No. Again, the amount of the minimum wage has nothing to do with the facts that humans cannot compete with a machine specifically designed to be more cost-efficient at a given task. The fact that you still do not understand this after being given the example from China where pays are a fraction of the West baffles my mind.
Guess what? EVERYBODY starts out untrained.
Giess what? This has nothing to do with the argument.
Things like $15/hour minimum-wage laws de facto ensure untrained people with no experience ARE STUCK in poverty.
Is that your goal? Pricing untrained workers out of the labor market and leaving them stuck in a cycle of poverty?
No. There are plenty of western countries in which fast food wporkers make around or above 15 dollars an hour and are not in fact stuck in poverty. But the thing is, whether they make 5 dollars or 20 dollars an hour does not alter the fact that in 20-30 years no-one will be making anything doing these kinds of repetitive manual tasks because again no matter the awge point automation is the more efficient route to go, and that's what companies care about. Unless the societies at large address this by adopting systems like universal basic income, the vast majority of people will become stuck in poverty because they have no skillset that would allow them to find work, and assuming that everyone will simply acquire a higher education and be able to find a job is unrealistic, both because not everyone has the mental capacity to be highly educated, and secondly because there will simply not exist enough of these kinds of positions to employ everyone.
Next thing you know, you'll tell me it's a great idea to force all employers to give health insurance coverage to all full-time workers, and that won't simply cause employers to limit workers to part-time status.
If your goal was to come off as the most stereotypical 'ignorant American', you've succeeded with flying colors. You do understand that every single industrialized country outside the US, including my own, already does this and does this with the health care costs being less than those in the US, right? Universal health care hasn't been a point of contention anywhere but in the States for several decades, as you're the only first world nation that still does not get that it's the waty to go if you want to both reduce the costs of the health care system and keep people healthier.
Again: you can't legislate what a person's labor is actually worth.
Again, I never claimed that, I pointed out that the root of the problem will remain totally regardless of whether the minimum wage exists or not and how much it is, and you chose to reply by wrapping yourself in the American flag and screaming about totally unrelated things.
You seriously need to do some reading on the topic(s) and educate yourself. Because if you think that automation and issues of poverty can be solved by removing or lowering the minimum wage, your level of ignorance is fast approaching that of your current president.
Guess what? You can't legislate what your labor is actually worth.
No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's about total cost per hour, it's about efficiency and machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing. Let's do the math.
The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay. Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages. So your equivalents in China are essentially yelling: 'yeah, how about that, priced yourself right out of a job! If you only were satisfied with working at 3 dollars a day you maybe could have kept your job for another 5 years before it was automated!"
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
Where did truck drivers, airplane stewards, luggage handlers, tarmac layers, silicon wafer makers, oil drillers, earset makers, cell tower technicians, etc come from?
None of those jobs nor even the countless ones supporting them existed at one time. If you asked people at the time, they couldn't even imagine such jobs.
No-one is saying that new job descriptions will not appear in the future. But the thing is AI - both the narrow-AI systems being developed now and in the future more generalized AI - is an entirely different shift than that of the previous 'dumb'/mechanic automation. Once AI-guided production becomes more commonplace, which will occur in the coming decades, a big chunk of humans will lose their jobs but they will also not be able to easily train themselves with a new skillset that would be of any value. The more widespread AI-based automation becomes, the cheaper it will become which will lower the marginal utility of hiring humans for most jobs. This is especially apparent on production and logistics side where humans are already most often the slowest and most inefficient part of the process. The only reason not all warehouses are fully automatic at this point is the cost, and the cost is coming down as time goes along.Once general purpose AI is reached (and there's no reason to suspect it won't be reached eventually unless one is stubborn enough to argue for some kind of a 'soul' that would make the capabilities of a human brain beyond achievable for a computerized system) then pretty much any job that requires thinking/analyzing data will be done faster and better by machines.
It's misguided to assume that human labor will remain competitive with super-intelligent systems indefinitely. Essentially any job that requires manual precision or quality control can already be done much more efficiently by computer-aided systems than by humans, and this trend is only going to continue.
The market does not magically optimize itself for full-employment. Humans will only be hired if they're the only way to get something done, or massively cheaper than machines. For the next 1-2 decades this will remain the case in many fields, but with the rate of advancement we're seeing already in AI and the fact that any new production facilities built in the west require a fraction of the workforce from 10-20 years ago, comparing the upcoming shift to the automation boom from the 60s onwards is not a valid comparison.
In such a free completely covered system, how do you prevent someone from faking a more serious condition in order to get a free ride?
For the trip to be covered the hospital needs to confirm that the trip was required. That is, someone can take a cab or an ambulance to a hospital with the cost being 25, but unless the hospital agrees that the trip was required, the trip is not covered and will be charged from said person in its entirety.
