions, but there is no field visible into which this workforce could then migrate because the automation this time effects all simple jobs, not just simple jobs in one field like agriculture.
This is nonsensical. We're not highly automated because even the processses such as invoicing which are semi-automated still require humans in the loop for now, but that's about to change. That is, the situation we're in now in which machine learning is still in very limited use, is not comparable to a situation in which selflearning systems become widespread and capable of doping something like data entry at speeds and accuracy faster to humans. There's currently still good reasons to keep human workers in an office, and there will also be in the future, but the amount required will drop greatly as the actual data entry and processing will be handled by machines and the few humans around will be there just for oversight and problem situations.
You in fact agree with this, to a large extent, because you said:
This is true. However you then go on to make this statement:
This does not follow. You see, If I have a company doing manufacturing, and I used to employ 50 people. I automate the whole thing, and I need to keep 5 people employed to do maintenance and oversight. Okay. How then, in your opinion does this translate to companies needing more labor, when what's happening is that 1 person working likely less than 40 hours a week is now capable of performing the labor that used to take 10 people 400 hours? For more jobs to appear to employ the 45 now unemployed people, demand needs to go up. But for demand to go up, people need to have money to spend to create the demand, and it's not clear or automatic under future scenarios that such an increase in demand will happen.
With both of your examples, the farming and the aqueducts, we're talking about making 1 defined time-intensive task much easier to handle. That's again not what's happening here, we're talking about making ALL tasks that an untrained, non-specialized human can do so much faster that there's simply no need for untrained labor in the near future.
Again tell me: where do you expect all the office workers, taxi-drivers, truck-drives and so on to go and get employed? They do not have a useful skillset that's needed by anyone. Some of them will retrain and work in the new supervisory/tech roles, but again assuming that making the entire chain of production more efficient will somehow magically create jobs for everyone it leaves unemployed is not accurate or correct. We already have more people than we have jobs for. globally speaking, and the value of unskilled labor is dropping and dropping. So why do you expect this trend to suddenly reverse as we get better and better with gett
You managed to miss the point completely. We're not talking about cases of singular companies automating here, we're talking about the disappearance of entire fields of employment that can be easily automated in the coming decades. Low-skiled workers across the board will be replaced by machinery and automation, leading to an increase in unemployment as the people who used to drive cabs or do simple office jobs such as invoicing/other form handling etc will be without job opportunities.
Sure, automation also creates some jobs, but always less than it takes away. It's not as if all the former can drivers, invoicing personel etc will all retrain themselves as engineers or machine learning specialists and get employment that way because even if they were all capable of educating themselves to that level (which they are not) there will simply not be an equivalent amount of these positions around.
This being the case, unless we provide these people with some form of guaranteed income,l major chunk of the consumer class will be without income, which means demand for consumer goods will drop across the board because these people will have nothing to buy with.
I'm not advocating to shun labor saving devices such as automation, and frankly I don't know how you managed to get that idea from the post. I'm talking about the fact that we're getting so good at making labor-saving devices that the need for human labor will decrease and decrease as untrained workforce will no longer be required. This has to be dealt with unless we want to create a massive class of people living in permanent poverty, and since as you rightfully pointed out we cannot address it by opposing automation we have to solve it by providing these people income in another way, ie. through something like BI.
Except it will not. The amount of people 'not producing' will keep growing as automation grows, and when we hit AI* the machines will be more skilled and efficient in doing ALL work, including all intellectual work, at which point according to your great 'solution' humanity would have to go extinct.
Which is not to say all limits on population growth are a bad thing, and might certainly be required in such a situation, but the core of the problems is we're so good at encoding and improving the learning capabilities and intelligence of our machines and software that we will eventually engineer human intelligence out of the loop.
*=if someone still thinks general AI cannot be reached then as Sam Harris points out here you must find something wrong with the following three premises:
1. Intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems
2. We will keep improving the information processing/intelligence of our machines
3. We (homo sapiens sapiens) are not near the summit of possible intelligence
Whether it takes 50 years or a 150 years is another matter, but seeing the pace of advances currently being made, unless technological advancement is brought to halt entirely by a global catastrophe/war, we will eventually be capable of developing a human level AI at which point it will take over its own development and surpass us quickly, at which point if we went by your fancy idea we'd have to commit species-wide suicide because none of us have to be 'productive' again and that apparently somehow means we lose all value/meaning in life if we don't get to enjoy the wonders of working 8 hours a day.
