Trump is fine with gay marriage and where Caitlyn goes to the bathroom...but Hillary wants to airlift hundreds of thousands of people who want to throw gay people off rooftops. It's a simple equation.
Actually no, no it isn't. The people looking for shelter from western countries are the people Daesh is currently throwing of buildings and massacring.
You created a failed state and a power vacuum in the middle-east, which lead to the rise of a theocratic quasi-nation of murderous madmen who're killing their own countrymen and fellow muslims en masse, and then when this population of civilians escape helloholes like Aleppo in hopes of not getting blown to bits amidst all of the fighting, people put them in the same category as the heinous murderers that they're escaping from. It's ridiculous.
Now is it true that Daesh is trying to sneak some guys in with this flood of people? Yes, absolutely it's true. But does that mean that because a tiny fraction of the wave of immigrants might be evil, the west should abandon all shreds of humanism and let the civilians be crushed by conflict? Have you seen the shape Aleppo is in?
We're at a point, wherein we here in Finland with 1/50th of US population have taken as much refugees as the US (10 000), and we had NOTHING to do with starting this conflict in the first place, and the US is supposed to be the 'land of the brave' and somehow the epitome of western morality? If so, stop being a bunch of pussies and take some responsibility for your own actions and do something to help the people whose lives your well intentioned but horribly executed nation building exercise has totally fucked up.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Or should we just give up on you guys and amend that with 'unless they're brown people escaping a conflict we started, in that case FUCK THEM!'?
I was recently at the Louis C. K. show here in Helsinki and they did not require anyone to lock away their phones, but prior to the show there was an announcement that anyone caught filming the show will be ejected.
As a lover of stand-up, I can understand why they're strict about this: the tickets to the show cost nearly 60 euros and essentially people are paying that to hear new material. It's different from music and other performing arts where most often people know what they're going to see. AC/DC won't lose any ticket sales if a few dozen guys upload a shitty quality video of Thunderstruck from midfield. But a recording - even audio only - of the new material by a stand up performer will probably hurt ticket sales.
That being said this seems like overreach: I did not see anyone being ejected from the aforementioned show (well, outside 1 dude who was way too drunk but he wasn't recording). People who've invested money to get to the show are unlikely to risk missing the show just to get a clip online, so I don't see a need for such a high-tech solution.
A Wall Street endorsed 1% candidate is what's best.
Ah yes, because having a wall street endoresed 1 % is bad surely electing someone who belongs to said 1 % and has said: “It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”
According to the Times, a building on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City's Manhattan borough that is partially owned by Trump has a loan of $950 million that was paid for by a few different entities, including the Bank of China and Goldman Sachs.
Yes, yes indeed, this is the candidate that will put wall street in its place and change the status quo!
How... how does this shit fly with the american public, seriously?
They're not obvious to everyone, in fact it'd seem they're not obvious to most people. There haveve been a few studies done on how well people, especially young people recognize sponsored content as an ad and the results are quite far from it being obvious:
In the study, published in the December Journal of Advertising, Bartosz W. Wojdynski and Nathaniel J. Evans, both assistant professors in the Grady College, conducted two experiments using online news articles to examine the differences that the language and positioning of the disclosure labels make in determining whether consumers recognize sponsored articles as advertising content.
In the first study, only 17 of 242 viewers, or 7 percent, identified the content as advertising, and in the second eye-tracking study, only 17 percent identified the articles as advertising.
"I think that many publishers and advertisers assume that just because they put a label on the content, consumers will automatically understand that the article they're reading is a paid advertisement," Wojdynski said. "These results show that's not the case at all, although the design of the disclosure label can make a big difference."
The first study invited subjects to read online content featuring two stories: one that was editorial content and one that was a native ad featuring a quote from the executive of a fictitious company. Twelve versions of the second story were presented, all with varying disclosure label language-"advertising," "sponsored by," "brand voice" and "presented by"-and different positions for the disclosure label-on the top, middle and bottom of the article page.
The study found that readers were seven times more likely to identify as advertising those articles that used "advertising" or "sponsored content" in the disclosure label compared with those that used terms like "brand voice" or "presented by."
The second study used eye tracking to determine the best position for disclosure labels within native advertising articles. When a native advertisement disclosure was at the top of the page, only 40 percent of the viewers looked at it, but when the disclosure was in the middle of the page, 90 percent looked at the label. Sixty percent of the viewers noticed advertisement labels at the bottom of a page.
As adblocking has become easier than ever advertisers have evolved and sponsored content is the new trend, and even though to you or me it's blatantly obvious to pick these out, many people are easily deceived. So if we want to make sure advertisers cannot deceive consumers emphasizing correct labeling is important.
You're under the illusion that evidence, or facts, make any difference in this election. We live in the golden era of conspiracies, wherein 'the official truth' can always be disregarded when it comes to politicians and governments and replaced with one's own version of the truth supported by the relevant blogs.
Remember, one side of this race states that he believes climate change to be a chinese conspiracy. This is not a level playing field of factual argumentation, this is a shitshow. It matters not how things actually are but how they're perceived. Traditionally the media is supposed to act as a watchdog and catch politicians on their lies, but it seems to me that the US media has given up on that a long time ago and now its just reporting what the red team says and how the blue team responded.
Functioning democracies require the voters to be informed, and at the risk of sounding condescending, the american public at large is not, which is why Trump is where he is.
That said, the reason we're effectively locked into a two party system is Duverger's law. Plurality voting with single member districts leads to two party systems. It would require seriously amending the Constitution to change that.
All of this is very true. However, I'd argue that this is the kind of situation that the amendments made for. I mean, if it's the case as it now looks to be that the electoral system has slipped from the hands of the population to the hands of a tiny minority of wealthy individuals and institutions that control effectively both parties, is this not a case wherein seeking to amend the constitution to alter this state would be precisely the moral thing to do?