This is enough to keep abuses minimal to my knowledge, meaning I'm at least not aware that people misusing the system would be a major issue cost-wise, even though I'm unable to provide you with exact figures as to the amount of these cases.
I've had to go to the ER for a non life threatening injury that prevented me from driving myself. I wish I would have though to call Uber or a cab. It would have saved me thousands.
Here in Finland the Social Insurance Institution actually will pay for your cab ride to a hospital for the part that exceeds 25 euros. That is, if you take a cab and the cost is 300 because of a long trip, you will pay 25 euros, the rest is covered by the state. Same goes for ambulances, the patient has to pay 25 euros for the ride to a hospital/nearest point of treatment. After that, once the patient is admitted to care, if he/she needs to be moved to another hospital for exams or treatment at a better equiped facilit, it is covered for by the single payer medical system, ie. the patient doesn't pay a dime for it.
I work for the Hospital district of Helsinki and Uusimaa and as the largest district in the country we're in charge of all the highly specialized care in Finland, for example all of the really complex surgeries are handled here. Because we're one of the larger countries in Europe, this means we routinely get patients from up north in Lapland traveling distances of close to 1000 kilometers to reach urgent treatment here. In situations of extreme urgency, helicopters are used, this is usually done for example in cases where the patient has an entire limb detached due to an accident and needs to be operated within hours for recovery to be viable. Donated organs are also routinely flown in with copters,
Obviously this isn't cheap, as transfering patients over long distances costs both in time of treatment staff as well as equipment an fuel costs. All that being said, our total medical expenditure for the public system is around 4040 dollars per capita, which is about 40,8 % of the 9890 dollars per capita spent in the States, according to the OECD..
In fact, as I've said before and I'll say again: every single universal model in existence is cheaper than the current US model, which is why every other OECD member has adopted some variation of a universal model, not all of which are single payer.
European law says that Microsoft cannot hand the data over to foreign (US) authorities.
The law does not say that, actually, nor is the argument MS is making; MS is not saying that handing over the data would be illegal for them to do on the EU side, but that as the search warrant being used is a domestic one, said warrant does not apply to data outside the US. The law in Europe says that Microsoft or any other corporation cannot process data concerning EU citizens outside the Union without following European law. This means 2 things:
1) If the data in question is not of European citizens but American citizens, in so far as I understand, there's nothing that prevents Microsoft from handing over the data. Although even if this is the case this doesn't mean they have to do so. But my current understanding is that nothing in the Data Protection Directive (which is about to be replaced by General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect in May this year) prevents handing over the data of non-EU citizens.
2) The data is not inaccessible to US authorities if you follow the correct procedure. Contact the authorities in the country that the data is located in and present the evidence for your case and if it is solid said authorities can force MS to hand over the data and then hand it over to the US.
The laws are meant to protect people's privacy, which is a good thing. However, this does not mean evidence for a case will always be inaccessible, or that any transfer of data from EU to the US is in all cases forbidden. it just means you need to co-operate with the local authorities to get it.
Even if the US supreme courts eventually rules against MS, that doesn't negate either of the 2 points above. Meaning, even if the supreme court decides that domestic US search warrants apply to data abroad, the US authorities still cannot compel corporations to hand over data of EU citizens without co-operation from local authorities.
The US army is very, very good at fighting a conventional war against a conventional army. It's much less good at dealing with hit and run attacks from insurgents on its supply lines.
This is a problem of all conventional armies and it relates to the game theory of such conflicts. When one side is fighting for their lives and survival they're essentially playing an infinite game, wherein the only goal is to survive. At the same time they know the enemy is not committed to staying engaged indefinitely. The Viet Cong knew that they had no chance but to fight or die, and they knew each casualty inflicted on US troops tilts the scale in their favor because the more costly in lives and resources the occupation becomes, the less likely it will be that Americans want to continue said occupation. The Afghans used the same tactic successfully against the soviets with some help from the US and are currently doing so against the NATO troops as well.
However, the game is different in a hypothetical scenario on your home soil. In a hypothetical conflict against a segment of Americans, the army does not have the option of retreating from the conflict in the same way they did in Vietnam and the Soviets did in Afghanistan-. It'd be a case wherein both sides would be locked in what's essentially an infinite game. If you look at the history of civil wars, the side with better weapons and equipment usually wins because of this. Since the conflicts only end when one side surrenders, the side better equipped to wage the war up to that point is favored.
Point being that the war of independence or Vietnam is not a valid point of comparison, because those are conflicts with a conventional army fighting on essentially foreign soil against an insurgency fighting for their very survival.
Look at your own civil war: the Union army had over double the amount of troops and better logistical and financial support networks for said troops, which allowed them to overcome the South. The same goes for the civil war we had here in Finland a 100 yeas ago: we had just become independent so we didn't even have a proper standing army yet, but one side had some thousands of troops that had received training and equipment from Germany and was more professional and disciplined, as well as having simply more men and better organisation, which allowed them to overcome the less trained and less organised and equipped red side.