No, no it isn't. The whole point of BI is to simplify the already existing models of social security. The people in this experiment are currently on unemployment benefit which this will replace. The whole point about BI as others have pointed out is that it's created essentially as a negative income-tax bracket. That is, not everyone across the board will get X amount of euros more (which would be what you describe: a blatant increase in inflation and nothing more). The BI will be taxed away from people making above a a certain amount, thus making it a modified version of the already existing benefits we have here.
Have a look at this chart, it's one of the proposed models for basic income by the Finnish Green Party. Now, I might not entirely agree with the numbers therein but this gives you an idea of how these systems are imagined. The leftmost column is the basic income, same for all income groups. The column after that is income from work, and the column after that is taxes paid for on the income for work (41 % for those making less than 4200, and 49 % for those making above it). The column after that is net income after taxes, and the column after that is total income (net income + basic income), the rightmost column is the effective tax-rate. Now you can see that for the two lowest classes, even though the nominal taxrate is high (41) the effective tax-rate is indeed negative due to the basic income, and only 4 % on those who make 1500.
This model (and most UBI models floated around here) would actually lower taxes on middle and low income earners. The cost to moving to a model like this from the current system would actually be relatively small, as we already have a both heavily progressive taxation system as well as a wide-variety of different types of social benefits that this would replace,
The whole problem with the old-fashioned social-security systems currently in use here (in Finland) and elsewhere is that the amount of terms and conditions involved with them create a trap: people cannot for example accept part-time or gig jobs as that basically stops the for receiving the unemployment benefits for awhile and they have to re-apply for it, effectively meaning that taking say a 3-4 days job offer will often lose you more money when you factor in the loss of the unemployment benefit for a fixed amount after that.
This makes no sense, as it's trapping unemployed people into a situation where they're afraid to take part-time jobs because they cannot for certain know they'll be able to survive the interrim period between the part time job ending, and the umemployment benefit starting to run again.
This is one of the scenarios in which BI is meant to help and is actually what this experiment is meant to test: what they're looking at is whether or not allowing people the same amount of income as they're currently getting in the form of the current unemployment benefit but guaranteeing that they will not lose it if they take a part-time job offer, whether or not this increases the people's willingness to take up short/part-time contracts, knowing that their income will be secured and will not be disrupted by this.
Since the amount in this experiment is no different from the existing unemployment benefits, it cannot be argued that this will drive inflation up, as we've had hundreds of thousands of people receiving the exact same amount of money in the form of unemployment benefits for years, and that has not driven up inflation.
With automation taking more and more jobs systems like UBI are a necessity for the future: if we want to keep the economies running, if we want to maintain a consumer-base of people who have money to spend on goods and services in a future in which their labor will be either of very little or no value (because they've been made obsolete by machines), we must provi
It doesn't matter whether the people running it claim to be conservative or liberal, if they're running the company against liberal positions (tax-evasion and shitty treatment of employees for example) then they - and hence the company itself - are not liberal.
Eh... Are you seriously equivocating Apple, a multibillion dollar global megacorp with 'liberal do gooders'? Really? Yeah I get it, plenty of liberals use Apple products, but I've never seen people - on the right or on the left - claim that Apple as a company is in any sense liberal. Their tax-evasion as well as lack of any charity work whatsoever are quite well known, so I don't know where this notion of Apple as a 'liberal' company is coming from.
If anything, stories like this further go on to prove that Apple is just as unethical and uncaring as most other companies of their size.
While I'm touched and moved that you care enough about my time to complain to me about how I choose to spend it I can honestly say I wouldn't have normally bothered responding to such bullshit, but as I have an hour or so to waste at work while I'm waiting for certain updates to be applied and so on I had nothing better to do.