Sure it's no easy task to get done, but it is, in my opinion, the one thing that's currently holding back legitimate change in the US. As long as the red team and the blue team control everything and anything, nobody - not even Trump - is going to rock the boat too hard and the revolving door from Washington to lobbying firms will keep spinning.
I based the remark on analysis of his plans that I've read such as this and a few others which seem to agree that his plan would increase the incomes of the top 1 %, but I admit I do not know if the plan on his page has been altered since these kinds of calculations have been last done.
Thanks for the interesting points about the tapes. Do you happen to have a source on the point about the reactions being out before the tape itself? Would be interesting to check out.
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..." "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?" "What?" "I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?" "I'll look. Tell me about the lizards." Ford shrugged again. "Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it." "But that's terrible," said Arthur. "Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”
-So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Watching this election from the outside has been one of the most absurd experiences in my life thus far. The fact that these 2, both of whom are massively hated, are what the american version of 'democracy' (quotes because if this election doesn't showcase the huge issues with the primary-system I don't know what will) produces is just baffling to me.
And the fact that somehow Trump is seen as an outsider makes this even more twisted: he's not an outsider, he comes from the funding class itself, the same class of people that people hate Hillary for being in bed with. He gets his money from a whole host of different sources than Hillary, but nothing I have seen or read about him makes me believe he's capable of any integrity, or in fact that he has any principles at all. I mean look at his so called 'tax plan', it's cuts to the very richest of the rich, meaning himself, the Kochs, the Waltons, etc. But somehow this is the guy who stands for change and for the little guy moreso than Hillary? On what basis?
Honestly about the only sensible opinion I've heard him say is his opposition to the trade agreements, but given his tendency to openly lie about what he said 5 minutes ago on tape and deny he ever said such a thing I have not got high hopes that he would stick to that either if elected.
Facts stopped mattering a long time ago in this race on Trump's side because he's a known liar and on Hillary's side because the same is true for he and on top of that no-one trusts the establishment. So this has become a weird pseudo-election in which it's not about the policies, it's not about the current state of affairs, it's not about factual argumentation, it's mainly about making sure the other side is perceived as the wrong lizard. It's reality tv masquerading as politics, which is why I guess Trump has gotten as far as he has.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: please change the election system towards something that better allows multiple parties to gain power and redo the laws on political funding. The proper reaction when you see that an establishment talking head and a clown are racing for the presidency is not to elect the clown out of protest, because giving a clown the
I was referring to its official goal as in controlling terror. Obviously it's benefited other instances and the governments to expand their power but from the standpoint of the citizenry it's been a total failure in every measurable way.
The question is "why"? - you have a higher chance of dying from a bee sting or a lightning strike, why not address the higher risks first?
Psychology. The nature of terrorism as a threat is what makes it so efffective towards western populations. I can avoid going out in a lightning storm, and I can for the most part reasonably well avoid bees, but the thing which makes terrorism such a hard issue to tackle is that it's unpredictable and usually there's not much you can do to avoid it if it hits and you happen to be there.
Same is true with car accidents and a whole host of other issues, but the difference is that this is intentional. People can mostly deal with the old truism of 'shit happens', when you're talking about natural catastrophes and accidents, but when you're talking about people with malicious intent, it's much harder to get people to adopt the notion that this really isn't a big deal. Add to that the fact that so far most strikes post 911 in the west have been small, but all it really takes is one major one again to cause massive panic and outrage: lightning and bee stings are not hoping on getting their hands on biological or nuclear weapons for maximum damage.
I'm personally not american and I agree that the war on terror (how can you even have a war on terror which usually is a direct consequence of war itself, that is, wars tend to cause terror) is a failure. I don't support draconian monitoring of people or what the intelligence agencies are doing. But I do think comparing terrorism to naturally occurring accidents is not exactly a good comparison because the 2 phenomenon are quite different in that only one of them is driven by conscious intent to harm people - and that matters when it comes to dealing with threats.
The material cost is actually a fairly small part of it
Are you seriously thinking that covering high-traffic road with glass-panes filled with electronics will keep the material costs small compared to a regular road?
The per area cost of these things is insanely high and they haven't even been able to demonstrate that these things can survive a single semi rolling over them, let alone thousands per day, while at the same time retaining their optical clarity so that the energy creation rate does not drop insanely due to scratching and dirt.
I have seen no material calculations or durability calculations of these things which would not make the whole project insanely inefficient and expensive, nor do any of the materials provided by the companies themselves change this. They've done no heavy-testing nor given out any reliable lifespan estimates etc etc... The idea is cool for sure, but the practical specs they've given inspire no confidence in it whatsoever,
It has been suggested that solar roadways can save money by replacing the substantial cost of building a road surface. Most of the cost of a road is in the road bed, the load bearing structure that gets hammered millions of times by trucks with only superficial damage. It is not possible, even in non-freezing climates, to build a load-bearing road without this base, so at best solar roadways requires the replacement of only the surface of the road (inexpensive bitumen and gravel) with concrete and steel, then tiles. LA freeways were originally built with concrete, but are now repaired with tarmac, aptly illustrating the price differential involved.
If a regular expressway costs about a million dollars per mile, solar roadways will add to this cost $400,000 for concrete (at $75/cubic meter) $250,000 for steel rebar and support pillars (conservative estimate at $1/foot) $17,000,000 for 170,000 tiles, at an incredibly conservative cost estimate of $100/tile. Actual cost is likely more like $1000/tile. Lets say when you throw in cabling, trenches, and margin for defective tiles it's $20m/mile. If you wanted to pave just Route 5 between LA and SF, that's $10b.
For the same price, you could, instead, install a real solar power plant in the high desert north east of LA that generated around 4GW of power (twice the size of Hoover dam, another renewable plant in the region). For the same price, you get 100x the power, 10x the lifetime, and Route 5 continues to be usable.