I.e. saying "The US army has better weapons than civilians, therefore it would win, therefore civilians don't need AR-15s to defend against tyranny" is dumb on many levels.
But likewise, saying that with AR-15s or equivalent weapons civilians could successfully defend themselves against the US Army is equally misguided, because it's not something that's supported by historical evidence about the nature of such conflicts. Civil wars and wars of occupation are 2 different categories of fighting
Only in America would this argument be considered logical. Have you not noticed that no other country in the world has reported a mass school shooting this year? Do you know how many mass school shootings there have been in the UK, ever? 1. In 1996.
As a fellow European coming from Finland that has more guns than the UK per capita (we have a large rural population and a lot of stuff that's hunted) I'm gonna try to be the guy to see both sides here.
You're correct in that, with no guns there's almost no school shootings. We've had 2 in the whole of 2000s (with a total of 18 dead including the 2 perps) and we have to my knowledge the most guns per capita of the western nations after the US. But the thing is since the constitution in the states is different, it makes very little sense in these discussions to hammer say, the British model because it's should be clear that something quite like that will never fly in the US, which is where the discussion usually ends. However thing is there is middle-ground between 'ban all guns' and status quo of the US. The whole gun control 'debate' in the US from what I've gathered is more of a shouting match of 2 sides neither of which are actually willing to work together to do something to repair the situation but are both insisting that the magical answer is somehow 'more guns' or 'less guns'. It's not just about the absolute number of firearms, it's more about what methods are taken to try and prevent mentally unstable people from acquiring weapons.
It ought to be obvious that as long as it is possible for nearly anyone to walk into a store and walk out with a gun or guns without any background checks, the amount of gun-crime will stay high. The standard counter-argument for requiring a background check and/or a doctor's statement of mental sanity (as is the case in here for example) is that it will not help because criminals will always get guns from the black market, but that's not true. I mean, obviously some segment of criminals will always be able to acquire guns illegally, but the point is that most people who commit crimes are not criminal masterminds that have the will or the ability or the mental stability to do so, so requiring some checks before one can walk out of the store with a weapon does provably reduce the amount of gun crime and deaths without removing the option of gun ownership from law-abiding, sane people. But related to this problem is the fact that all of this is handled on a local level which is what makes it so tricky. I mean, any amount of background checks or sensible vetting makes little to no difference if one can drive 30 miles out of town and get one's gun across the state line without a check. For gun control measures to work they have to be nation-wide, which means involving the federal government which immediately drives many on the right in the US into full paranoia mode.
Cars are sometimes evoked as a comparison with people pointing out that you need to see a doctor and take part in training before you're given a license to drive a vehicle. People then point out that well, owning a car is not a constitutional right so the comparison is not valid, but that's not true. Think for a moment if it was the case that owning a car was a constitutional right. Would that mean it would make sense to make it legal to just sell a vehicle to anyone who walks through the door as long as they're of a certain age? Would that be something that would make sense for public safety overall? If not, then how come the same attitude makes sense for guns?
So to summarize; dear fellow non-american westerners: stop throwing the 'ït's so obvious, just get rid of all the guns and the problem will be solved, duh!' -card onto the table as it's not helpful in the context of the american legal landscape and overall attitude towards guns. And dear Americans: stop treating all discussion about gun control as if the advocates wanna get rid of the 2nd amendment altogether and consider the fact that there are methods of limiting the availability of guns to mentally unstable individuals that could be implemented without confiscating all of the weapons from everyone or removing the 2nd amendment.
Likewise, though the project is still in the early phases.
The Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) is planning to work with Watson Health and employ cognitive computing to aid in the early identification of serious bacterial infections in prematurely born babies and to bolster imaging of cerebral hemorrhage patients. HUS is also evaluating Watson Health and employing cognitive computing to aid physicians in providing patients with personalized cancer care.“ IBMs approach to AI, with its focus on augmenting human intelligence, may open up entirely new avenues for us to develop treatments. There is potentially globally groundbreaking research in these areas of application with Watson cognitive computing,” said Chief Medical Officer of HUS Markku Mäkijärvi.
Aliens and AI are only feared by those with limited imagination and no skill with search engines.
No. Aliens as a potential threat goes to the same category with the gamma ray burst and supervolcanoes meaning: if they happen there's nothing much we can do to stop them because chances are any civilization capable of interstellar travel will be so far ahead of us that if they're hostile our chances of surviving a fight with them are next to nil. Therefore just like the supervolcano and gamma ray bursts, worrying about that threat is useless as there's little we can do to affect the risk.