Besides of which, I've debunked this ancap-BS so many times at this point it's almost a routine, took me about 7 minutes, so even if nobody bothers to read it, it's not a massive loss.
Seems to me you did, and failing to find anything to comment of actual substance you chose to whine. Whatever suits you, mr. Anonymous OP. ;)
Yes, the evil government mandating and enforcing food and safety regulations, running the justice system, and doing all these evil things. Corporations should be free to add addicting substances to their products to hook consumers to their products, and if you go ahead and buy them (obviously there'll be no mention of the opiates added because that'd be EVIL GOVERNMENT intervening again) then it's your own personal choice and you should have funded your own laboratory to make sure what you're buying hasn't been messed around with.
'Stolen' implies you don't use publicly funded utilities and services to be able to work and thus make your money. The infrastructure provided for by taxes is the basis for most commercial operations in most economies, so to say that the money used for its upkeep allowing you to continue working iss 'stolen' from you is just asinine.
Property rights are not natural rights. The whole concept of "your property" and "my property" only exists because societies have come together and drafted a set of rules (=laws) which define ownership of goods and how they may be transferred or not. If the government stops existing you no longer have any property, you just have stuff which I can take away at any minute if I have enough muscle to do so. I cannot be prosecuted for it as that would require a court-system, also itself an extension of government and society that you oppose. Therefore claiming that you have some magical right to be entitled to 100 % of your salary and that any form of taxation is 'theft', when 'theft' itself is a concept defined by the society that you oppose is just idiotic.
Moreover, do you understand that we're headed into an age where the vast majority of people will not be able to trade their labor into money because for most menial tasks the constantly improving machines will be so much more cost-effective that corporations will have no need to hire low-skill workers anymore. You're essentially arguing for a future in which the vast majority of folks will be left to starve or commit crimes for their own survival.
The developed economies are in the grips of a fast change: people are being made obsolete as factors of production. To deny this is to deny the technological progress that can be plainly seen by anyone. Automation creates some new jobs but never at the same rate at which it is taking them away, as the upkeep of an automated system always takes less personel than running the entire operation with human labor (to use the example of self-driving cars here_ automating the taxi-serivces for example will require an X amount of people to oversee the system and do maintenance, but that number will be vastly smaller than the amount of cab-drivers it will make jobless).
So with this in mind I'm amazed at the (mostly) american far-right mentality of "fuck the government, I wish to subject my life to the whims of corporations, because they truly care about me, as I'm a hard working man'. They don't. The corporations care about making money, they will throw you at and leave you to die the moment you no longer provide any value for them, and because of that civilized societies have come together and decided that since we're no longer living in the middle-ages, people should not be left out to starve and die if they cannot get employed or in fact cannot work at all because of an illness or disability or other factors.
But for some reason you seem convinced that such principles are needless, either because you're unable to see the long term consequences of having instances around that care for stuff other than making more wealth for themselves, or because you do in fact see it but are enough of a sociopath to not give a shit about the well be
They do indeed say that, but it is not exactly as straightforward. It can be argued that the raw up-front cost of securing the system is more expensive than the work you have to do to recreate lost data, though certainly this is not always the case.
But the problem is that this hypothetical damage to the company from such a hack is really hard to measure accurately (especially beforehand) because if you're only looking at the number of hours you need to pour in to undo direct damages you're missing a part of the picture, and a big one, the brand.
They're not a huge multinational business, they're a midsize company that's geared towards a rather narrow corporate customer-base. The damage done by something like this in terms of future sales lost because this is entirely an unknown. It might be small enough to justify not securing it, but it also might be huge.People tend to suck at risk evaluation because in these types of 'high risk, high reward' situations that you're referring to what happens is that the rewards are overestimated and the risks are downplayed. I mean, with smaller companies that often have a few bigger clients, losing just one major client can make a huge dent in your cash-flow and send you spiraling down, Ignoring that potentiality in risk-analysis is foolish.
I mean, at the very least if it is a calculated risk instead of stonewalling their own workers the management should be able to present their numbers on which their risk-taking is based. If they would come up with solid math taking into consideration the projected indirect effects on future sales and brand, then maybe I'd give them a pass. But to just downright ignore the issue without a proper explanation is incompetent leadership because it sends a signal that it really doesn't matter if the employees give a shit about anything as the management apparently doesn't either.