If you think these things are economically viable at the current level of tech/traffic amounts, you are the one that I'm sorry to say has no understanding of the unit-costs involved.
You do not have to choose between just Trump and Clinton. It doesn't have to be a crook or a thief.
While this is theoretically true, in practice the american political system is currently such that all elections are decided between 2 parties.
A two-party system often develops in a plurality voting system. In this system, voters have a single vote, which they can cast for a single candidate in their district, in which only one legislative seat is available. In plurality voting (i.e. first past the post), in which the winner of the seat is determined purely by the candidate with the most votes, several characteristics can serve to discourage the development of third parties and reward the two major parties.
Duverger suggests two reasons this voting system favors a two-party system. One is the result of the "fusion" (or an alliance very much like fusion) of the weak parties, and the other is the "elimination" of weak parties by the voters, by which he means that voters gradually desert the weak parties on the grounds that they have no chance of winning.[6][7]
A prominent restrictive feature unique to this system is purely statistical. Because the system gives only the winner in each district a seat, a party which consistently comes third in every district will not gain any seats in the legislature, even if it receives a significant proportion of the vote. This puts geographically thinly spread parties at a significant disadvantage. An example of this is the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom, whose proportion of seats in the legislature is significantly less than their proportion of the national vote. The Green Party of Canada is also a good example. The party received approximately 5% of the popular vote from 2004 to 2011 but had only won one seat (out of 308) in the House of Commons in the same span of time. Another example was seen in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, when Ross Perot's candidacy received zero electoral votes despite getting 19% of the popular vote. Gerrymandering is sometimes used to counteract such geographic difficulties in local politics but is controversial on a large scale. These numerical disadvantages can create an artificial limit on the level at which a third party can engage in the political process.
There are ways of setting up the system so that it favors multiple parties, but this requires large-scale reform towards some variant of proportional representation. And herein lies the core of the issue: since the existing parties both clearly benefit from the status quo which essentially makes it impossible for them to lose power, there's de facto no change they will be interested in reforming the political system or funding for that matter.
As far as I can see (as a non-American) the only change the people have to change the system would be getting it done through local levels (ie. through for example article 5 convention).
Bad choice of word from me there yeah. What I meant is that if in the example I gave the price for my ride is 35 dollars and yours is 20, the customer does not have access to all the information that has been used to set the price, nor does he have access to what other users are being charged for the same ride. This is what currently tilts the market in favor of the provider, be it lift or uber or any other.
This is not a "market failure". When supply is constricted, prices should go up so the rides go to those who need them most
Except that this is a market failure in the sense that the market is not fair as the customer and the supplier do not have access to the same amount of information about the state of supply and demand. That is, Uber can jack up the prices basically at any point and use 'increased demand' as a blank slate excuse for it and customers have no way of telling if this is indeed the case. If I'm buying a product and it's out of stock I know no-one else is currently getting it either so if the price goes up I can know for sure it is because of increased demand.
Uber can basically dictate the price, and we have no way of telling which combination of factors their algorithms are using to come up with that price. We already know they've been guilty of using the phone's battery level to affect pricing. It's very likely they also have databases on just how much each customer has usually been willing to pay.
So this being the case if you and me both ordered a ride at the same spot on the exact same time to the same destination, with me being a heavy user with a low battery and you being a first time user, the prices we might get for side ride might differ wildly, even though the product/service being offered is exactly the same and costs exactly the same to produce.
To me, this goes against the core principles of free market, because this is equivalent to the pharmacy charging me more for pain meds if they know I'm in extreme agony, or the store charging me more for food if they knew I was starving.
I want to be clear that I have nothing against Uber raising prices when it is actually the case that demand is high. I'm just saying there needs to be more oversight and transparency to ensure that they cannot manipulate the price in ways which are unfair to the consumer under the pretense of 'high demand'.
What makes people think professionals known for introversion want to have absolutely NO privacy?
It doesn't have much to do with what they think the programmers want, it's an efficiency measure. You can fit more people into the same space and as an added bonus they can be more easily monitored. This is enough of a reason for many companies to move to these types of offices and then they just sprinkle some BS about how it's really for the good of the workers.
It really depends on the type of job. I like my privacy as well, but I've worked jobs in which having the team you work with in the same space actually is a convenience and since I pretty much blast music from my headphones 90 % of the time anyway it's not as big of a deal for me.
Point is, some people work better alone, some work better with others, and a smart company tailors their premises to accommodate both.
Satan: Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He's a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does He do, I swear for His own amusement, his own private, cosmic gag reel, He sets the rules in opposition. It's the goof of all time. Look but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow. Ahaha. And while you're jumpin' from one foot to the next, what is he doing? He's laughin' His sick, fuckin' ass off! He's a tight-ass! He's a SADIST! He's an absentee landlord! Worship that? NEVER! Kevin Lomax: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven", is that it? Satan: Why not? I'm here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. I've nurtured every sensation man's been inspired to have. I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him. Why? Because I never rejected him. In spite of all his imperfections, I'm a fan of man! I'm a humanist. Maybe the last humanist.
While this is true, it almost wasn't the case. I happen to know that the R&D side of Nokia had a plan/prototype for a touch-screen operated phone at around the turn of the millenium. They however deemed it to be too expensive to be marketable as the touchscreen tech of the time was expensive and unreliable. Their only mistake was to scrap the project entirely, which left them permanently behind in the smart-phone race when it soon began.
Nokia was essentially lead by engineers, which led to them being overly focused on the devices and pushing out new iterations of those, rather than streamlining the selection and focusing on features and the OS more. Symbian was a mess partially because they had such a wide array of phones that it needed to run on that trying to develop a modern phone OS out of it that could have competed with the likes of Android and iOS would've required cutting down on the amount of new phones to be pushed out every year. And they didn't want that, because at the time they thought the diversity of selection was what was going to keep them in the lead.