AI on the other hand is an entirely different thing, because it's one that we have control over, and one that has genuine potential for both helping us greatly and destroying us. It should be noted that hardly anyone who's done even cursory reading on AI fears the 'Terminator' scenario in which an AI is developed/arises that is intentionally malicious and seeks to destroy us. The real risks of AI are related both narrow/non-general AIs wrecking havoc as well as to the intelligence explosion of general AIs and the alignment problem related to that: once general AI is developed, it will become superintelligent in a very, very fast timescale because of the speed at with such an intelligence is capable of learning. As an example of this principle one needs only to look at current projects such as AlphaZero (quoting the wiki):
AlphaZero is a computer program developed by the Alphabet-owned AI research company DeepMind, which uses an approach similar to AlphaGo Zero's to master not just Go, but also chess and shogi. On December 5, 2017 the DeepMind team released a preprint introducing AlphaZero, which, within 24 hours, achieved a superhuman level of play in these three games by defeating world-champion programs, Stockfish, elmo, and the 3-day version of AlphaGo Zero, in each case making use of custom tensor processing units (TPUs) that the Google programs were optimized to make use of.[1] AlphaZero was trained solely via "self-play" using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate the games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks, all in parallel, with no access to opening books or endgame tables. After just four hours of training, DeepMind estimated AlphaZero was playing at a higher ELO rating than Stockfish; after 9 hours of training, the algorithm decisively defeated Stockfish 8 in a time-controlled 100-game tournament (28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws).[1][2][3] The trained algorithm played on a single machine with four TPU's.
Thta's 8 hours of training without any knowledge of prior games to beat the best existing chess algorithm that has taken humans years to develop. This same principle scales up to more general AIs: once activated, they will surpass us in likely any field in a matter of at most weeks or months, if not sooner. This means that unless the goals of a general AI are extremely well defined, there's a genuine risk that we will unleash a system in the coming decades which can outsmart us in every field, and if its goals are improperly defined, or if it changes it goals due to some reason unknown to us (we cannot expect a general AI to have permanently fixed goals as they're capable of changing themselves) they will be capable of crippling entire societies on purpose or a s side-product of chasing some badly defined goal within days, and it's unlikely that we can produce effective countermeasures against a system that's both way ahead of us in intelligence and thinks a million times faster. What makes this all the more scary is the fact that we only have essentially one shot to get this right. If a problematic general AI is released into the world (and we cannot expect to be able to keep superintelligent systems in boxes forever) it will likely be able to seek out and thwart any attempts in developing subsequent AIs to stop it, so it's not like we can experiment un
You have to realize that the fight or flight instinct isn't about surviving, it's about avoiding pain and suffering.
Excellent point. Now, when you think about it, barring religious dogmatic opposition to suicide, most people are alright with suicide in certain scenarios, meaning euthanasia. I mean, if you think of someone in a terminal condition who's in terrible pain and is dying either way, it's hard to really say to this person that he/she must suffer til the end if they want to go and we have the means of making it painless for them. Most people would rather choose that I wager than lingering at the end of tubes for the final weeks or months of their lives.
The problem arises when we start talking about mental states wherein the pain the person experiences is inside their mind. Looking at a physically healthy human being who wants to kill themselves because the pain inside their head is too large we're left confused. The medical profession approaches this from the point of view of a neurochemical disorder and maintains that it's just a glitch that can be treated, and most often it can. But the real question is, what about the cases wherein it can't? I mean there are bound to be cases in which an individual is so chronically and deeply depressed for example that despite medication or therapy they don't feel their life is worth continuing. We then bump into a sort of paradox: when thinking about whether or not it should be acceptable to let these people choose suicide just as in the case with terminal patients with physical pain, we're confronted by the notion that if they're depressed they're not thinking rationally (even though avoidance of suffering that one sees no end to is rational) and therefore we cannot let them choose death. They must be kept alive until they realize that their life is worth living, and if they do not realize that we must keep them locked up so as to make sure they don't kill themselves even if this inflicts pain upon them. Now, this approach is understandable from the point of view of doctors because the doctors are committed to trying to cure patients, so it seems to go against the ethics of a healer to give up and say: 'alright then, you can do as you please because we can't seem to help you'. That would be seen as immoral in cases wherein the pain originates in the mind, even though it's seen as the moral thing to do when we know the pain is of a physical origin.
But I think this attitude also creates a trap: people with suicidal thoughts or severe depression know that if they go and seek help they might end up putting themselves in a situation in which they remove the option of suicide from themselves while not removing the suffering. This raises the bar for going to get help because the more serious your condition, the more likely it is that you will be locked up for your own protection. Thus, getting help for such people may seem as a gamble, wherein you either get better, or extend your agony for an indefinite amount of time. This I think is why so many people who commit suicide never seek professional help or tell about their intentions to anyone.
I know it may seem counter-intuitive, but I feel if the medical field stopped treating assisted suicide as an non-option for all except people in terminal physical conditions we'd see an increase in the amount of people seeking help, and thus likely a reduction in the amount of suicides.
The entire Trump Russia investigation was predicated on the 100% false Steele Dossier
Based on what I just recently read this is not true.