This actually is exactly what happened to a friend recently. They're running a lot of Linux servers, but as they were doing some sort of changes they were temporarily moving data from the linux machines to windows environment which got ransomwared and they got screwed. They have backups, but they're not up to date.
To my knowledge they have no intention of paying the ransom.
This is a perfect example of management having their heads up their asses. It's not that they don't have competent people who'd be more than willing to improve backups and general security (in fact the friend in question working as a systems analyst has been whining ever since he joined the company that their security is way too lax), it's that the upper management does not seem to care because they do not perceive the risks involved correctly.
As someone from a management background education-wise I believe this is incredibly incompetent leadership. The whole reason companies hire experts is (or should be) that you listen to the feedback of said experts. If the guy most in-tune with your systems is telling you for a couple years that you're essentially begging to get screwed over, ignoring his warnings and prioritizing cutting costs is something that should get you fired. Unfortunately this is a case where the manager in question has known the founder of the company for who knows how long, so he pretty much has a permanent position due to nepotism, and right now it's costing them a lot of money, customers and also competent people (my friend is currently looking for new job, and I can't blame him).
Yes, but you see, that would be universal basic income: paying people who can no longer efficiently compete with massively cheaper foreign manufacturing jobs and automation so that they can keep living and being part of the economy. And that's something that will not fly in the american political climate. Tariffs on the other hand are something that have been used for centuries, so they're easier to pass as that sounds less like socialism, even though as you put it, it's just a worse/less efficient way of implementing socialism than directly paying the outsourced workers would be.
If you increase efficiency by cutting manufacturing costs the money saved is taken from the workers whose jobs are outsourced or automated. Tariffs work to slow the rate of outsourcing but they will not be able to stop the same jobs from being automated entirely sooner or later, so regardless of which route one takes, sooner or later decisions have to be made as to what to do with the masses of people who can no longer compete for jobs because they're either too expensive or have been made obsolete entirely.
There's simply no way around the fact that the era of low-skilled but high paying jobs is coming to an end fast, and the developed economies will have to deal with ever rising unemployment rates and re-think their approach to income, because sticking our heads to the sand and thinking that somehow in 50 years people will still be paid what they currently are to do manufacturing or simple office jobs is not realistic. Likewise, thinking that all of the people currently working in these fields will go to study machine learning and work in programming or engineering is not realistic.
So we cannot continue to measure the value of individuals in terms of productivity. The idea that any man or woman can 'earn' their standard of living by exchanging their labor for money will simply no longer be viable in the future when their labor is massively inefficient compared to other alternatives.
If we are to make sensible decisions as a species over our future, there's no way for science to not get mixed up with ethics. Science is the best and only reliable tool we have for gaining knowledge about the world. If scientists all seclude themselves from any discussion about what should be done to fix a given problem (be that climate change or anything else) then they're essentially leaving it to be decided by people who know nothing about the subject,
You're right that political decisions about energy policy are currently guided heavily by big investors. The only way away from this is to increase the amount of factual information to counter lobbying, and the only way to do that is to involve scientists more, not less.
Insurance has certainly played a large part in the explosion of costs, but it is not the sole or even the main cause as much as it's a catalyst. Insurance is an added margin on top of the cost of care itself, but there are numerous countries which do use a partially insurance based system coupled with a public option and pricing controls that still achieve costs way lower costs than those of the US on equal level of care.
The US health market, both hospitals as well as insurers, is dominated by private commercial entities. This means even without insurers, the system would seek an equilibrium where it can extract the most money out of people because that is what corporations do, Even without insurer-middlemen, if a corporation can double the price of treatment and end up making more money, the fact that some people will now die because they can no longer afford the procedure is irrelevant, from the standpoint of shareholders. This is why pretty much every country outside the US heavily limits and controls health business.
Yeah I'm aware the standard versions are much cheaper, however this does not change the core of the argument: you cannot drive down cost by having several playes get expensive infrastructure for a service with a static demand while they all at the same time seek to make a profit on it.