However, most of the other arguments you provide rest on the premise that "the demand for low skill human labor will drop very close to zero as most menial jobs and quite many more complex jobs can be automated." This assertion is not supported by historical precedent: every time something has been created to reduce labor, we just find other ways to keep people busy
For the first time in hisotry we're starting to see a point in which machines are not just there to ease production in the hands of humans, but to take it over completely. Take something like drivers as an example: logistics is a huge part of modern day life in any economy, and moving stuff from place A to place B provides work for a lot of people. Now then, as technology has advanced less and less people have been able to transport larger and larger amounts of stuff. In the very near future we will start needing no drivers at all, as cars will navigate themselves.
So then, you say that these people who used to drive trucs and cars will simply do something else... what? By the time self-driving cars become common place, a good deal of other low skill jobs will have already gone. The number of warehousing jobs and data entry office jobs is falling as automated warehousing and scanning systems are takjing jobs away from both etc...
Of course technology creates some new jobs with it, but the point is that these technologies create less jobs than they automate. A completely automated warehouse will require maybe a handful of people to supervise and maintain the system wherein it used to employ tens if not hundreds of people etc...
You cannot simply assume work will pop up from out of nowhere for people, since most jobs uneducated people could do can soon be handled more cheaply and more efficiently by machines.
Where will they get their sense of achievement (assuming they're not very religious)?
Hobbies, arts, etc. I mean, we don't yet know, but we do know that many people simply will not have a skillset that will be worth enough in the market for them to be employed. It doesn't matter if you're a top notch welder once we have robots that can do pinpoint accuracy welding 24/7 with less mistakes than a human. That means people will have to start finding their sense of achievement in things other than work for the most part.
When living on UBI is comfortable, we've lost the "significant improvement" incentive
Well living on the UBI is supposed to be comfortable because as I'm trying to explain to you, it's pretty much inevitable at this point that within the next century most non-highly educated people will have to be without jobs. The alternatives are even worse: not having a UBI means these people will still be without a job and they can easily become a destabilizing force in the societies.
Being poor is not a purely economic problem. It's chiefly a social problem and yes, throwing money at the poor won't fix the social problem.
But it is also an economic problem and what you're not understanding is that you cannot fix poverty with incentive-based systems in a future in which the market has no need for the majority of people who have no valuable skills.
Slavery is morally wrong... and so is freeloading.
In a future in which there will only be jobs for a small segment of the populace 'freeloading' (ie. living unemployed) will be the norm, not the exception, and as such it cannot be seen as morally wrong. The idea that one has to expend X amount of physical/mental labor to be able to live 'morally' within a society can only be valid so as long as that is something that is possible for everybody to do, since that won't be the case very soon, saying that somehow because we've managed to use technology to reduce the need of workers (which is, in the end, the whole point of technology from the start) makes not working
The future you describe is very close as compared to existence of humans, but still 50-1000 years away. Definitely not before 50 years,
Well, when I used 'decades' I basically mean within this century. Like, sure, some things might take a lot of time, but many changes I suspect will happen a lot sooner than people expect. I mean, we can already see that for example the driverless cars are quite close, and that change alone will start to affect the employment of a great deal of people relatively soon, and before that a lot of regular office jobs which are primarily data input will be gone. So yeah, to get to the full on '0 % manual labor' type of situation might take a long time you're right, but we'll start needing something like the UBI way before we hit that point, which is why some countries are starting to consider it now.
The government now becomes the provider, rather than the individual
Yes, but that's the whole point of it. The reason something like the UBI will be needed by every country sooner or later is that in the foreseeable future the demand for low skill human labor will drop very close to zero as most menial jobs and quite many more complex jobs can be automated.
When we remove the incentive to work, we reduce production.
No, not always. As explained above, we're headed toa future were most simple jobs are done by machines. This means these things are still produced, they're just not produced by human workers.
More importantly, the satisfaction of working disappears. Is work not respectable? Do people not get a sense of achievement when they can be self-reliant? Isn't that what all liberals claim to be for? Freedom and individualism? How can one be for those and also for basic income?
Very simply: because we recognize that having everyone be fully employed in the future is an impossibility, one's freedom to live should not be defined by work. This doesn't mean work is not respectable, and many people will probably be working part time still, and contribute to a number of things via which they can get their sense of achievement.
UBI makes upward mobility difficult by making the reward of getting a job less. How can we expect someone to climb up the ladder if the first three steps are less attractive than not getting on it?
But again, since there will be massses of people for whom work simply does not exist in the coming decades, UBI is a necessity. It's not like these people can somehow all be compelled to work when the demand of human labor required will be far below the amount of people on the planet. 'Climbing up the ladder' is not something that everyone CAN do, so those people must be provided for and UBI-like systems look like the most sensible way to achieve this.
The people who have the intellectual capabilities to educate themselves for a job they can actually do will still be motivated, because most people want a better/higher standard of living. We have quite extensive unemployment benefits here in Finland, yet people still look for work instead of just living on the benefits, because even though the difference between a low wage job and being on the benefits might not be more than a few hundred euros that few hundred euros more in disposable income is a significant improvement in one's standard of living.
Throwing money at the issue isn't going to fix it. We must make a path out of poverty, not make it more comfortable.
Throwing money at the poor doesn't make them less poor?
Overall, it seems to me that a great deal of people who oppose the idea of UBI do not understand the economic realities especially western post-industrialized economies are facing in the very near future. The whole concept of employment will change drastically as less and less humans are needed for companies and services to operate. This means we have to change our ideas about the role of work in everyday life, because the technological advances that are rushing us towards this age are already happening and they cannot be stopped.
Our economies have adapted to similar major shifts before: the cessation of slave labor, the industrial revolution, etc. and we'll adapt again, and the history will likely look back at the guys who thought UBI was the end of the world as akin to those who said the ending of slavery would cause major economic meltdowns.