Notably, the Republican memo does not assert that Mr. Steele’s information was the fountainhead of the broader Russia investigation as many Republicans and conservative media commentators have insinuated.
The Republican memo does not provide the full scope of evidence the F.B.I. and Justice Department used to obtain the warrant to surveil Mr. Page, and it is not clear to what extent the application hinges on the material provided by Mr. Steele. In December 2017, the Republican memo said, Andrew G. McCabe, then the deputy director of the F.B.I., told the House Intelligence Committee that no surveillance would have been sought without Mr. Steele’s information.
But the people familiar with the Democratic memo said that Republicans had distorted what Mr. McCabe told the Intelligence Committee about the importance of the information from Mr. Steele. Mr. McCabe presented the material as part of a constellation of compelling evidence that raised serious suspicions about Mr. Page, the two people said. The evidence included contacts Mr. Page had in 2013 with a Russian intelligence operative.
Mr. Page’s contacts with the Russian operative led to an investigation of Mr. Page that year, including a wiretap on him, another person familiar with the matter said.
(emphasis mine)
From what I've gathered so far es a European trying to stay on track on current events, the main issue is this: FISA applications are not public information. It is not possible to know what evidence besides the memo was used in the application and how much (if at all) the memo eventually influenced the decision. Now. to me it seems the republicans are taking full advantage of this fact and trying to portray the memo as the singular piece of evidence on which the whole thing hangs upon, because they know that they cannot be disproven without the releasing of classified material, meaning their backs are covered.
Stop slurping up the shit being shoved by the MSM and actually read it
So instead we should believe a memo written by a party that has a vested interest in the investigation and does not (cannot in fact due to the classified nature) release full details on the state of the investigation and seems to be crafted precisely to appear to say something it indeed does not say (that the memo was the primary reason/piece of evidence used for the application) and thus to give a misleading picture of the state of things? Huh? How does that make sense?
Social Media is supposed to be entertainment, not a fucking source of news, facts, and shit you use to guide you in your life's decisions.
Who determines what social media is and is not supposed to be a source of? I mean, Slashdot is a form of social media. Not a very modern one at that, but the existence of the karma system as well as a friend system makes it a social media even though the topics being discussed are (mainly) news. So are you saying that we should get rid of the social dimensions of this site because you don't like the fact that other people discuss news elsewhere?
More over, just like Slashdot, social media sites themselves are by and large just content aggregates. It's possible to get good news out of social media if you follow say, news organisations that share their content, or if your friends follow them and share them. The social media site is just a delivery platform for content. The kind of content you see depends on the kind of people you friend/follow. Back before current social media content was being shared and discussed on forums and boards, and before that IRC and newsgroups.
Only thing that has really changed is that now with the existence of easier to use and mobile devices these kinds of platforms have become accessible to everyone.
I think we should give up on trying to fix Stupid.
No, we shouldn't. The internet is not going to go away in power or influence. Instead, people need to be instructed in how to use it better. The vast majority of young people cannot differentiate sponsored content within their news feed for example. They're seeing (and being influenced by) ads without realizing they're ads. These are things that need to be taught in schools. Fact-checking is a skill that's not too difficult to learn or to teach, but for that to happen people need to start to pay more attention to the source of the information they're looking at.
New technologies require the teaching of new kinds of skills. Education these days should focus not on trying to get kids to memorize a lot of facts, but instead it should aim to teach them how to search for facts and differentiate them from fiction using the largest information network ever built by man that most western people now have access to from their pockets. Teaching kids the basics of information retrieval and how to use search engines and so on has been a part of the curriculum here in Finland for over a decade. In our neighbor to the south, Estonia, kids are allowed to look for answers on their phones during certain classes as well to help them practice this skill, and so on.
People die. People are born and inherit this wealth.
This is actually at the core of the problem of income inequality. As Thomas Piketty points out in Capital in the 21st century:
Piketty's Main Claims 1. The Return on Capital is Greater than Growth. Piketty claims that r, the average annual rate of return on capital, is in the long-run greater than g, the growth of the economy (i.e., the annual increase in income or output).
r > g (1)
And, "If . . . the rate of return on capital [r] remains significantly above the growth rate [g] for an extended period of time . . . , then the risk of divergence in the distribution of wealth is very high." [pg. 25] 2. Inherited Wealth Grows Faster than Income. If r > g, then inherited wealth grows faster than output and income. The reason? "People with inherited wealth need save only a portion of their income from capital to see that capital grow more quickly than the economy as a whole." [pg. 26]
When a tiny fraction of the top 1 % owns nearly half of everything, and the bottom 90 % owns practically nothing besides their residences (and 75 % of all publicly held debt (source)), and the above conditions being true this division is only going to grow unless something is done, it should be clear that this model is not sustainable.
"Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels - levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies." [pg. 26]
Assuming we can figure out who these people with "too much" are, and how the government is going to tax it from them, how is this wealth going to get in the hands of the middle class? Do we just have the government write out checks to everyone?