I don't know about the US staff requirements, but in here radiological nurses go through around 4 years of training including physics having to do with radiation does calculations and so on. I'd say that's relatively highly trained. And again, even if you hire hobos from the street and pay them 5 $ an hour, this doesn't change the argument.
Excellent plan. So now when someone gets say cancer, unless they happen to have tens or possibly hundreds of thousands stashed away for cancer-day, they can either try to apply for a loan or go the way of walter white. Advanced health care is so expensive, there is no practical way for most people to pay it out of pocket and the demand is inelastic (people who have a serious condition requiring immediate care do not have the time or the capabilities to compare prices and go to the other side of the country to get their treatment slightly cheaper) which make market based solutions terribly inefficient at providing it cheaply.
Moreover, since the demand is fairly static there's no way of effectively competing in a market with existing hospitals. Take something as simple as X-rays for example: a given area will have a fairly constant demand for xrays that's directly tied to the size of the population, let's say 10 000 as an example. But the machines and the staff to run x-ray machines cost a lot. The price of a simple machine is around a million. If we assume a life-span of 10 years for the device, that factors down to roughly 10 dollars an image as the base cost (+ staff costs + margins for the hospital). If someone else buys a device to compete with the first one, they too will have to try and recoup their costs, which will drive the base-price of an image up in both hospitals, raising the costs overall. If demand is split evenly between both it means the base-cost will double.
The infrastructure to provide advanced medical care cost enormous amounts of money, which acts both as a barrier to entry to the market, as well as making sure that increasing competition will lower the general efficiency of a system once you start getting more capacity than you'd actually need to satisfy the needs of a given population.
Or, you could just do what most other developed economies have already done and institute direct controls on pricing. Just having a public option for insurance allowing the government to leverage its size and negotiate down prices would be a start. There's no justifiable reason for allowing companies to rake in gigantic profits on a life-saving service that pretty much everyone will need at some point in their life.
To this day, I've never understood why the richest country on the planet allows its citizens to be left to die or saddled with massive debt over medical issues when there are several existing models of providing first world level advanced care at a much cheaper cost per capita (in fact, every single existing medical system is cheaper than the US one)..
But that requires treating health care as a right of citizens, not as a commercial commodity, which goes against the divine mantra of 'the free market is the solution to everything' that seems to dominate american politicians' discussion on health as if the only way to keep people healthy is to sell them health.
As a western liberal I of course object censorship in all of its forms, but at the same time I understand the mindset that the Chinese establishment has: they cannot prevent the inevitable spread of communication technology, so more and more Chinese people are becoming networked. This means that the potential for massive protests of millions of people over any number of subjects ranging from food prices to air quality to an outrage over public transit prices can occur more and more easily as these ideas are free to spread.
Take something like the 2013 Turkey protests as an example. The estimates of how many people were on streets ranger from 3,5 to 7,5 million people. As I was in a relationship with a Turkish woman at the time, I know the effect social media had. People were sharing the locations data with each other; locations of other protesters, riot cops, locations of where to get gas masks/first aid, and in general coordinating the movement of the masses to try and evade the rather over the top fascist measures that the government pretty much immediately chose to resort to. Now 3,5 million people is a lot, but percentage-wise it's less than 5 % of the total population. China has approximately 721 million online users and growing. Even if only 0,5 % of that population gets together and starts organizing protests movements, we're talking about over 3 and a half million people, around the same scale as the protests in Turkey.
From the perspective of the Chinese government the situation is tricky: lowering censorship would be a good PR move and make people happier, but it has the potential to trigger situations in which Tianmen square will look like a peaceful and orderly event. The path of least resistance is thus to allow people to yell about their dissatisfaction online, but just make sure the information never reaches a critical mass of people to trigger major social instability and havoc. Put another way: giving total freedom of communication to the Chinese people has the possibility of sending the country into major internal turmoil, possibly even civil war, because the internet can be used - both by ethical and unethical instances - to leverage the power of the mobs at much faster speeds than any other communication technology up until this point.
From this perspective I understand why they're doing it, even though I do not condone it.