Through technology, Republicans are destroying jobs.
No. Neither the republicans or democrats are responsible for general technological progress or the economic fact that once a job can be automated, it's nearly always more efficient to leave it to a machine. This has been the case ever since the industrial revolution started and is obviously accelerating, but it's not as if some political group gets together somewhere and schemes to do this; we've reached a point in which technological progress is pretty much unstoppable and will keep happening no matter what politicians say or do,
I'm a part of the European left, so I'm pretty fucking far from republicans ideologically, but even so it's incredibly cheap and shortsighted to blame anyone - even one's political adversaries - for something as basic and natural to modern day human life as innovations, and on this site of all places, where all of us should know better.
So you don't like the oncoming nightmare of automation?
That's not what he said at all, the automation is not a problem in and of itself and he never claimed so.
Why not "rage up and fight the machines"
Because you can't roll back technological progress and history has shown us that, the luddites never win.
If all you do is whine about and post your whininess on/. then you are not solving the problem are you?
The whiny ones talk and talk and ultimately do nothing. The silent ones say very little because they focus on solving the problems. Which one are you?
The irony of ironies here is that of you 2, he's the one that actually mentioned a solution (universal basic income) whereas all you did was misrepresent his position as well as whining without adding anything of value to the conversation.
Know who you are citing. Skeptical Science is not trustworthy.
Be the background and education of the founder what they may, the point is the arguments made by OP are not supported by peer reviewed science. That is, the veracity of the studies and results which point to OP being wrong - are not dependent on the credentials of whoever founded the blog because he has had no part in said studies. He claimed UAH satellites show the stratosphere is not warming, and I pointed out that UAH itself has explicitly said this is not the case. here's the link to the paper itself.
So, if the articles quoted and mentioned which refute OPs claims are not accurate, I ask you and other to link to peer reviewed papers showing that to be the case, because pointing out that whoever started the blog isn't very good at math has absolutely no relevance to the veracity of the actual scientific papers mentioned.
The computer simulations suggest that water vapor should increase temperatures by around 4 C.The computer simulations suggest that water vapor should increase temperatures by around 4 C. Yet the latest measurement of this (the 'Transient Climate Sensitivity') show the computer simulations don't match reality
There are two ways of working out what climate sensitivity is. The first method is by modelling:
Climate models have predicted the least temperature rise would be on average 1.65C (2.97F) , but upper estimates vary a lot, averaging 5.2C (9.36F). Current best estimates are for a rise of around 3C (5.4F), with a likely maximum of 4.5C (8.1F).
The second method calculates climate sensitivity directly from physical evidence, by looking at climate changes in the distant past:
These calculations use data from sources like ice cores to work out how much additional heat the doubling of greenhouse gases will produce. These estimates are very consistent, finding between 2 and 4.5C global surface warming in response to doubled carbon dioxide.
All the models and evidence confirm a minimum warming close to 2C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 with a most likely value of 3C and the potential to warm 4.5C or even more.
Granted, you didn't specify wat exactly do you mean by 'latest' here, the PALEONSENS study ('Making sense of palaeoclimate sensitivity', from Nature, link can be found in the article) is from 2012. If you have some newer peer reviewed research showing these types of results are somehow false, please link them and don't just state these things as if they're facts.
Furthermore CAGW makes the specific prediction that the Lower Tropical Troposphere temperatures will increase faster than the Earth's surface temperatures - yet not only is this not seen, the opposite is seen by all measurements, including our most reliable ones, the RSS and UAH satellites (and corroborated by thousands of weather balloon samples). Again this falsifies the CAGW Hypothesis.
The MSU satellite data is collected from a number of satellites orbiting & providing daily coverage of some 80% of the Earth's surface. Each day the orbits shift and 100% coverage is achieved every 3-4 days. The microwave sensors on the satellites do not directly measure temperature, but rather radiation given off by oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. The intensity of this radiation is directly proportional to the temperature of the air and is therefore used to estimate global temperatures.
There are also differences between the sensors that were onboard each satellite and merging this data to one continuous record is not easily done. It was nearly 13 years after the original papers that the adjustments that Christy and Spencer originally applied were found to be incorrect. Mears et al. (2003) and Mears et al. (2005).
When the correct adjustments to the data were applied the data matched much more closely the trends expected by climate models. It was also more consistent with the historical record of troposphere temperatures obtained from weather balloons. As better methods to adjust for biases in instruments and orbital changes have been developed, the differences between the surface temperature record and the troposphere have steadily decreased.
At least two other groups keep track of the tropospheric temperature using satellites and they all now show warming in the troposphere that is consistent with the surface temperature record. Furthermore data also shows now that the stratosphere is cooling as predicted by the physics.
All three groups measuring temperatures of the troposphere show a warming trend. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program produced a study (
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Actually no, no it isn't. The people looking for shelter from western countries are the people Daesh is currently throwing of buildings and massacring.
You created a failed state and a power vacuum in the middle-east, which lead to the rise of a theocratic quasi-nation of murderous madmen who're killing their own countrymen and fellow muslims en masse, and then when this population of civilians escape helloholes like Aleppo in hopes of not getting blown to bits amidst all of the fighting, people put them in the same category as the heinous murderers that they're escaping from. It's ridiculous.
Now is it true that Daesh is trying to sneak some guys in with this flood of people? Yes, absolutely it's true. But does that mean that because a tiny fraction of the wave of immigrants might be evil, the west should abandon all shreds of humanism and let the civilians be crushed by conflict? Have you seen the shape Aleppo is in?