Or, or you could do any number of things other than 'writing checks'. Secondly of course it makes no sense to tax it away entirely, no-one's even proposing that. Through your history you've previously had high marginal rates for those making the most money, and despite that people still kept investing and making money because as long as you don't tax a 100 % of it, there's still going to be an incentive to make more. You could tax inherited wealth / dividends above say tens of millions at a marginal tax rate of something like 70-80 % and use said money to provide for example universal health care and education to the lower and middle-classes which would not only significantly improve their quality of life, it would also allow increased social mobility by allowing people to educate themselves without having to take massive amounts of debt in a situation wherein a degree is a requirement - but no longer a guarantee - of getting a well paying job. Not to mention all the other possibilities such as reducing the amount of debt the government has to take, funding infrastructure building, research, etc. Eventually automation and AIs will make most current jobs (even the white-collar ones) obsolote, at which point if you wish to maintain domestic demands for goods and services, the only way for that to happen is via something like universal basic income. The companies need less and less paid staff to run their operations going ahead, but at the same time less and less staff means less and less demand for products as less people are getting paid unless something is done. You can't stop the technological progress causing machines to overtake humans in efficiency, so really the one thing you can change for more easily is taxation.
Of course I'm not American but neither is the nature of this problem: income inequality is going up nearly across the board in the west, the US is just the case wherein it has gone on for the longest time.
Might be easier to convice a group of libtard VC investors of your brilliant idea (see juceroo) than to acutally develop a sustainable business that convinces a broad range of public investors.
Couple of important points you're missing here. Firstly: in tech especially these days you might not even have to convince a group of VC investors, if you've got promising technology one of the larger tech players might well be willing to invest in you. Alphabet/Google and the rest are funding quite a lot of small companies these days. Secondly: if your plan is to develop a sustainable business that will end up making you a lot of money, then going public might not be the best approach to begin with. The more stock you/the original founders keep on yourself, the more you're going to get out of the company when it starts turning a profit, regardless of whether you go public eventually or not.
When you add to this the points mentioned in the summary: namely that the amount of capital required by new companies is going down (software especially is nowhere near as capital heavy as it used to be) and hat going public makes you subject to stricter transparency rules which might not be ideal competition-wise, it's clear that unless you absolutely have to go public due to not being able to get funding elsewhere (or for some reason requiring large amounts of it), it often makes no sense for a startup to go public as a means of getting funding.
They start their competitive career in inducing brain damage in high school.
Why would it kill you any sooner? Headaches aren't lethal and you
Erm... as someone who's had cerebral palsy since birth due to damage to the motor cortex caused during a premature birth I have some news for you: the consequences of brain damage are not limited to headaches and migraines.
It's about quality of life, not duration.
Exactly. And if you look at what chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which to my knowledge is the most common neurodegenerative condition for contact sport athletes with repeated head injury causes, you'll find a whole host of symptoms, quoting the wiki:
Symptoms of CTE, which occur in four stages, generally appear 8 to 10 years after an athlete experiences repetitive mild traumatic brain injury.
First-stage symptoms include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as well as confusion, disorientation, dizziness, and headaches. Second-stage symptoms include memory loss, social instability, impulsive behavior, and poor judgment. Third and fourth stages include progressive dementia, movement disorders, hypomimia, speech impediments, sensory processing disorder, tremors, vertigo, deafness, depression and suicidality.
Additional symptoms include dysarthria, dysphagia, cognitive disorder such as amnesia, and ocular abnormalities, such as ptosis.
The condition manifests as dementia, or declining mental ability, problems with memory, dizzy spells or lack of balance to the point of not being able to walk under one's own power for a short time and/or Parkinsonism, or tremors and lack of coordination. It can also cause speech problems and an unsteady gait. Patients with DP may be prone to inappropriate or explosive behavior and may display pathological jealousy or paranoia
Now, I don't know about you, but to me these are all things which impact one's quality of life significantly and are far more serious than headaches.
Facts are a wonderful thing because the longer and deeper you discuss them the harder they get.
Lies on the other side are brittle. Discuss them for long and they crumble to dust.
You're right about this entirely. The main issue with keeping people on topic is that if they disregard the facts presented it's hard to gain any common ground. That is, you can press a solid point backed up by data all you want in a discussion, but if the opposing side flatout refuses to give any weight to the data then the discussion gets stuck and people often quit the discussion, as he eventually did without getting back to me.
Right, you decided that your personal opinion was "the truth" and that he was just flat out factually wrong.
No, that's not what I think. The point is I was trying to base my argument on facts and numbers, and he wasn't even looking at said facts or providing any counters to the figures presented. I'm entirely open to being wrong if I'm given good reasons for why I'm wrong, he didn't. He just stated his opinion with nothing to essentially back it up., it's based on assumptions about nuclear energy which are not in line with the facts that we do have about nuclear safety and the environmental cost of nuclear vs. something like solar. So he makes a claim, doesn't back it up with anything. I try to show him why the claim is false, and he ignores the data (for example the fact that per kilowatt hour produced nuclear has caused the least deaths) and simply moves on to state something else.
It's not the case that we were coming to different conclusions based on the same data because he didn't base his argument on any data, thus the facts I presented to him in support of my argument had no impact on the discussion whatsoever. He didn't dispute the numbers, he didn't provide any numbers to back up his own position but simply moved on to the next talking point. The basis for his opinion was emotional, not factual, if it was factual he would have been able to provide some of those facts to support his view, instead what he did is, in a nutshell, simply state that radiation is bad (because of chernobyl & Fukushima) and therefore all nuclear power is bad/dangerous.
Could you explain how, exactly, a 100% solar/renewable approach would do more damage to the environment than the non-renewables that it could otherwise replace?
Because the renewable technology itself is manufactured using non-renewable materials. Solar panel construction for example generates around 300 times the amount of waste per unit of energy produced than nuclear, because the manufacturing of the panels themselves requires lots of heavy metals that are toxic (cadmium, gallium, indium, selenium etc), and also in limited supply and need to be mined from places like China, where the rare earth mining industry is already generating a lot of environmental issues.
Secondly there's the issue of storing the energy created. If we were to attempt to do it using current battery packs it would be extremely costly to the environment as lithium is also in limited supply and has to be dug up from the ground, and replaced after the batteries get worn. Not to mention this approach would not be sustainable, as we cannot indefinitely keep making lithium batteries, and especially since the demand for lithium batteries is going to skyrocket to begin with with the increasing amount of electric vehicles.
If/when we get better ways of storing energy created by renewable sources then we may be in a situation wherein it makes sense. At the current level of both production and storage equipment, a fully renewable approach does not seem to me to be environmentally sound considering the manufacturing processes and material demands involved, and the strain these put on the environment,
What are the limitations of demand management coupled with megabatteries that make a 100% solar/renewable approach not feasible?
The battery technology is simply nowhere near the point wherein enough storage could be realistically built to manage the whole grid with renewables. Batteries are made of perishing resources and have a limited lifespan
This is not to say something like this couldn't be achieved in the future if tech evolves, but using the current state of battery technology, essentially scaled up lithium-ion batteries it's not doable.
This is what a post-truth world looks like. The truth is whatever you prefer it to be,
This is true unfortunately and it's not limited to politics by any means. I was having a discussion yesterday on FB about energy policies and there was a guy arguing for '100 % solar'/renewable approach. I went in explaining to him why this is not feasible and would in fact do a lot of damage to the environment and that we should favor a mix of renewables and nuclear as that's the best combo to go with if we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly and effectively. He then came back with the typical fear mongering arguments about how radiation is scary and so on, and we had a back and forth where I tried to the best of my ability to counter his points with actual facts and figures about energy production, emissions, deaths per kilowatt hour etc etc. He never contested any of my points even, he just threw in the next objection he had in mind. After a few comments of this he finally came back with, and this is a direct quote: "you are entitled to have your opinion but I am afraid this will not affect/change mine. Sorry" In other words: 'I'm free to ignore facts that don't fit with my ideology'.
This is the fundamental issue with the net/social media in its current state. Since it's driven by algorithms that are geared to maximise time on site and engagement, those algorithms do 2 primary things: firstly the surround you with people and content that's in line with yours, because people like reading stuff they agree with, and secondly they drop in the occasional piece of information/news/opinion that's likely to make you angry, because angry people are more engaged and pay more attention, thereby improving the effectiveness of advertising.
People are naturally inclined to be more accepting evidence supporting a claim they already believe in, and the algorithms online have pushed this to overdrive. People on one side of an issue, and people on another side of an issue, all equally convinced that no-one in their right mind could be on the other . This makes conversation, actual, fact-based conversation, almost impossible, and simultaneously makes utilising social media for political/ideological propaganda really easy, because it's build to divide people into groups of likeminded people What the guy was likely doing to me in the energy discussion was throwing talking points at me that he had heard/seen made before by other members of his bubble. He wasn't arguing so much as he was lobbing memes at me, and in the end, when none of those memes worked, he resorted to 'well, that's like just your opinion man.'
The same phenomenon is going in globally with politics. People by and large don't discuss issues and facts, they take different kind of political memes and throw them at each other, with the end result being that the other side only usually gets angry and counters with their own memes. This is super effective in keeping people engaged on the site, it's precisely what the platforms aim to do and it's simultaneously toxic for any actual discussion about facts, because any fact-based arguments have a memetic counter to them.
The shock-and-awe water consumption numbers like the ones OP threw out are mostly water to grow the grass/grain the animals eat. Nearly all of that comes straight from the sky or from local wells [usda.gov], with no purification or disposal required.