We're at a point, wherein we here in Finland with 1/50th of US population have taken as much refugees as the US (10 000), and we had NOTHING to do with starting this conflict in the first place, and the US is supposed to be the 'land of the brave' and somehow the epitome of western morality? If so, stop being a bunch of pussies and take some responsibility for your own actions and do something to help the people whose lives your well intentioned but horribly executed nation building exercise has totally fucked up.
Or should we just give up on you guys and amend that with 'unless they're brown people escaping a conflict we started, in that case FUCK THEM!'?
I was recently at the Louis C. K. show here in Helsinki and they did not require anyone to lock away their phones, but prior to the show there was an announcement that anyone caught filming the show will be ejected.
As a lover of stand-up, I can understand why they're strict about this: the tickets to the show cost nearly 60 euros and essentially people are paying that to hear new material. It's different from music and other performing arts where most often people know what they're going to see. AC/DC won't lose any ticket sales if a few dozen guys upload a shitty quality video of Thunderstruck from midfield. But a recording - even audio only - of the new material by a stand up performer will probably hurt ticket sales.
That being said this seems like overreach: I did not see anyone being ejected from the aforementioned show (well, outside 1 dude who was way too drunk but he wasn't recording). People who've invested money to get to the show are unlikely to risk missing the show just to get a clip online, so I don't see a need for such a high-tech solution.
Ah yes, because having a wall street endoresed 1 % is bad surely electing someone who belongs to said 1 % and has said: “It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.”
Yes, yes indeed, this is the candidate that will put wall street in its place and change the status quo!
How... how does this shit fly with the american public, seriously?
They're not obvious to everyone, in fact it'd seem they're not obvious to most people. There haveve been a few studies done on how well people, especially young people recognize sponsored content as an ad and the results are quite far from it being obvious:
As adblocking has become easier than ever advertisers have evolved and sponsored content is the new trend, and even though to you or me it's blatantly obvious to pick these out, many people are easily deceived. So if we want to make sure advertisers cannot deceive consumers emphasizing correct labeling is important.
You're under the illusion that evidence, or facts, make any difference in this election. We live in the golden era of conspiracies, wherein 'the official truth' can always be disregarded when it comes to politicians and governments and replaced with one's own version of the truth supported by the relevant blogs.
Remember, one side of this race states that he believes climate change to be a chinese conspiracy. This is not a level playing field of factual argumentation, this is a shitshow. It matters not how things actually are but how they're perceived. Traditionally the media is supposed to act as a watchdog and catch politicians on their lies, but it seems to me that the US media has given up on that a long time ago and now its just reporting what the red team says and how the blue team responded.
Functioning democracies require the voters to be informed, and at the risk of sounding condescending, the american public at large is not, which is why Trump is where he is.
All of this is very true. However, I'd argue that this is the kind of situation that the amendments made for. I mean, if it's the case as it now looks to be that the electoral system has slipped from the hands of the population to the hands of a tiny minority of wealthy individuals and institutions that control effectively both parties, is this not a case wherein seeking to amend the constitution to alter this state would be precisely the moral thing to do?
Sure it's no easy task to get done, but it is, in my opinion, the one thing that's currently holding back legitimate change in the US. As long as the red team and the blue team control everything and anything, nobody - not even Trump - is going to rock the boat too hard and the revolving door from Washington to lobbying firms will keep spinning.
I based the remark on analysis of his plans that I've read such as this and a few others which seem to agree that his plan would increase the incomes of the top 1 %, but I admit I do not know if the plan on his page has been altered since these kinds of calculations have been last done.
Thanks for the interesting points about the tapes. Do you happen to have a source on the point about the reactions being out before the tape itself? Would be interesting to check out.
-So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Watching this election from the outside has been one of the most absurd experiences in my life thus far. The fact that these 2, both of whom are massively hated, are what the american version of 'democracy' (quotes because if this election doesn't showcase the huge issues with the primary-system I don't know what will) produces is just baffling to me.
And the fact that somehow Trump is seen as an outsider makes this even more twisted: he's not an outsider, he comes from the funding class itself, the same class of people that people hate Hillary for being in bed with. He gets his money from a whole host of different sources than Hillary, but nothing I have seen or read about him makes me believe he's capable of any integrity, or in fact that he has any principles at all. I mean look at his so called 'tax plan', it's cuts to the very richest of the rich, meaning himself, the Kochs, the Waltons, etc. But somehow this is the guy who stands for change and for the little guy moreso than Hillary? On what basis?
Honestly about the only sensible opinion I've heard him say is his opposition to the trade agreements, but given his tendency to openly lie about what he said 5 minutes ago on tape and deny he ever said such a thing I have not got high hopes that he would stick to that either if elected.
Facts stopped mattering a long time ago in this race on Trump's side because he's a known liar and on Hillary's side because the same is true for he and on top of that no-one trusts the establishment. So this has become a weird pseudo-election in which it's not about the policies, it's not about the current state of affairs, it's not about factual argumentation, it's mainly about making sure the other side is perceived as the wrong lizard. It's reality tv masquerading as politics, which is why I guess Trump has gotten as far as he has.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: please change the election system towards something that better allows multiple parties to gain power and redo the laws on political funding. The proper reaction when you see that an establishment talking head and a clown are racing for the presidency is not to elect the clown out of protest, because giving a clown the
I never said I assumed so, that's why I differentiated between official reason and actual reason, I get - and agree with - your point.
I was referring to its official goal as in controlling terror. Obviously it's benefited other instances and the governments to expand their power but from the standpoint of the citizenry it's been a total failure in every measurable way.
Psychology. The nature of terrorism as a threat is what makes it so efffective towards western populations. I can avoid going out in a lightning storm, and I can for the most part reasonably well avoid bees, but the thing which makes terrorism such a hard issue to tackle is that it's unpredictable and usually there's not much you can do to avoid it if it hits and you happen to be there.
Same is true with car accidents and a whole host of other issues, but the difference is that this is intentional. People can mostly deal with the old truism of 'shit happens', when you're talking about natural catastrophes and accidents, but when you're talking about people with malicious intent, it's much harder to get people to adopt the notion that this really isn't a big deal. Add to that the fact that so far most strikes post 911 in the west have been small, but all it really takes is one major one again to cause massive panic and outrage: lightning and bee stings are not hoping on getting their hands on biological or nuclear weapons for maximum damage.
I'm personally not american and I agree that the war on terror (how can you even have a war on terror which usually is a direct consequence of war itself, that is, wars tend to cause terror) is a failure. I don't support draconian monitoring of people or what the intelligence agencies are doing. But I do think comparing terrorism to naturally occurring accidents is not exactly a good comparison because the 2 phenomenon are quite different in that only one of them is driven by conscious intent to harm people - and that matters when it comes to dealing with threats.
Are you seriously thinking that covering high-traffic road with glass-panes filled with electronics will keep the material costs small compared to a regular road?
The per area cost of these things is insanely high and they haven't even been able to demonstrate that these things can survive a single semi rolling over them, let alone thousands per day, while at the same time retaining their optical clarity so that the energy creation rate does not drop insanely due to scratching and dirt.
I have seen no material calculations or durability calculations of these things which would not make the whole project insanely inefficient and expensive, nor do any of the materials provided by the companies themselves change this. They've done no heavy-testing nor given out any reliable lifespan estimates etc etc... The idea is cool for sure, but the practical specs they've given inspire no confidence in it whatsoever,
(Source)
If you think these things are economically viable at the current level of tech/traffic amounts, you are the one that I'm sorry to say has no understanding of the unit-costs involved.
While this is theoretically true, in practice the american political system is currently such that all elections are decided between 2 parties.
(Source: wiki article on Duverger's law
There are ways of setting up the system so that it favors multiple parties, but this requires large-scale reform towards some variant of proportional representation. And herein lies the core of the issue: since the existing parties both clearly benefit from the status quo which essentially makes it impossible for them to lose power, there's de facto no change they will be interested in reforming the political system or funding for that matter.
As far as I can see (as a non-American) the only change the people have to change the system would be getting it done through local levels (ie. through for example article 5 convention).
Bad choice of word from me there yeah. What I meant is that if in the example I gave the price for my ride is 35 dollars and yours is 20, the customer does not have access to all the information that has been used to set the price, nor does he have access to what other users are being charged for the same ride. This is what currently tilts the market in favor of the provider, be it lift or uber or any other.
Except that this is a market failure in the sense that the market is not fair as the customer and the supplier do not have access to the same amount of information about the state of supply and demand. That is, Uber can jack up the prices basically at any point and use 'increased demand' as a blank slate excuse for it and customers have no way of telling if this is indeed the case. If I'm buying a product and it's out of stock I know no-one else is currently getting it either so if the price goes up I can know for sure it is because of increased demand.
Uber can basically dictate the price, and we have no way of telling which combination of factors their algorithms are using to come up with that price. We already know they've been guilty of using the phone's battery level to affect pricing. It's very likely they also have databases on just how much each customer has usually been willing to pay.
So this being the case if you and me both ordered a ride at the same spot on the exact same time to the same destination, with me being a heavy user with a low battery and you being a first time user, the prices we might get for side ride might differ wildly, even though the product/service being offered is exactly the same and costs exactly the same to produce.
To me, this goes against the core principles of free market, because this is equivalent to the pharmacy charging me more for pain meds if they know I'm in extreme agony, or the store charging me more for food if they knew I was starving.
I want to be clear that I have nothing against Uber raising prices when it is actually the case that demand is high. I'm just saying there needs to be more oversight and transparency to ensure that they cannot manipulate the price in ways which are unfair to the consumer under the pretense of 'high demand'.
It doesn't have much to do with what they think the programmers want, it's an efficiency measure. You can fit more people into the same space and as an added bonus they can be more easily monitored. This is enough of a reason for many companies to move to these types of offices and then they just sprinkle some BS about how it's really for the good of the workers.
It really depends on the type of job. I like my privacy as well, but I've worked jobs in which having the team you work with in the same space actually is a convenience and since I pretty much blast music from my headphones 90 % of the time anyway it's not as big of a deal for me.
Point is, some people work better alone, some work better with others, and a smart company tailors their premises to accommodate both.
To quote a movie:
While this is true, it almost wasn't the case. I happen to know that the R&D side of Nokia had a plan/prototype for a touch-screen operated phone at around the turn of the millenium. They however deemed it to be too expensive to be marketable as the touchscreen tech of the time was expensive and unreliable. Their only mistake was to scrap the project entirely, which left them permanently behind in the smart-phone race when it soon began.
Nokia was essentially lead by engineers, which led to them being overly focused on the devices and pushing out new iterations of those, rather than streamlining the selection and focusing on features and the OS more. Symbian was a mess partially because they had such a wide array of phones that it needed to run on that trying to develop a modern phone OS out of it that could have competed with the likes of Android and iOS would've required cutting down on the amount of new phones to be pushed out every year. And they didn't want that, because at the time they thought the diversity of selection was what was going to keep them in the lead.
For the first time in hisotry we're starting to see a point in which machines are not just there to ease production in the hands of humans, but to take it over completely. Take something like drivers as an example: logistics is a huge part of modern day life in any economy, and moving stuff from place A to place B provides work for a lot of people. Now then, as technology has advanced less and less people have been able to transport larger and larger amounts of stuff. In the very near future we will start needing no drivers at all, as cars will navigate themselves.
So then, you say that these people who used to drive trucs and cars will simply do something else... what? By the time self-driving cars become common place, a good deal of other low skill jobs will have already gone. The number of warehousing jobs and data entry office jobs is falling as automated warehousing and scanning systems are takjing jobs away from both etc...
Of course technology creates some new jobs with it, but the point is that these technologies create less jobs than they automate. A completely automated warehouse will require maybe a handful of people to supervise and maintain the system wherein it used to employ tens if not hundreds of people etc...
You cannot simply assume work will pop up from out of nowhere for people, since most jobs uneducated people could do can soon be handled more cheaply and more efficiently by machines.
Hobbies, arts, etc. I mean, we don't yet know, but we do know that many people simply will not have a skillset that will be worth enough in the market for them to be employed. It doesn't matter if you're a top notch welder once we have robots that can do pinpoint accuracy welding 24/7 with less mistakes than a human. That means people will have to start finding their sense of achievement in things other than work for the most part.
Well living on the UBI is supposed to be comfortable because as I'm trying to explain to you, it's pretty much inevitable at this point that within the next century most non-highly educated people will have to be without jobs. The alternatives are even worse: not having a UBI means these people will still be without a job and they can easily become a destabilizing force in the societies.
But it is also an economic problem and what you're not understanding is that you cannot fix poverty with incentive-based systems in a future in which the market has no need for the majority of people who have no valuable skills.
In a future in which there will only be jobs for a small segment of the populace 'freeloading' (ie. living unemployed) will be the norm, not the exception, and as such it cannot be seen as morally wrong. The idea that one has to expend X amount of physical/mental labor to be able to live 'morally' within a society can only be valid so as long as that is something that is possible for everybody to do, since that won't be the case very soon, saying that somehow because we've managed to use technology to reduce the need of workers (which is, in the end, the whole point of technology from the start) makes not working
Well, when I used 'decades' I basically mean within this century. Like, sure, some things might take a lot of time, but many changes I suspect will happen a lot sooner than people expect. I mean, we can already see that for example the driverless cars are quite close, and that change alone will start to affect the employment of a great deal of people relatively soon, and before that a lot of regular office jobs which are primarily data input will be gone. So yeah, to get to the full on '0 % manual labor' type of situation might take a long time you're right, but we'll start needing something like the UBI way before we hit that point, which is why some countries are starting to consider it now.
Yes, but that's the whole point of it. The reason something like the UBI will be needed by every country sooner or later is that in the foreseeable future the demand for low skill human labor will drop very close to zero as most menial jobs and quite many more complex jobs can be automated.
No, not always. As explained above, we're headed toa future were most simple jobs are done by machines. This means these things are still produced, they're just not produced by human workers.
Very simply: because we recognize that having everyone be fully employed in the future is an impossibility, one's freedom to live should not be defined by work. This doesn't mean work is not respectable, and many people will probably be working part time still, and contribute to a number of things via which they can get their sense of achievement.
But again, since there will be massses of people for whom work simply does not exist in the coming decades, UBI is a necessity. It's not like these people can somehow all be compelled to work when the demand of human labor required will be far below the amount of people on the planet. 'Climbing up the ladder' is not something that everyone CAN do, so those people must be provided for and UBI-like systems look like the most sensible way to achieve this.
The people who have the intellectual capabilities to educate themselves for a job they can actually do will still be motivated, because most people want a better/higher standard of living. We have quite extensive unemployment benefits here in Finland, yet people still look for work instead of just living on the benefits, because even though the difference between a low wage job and being on the benefits might not be more than a few hundred euros that few hundred euros more in disposable income is a significant improvement in one's standard of living.
Throwing money at the poor doesn't make them less poor?
Overall, it seems to me that a great deal of people who oppose the idea of UBI do not understand the economic realities especially western post-industrialized economies are facing in the very near future. The whole concept of employment will change drastically as less and less humans are needed for companies and services to operate. This means we have to change our ideas about the role of work in everyday life, because the technological advances that are rushing us towards this age are already happening and they cannot be stopped.
Our economies have adapted to similar major shifts before: the cessation of slave labor, the industrial revolution, etc. and we'll adapt again, and the history will likely look back at the guys who thought UBI was the end of the world as akin to those who said the ending of slavery would cause major economic meltdowns.
No. Neither the republicans or democrats are responsible for general technological progress or the economic fact that once a job can be automated, it's nearly always more efficient to leave it to a machine. This has been the case ever since the industrial revolution started and is obviously accelerating, but it's not as if some political group gets together somewhere and schemes to do this; we've reached a point in which technological progress is pretty much unstoppable and will keep happening no matter what politicians say or do,
I'm a part of the European left, so I'm pretty fucking far from republicans ideologically, but even so it's incredibly cheap and shortsighted to blame anyone - even one's political adversaries - for something as basic and natural to modern day human life as innovations, and on this site of all places, where all of us should know better.
That's not what he said at all, the automation is not a problem in and of itself and he never claimed so.
Because you can't roll back technological progress and history has shown us that, the luddites never win.
The irony of ironies here is that of you 2, he's the one that actually mentioned a solution (universal basic income) whereas all you did was misrepresent his position as well as whining without adding anything of value to the conversation.
Be the background and education of the founder what they may, the point is the arguments made by OP are not supported by peer reviewed science. That is, the veracity of the studies and results which point to OP being wrong - are not dependent on the credentials of whoever founded the blog because he has had no part in said studies. He claimed UAH satellites show the stratosphere is not warming, and I pointed out that UAH itself has explicitly said this is not the case. here's the link to the paper itself.
So, if the articles quoted and mentioned which refute OPs claims are not accurate, I ask you and other to link to peer reviewed papers showing that to be the case, because pointing out that whoever started the blog isn't very good at math has absolutely no relevance to the veracity of the actual scientific papers mentioned.
This is incorrect
Granted, you didn't specify wat exactly do you mean by 'latest' here, the PALEONSENS study ('Making sense of palaeoclimate sensitivity', from Nature, link can be found in the article) is from 2012. If you have some newer peer reviewed research showing these types of results are somehow false, please link them and don't just state these things as if they're facts.
This is incorrect