Yes, but the problem is that groundwater reserves are not infinite. Due to heavy demand by agriculture, you're currently using them faster than they're being refilled. Quoting the link ('Groundwater Depletion in the United States (1900–2008)' by U.S department of the interior):
Conclusions
This study assessed long-term groundwater depletion in 40 separate aquifer systems or subareas, and one land use category. The cumulative volume of groundwater depletion in the United States during the 20th century is large—totaling about 800 cubic kilometers (km3) and increasing by an additional 25 percent during 2001–2008 (to a total volume of approximately 1,000 km3). Cumulative total groundwater depletion in the United States accelerated in the late 1940s and continued at an almost steady linear rate through the end of the century. In addition to widely recognized environmental consequences, groundwater depletion also adversely impacts the long-term sustainability of groundwater supplies to help meet the Nation’s water needs. Groundwater depletion also is a small contributor to global sea-level rise, but sufficiently large that it needs to be recognized as a contributing factor and accounted for when explaining long-term global sea-level rise. In general, unconfined aquifers exhibit greater volumetric depletion than do confined aquifers, although the latter tend to have greater water-level declines. Depletion in confined aquifers is derived primarily from leakage and storage depletion in adjacent low-permeability confining units. Depletion is also greater in the semiarid to arid western States than in the humid eastern States because of the greater potential for recharge to offset or balance withdrawals in humid areas. A variety of methods were used to estimate long-term depletion in this study. The most reliable depend on direct measurements of water-level changes in the aquifer systems. In a few cases, independent methods were available to facilitate cross-checking of the accuracy of the estimates. These generally supported the reliability of the estimates.
If nothing is done to make water use sustainable, then getting fresh water is going to get a lot more energy intensive and costly when the aquifers start running dry.
And the others were guilty? This really looks like 'oh, while trying to send the Jews into concentration camps, we made some mistakes and sent there some non-Jews'...
That's pretty much exactly what it is. Erdogan was elected with a very very slim margin and he knows the country is split in the middle. The cities are highly educated and well off and in favour of a secular state and against totalitarianism. The countryside, Erdogan's base, is less educated, more conservative and more religious, and this is the group he's been pandering to the whole time. This is why he's slowly dismantling the secular basis of the state and inching it closer to a theocracy, which is for example why they made a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in schools. His goal is obviously to ensure that his base stays ignorant so he can continue to enjoy their support.
Whether or not the 'coup' was an actual attempt or state-sanctioned theatrics to justify the subsequent actions doesn't even really matter at this point. What matters is that Erdogan's done after that is unjustifiable: he's thrown out judges, teachers, shut down newspapers and stations, increased censorship and blocking of sites online, and so on. At the same time he's been consolidating more power for himself and amped up the campaign against the Kurds, despite the fact that the Kurds are in fact helping to combat Isis, , but he knows that all totalitarian states need both internal and external enemies. For him the internal enemies are now the 'Gulenists' as well as the Kurds at times and the external enemy is Isis.
Not to mentioned with the courts now manned by Erdogan approved judges, what do you think are the chances for a fair trial for someone accused of treason? I mean this article demonstrates the standard of evidence that passes in the courts, it's essentially: 'you've visited these sites/used this app/shared this content, that makes you an enemy of the state'. Think about the fact that about half the country never voted for him, so how easy do you think it will be to find something 'anti-Erdogan'/anti Justice and development party that they've shared/liked at some point? Hell, if I was Turkish this comment alone would likely make me a candidate for facing a trial. I know for a fact that my Turkish ex-girlfriend who's an outspoken atheist and has been active in demonstrations against Erdogan for years certainly has a profile that makes her a target for prosecution, but I do not know if she's still free or not. And she's no 'Gulenist' as she's against the whole religion to begin with, but again, that doesn't matter to tyrants.
So yeah, the country with 2nd largest army in NATO after the US and previously the largest muslim majority secular state is slowly turning into a totalitarian islamist theocracy and the attitude of the entire West is mostly 'oh well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, can't be helped'.
And it doesn't matter if you believe climate change is man made or not. If we reduce general pollution, consume lest, demand better public transport (which can be a reality now, unlike self driving cars that might be a reality ten years from now, and won't even touch 10% of the capacity of trains), we can reduce all kinds of pollution, including CO2.
I 100 % agree with you, but there's a major dilemma here: it's not just about whether or not one cares about the environment, consumption is the cornerstone of the economy. It's the main driver of economic growth, which is why the idea that we should build more durable goods and buy less instead of more is one of the few major heretical beliefs in our time. I mean, for contrast I live in a society that compared to the US is far to the left with higher taxes and universal systems of education and health care, and even in here every single party in the parliament, including those on the left, is committed to economic growth. So when you say:
I personally don't feel this will happen until America runs out of countries to bomb and manipulate, fuel prices hit $9/gal and the US collapses.
I'll have to disagree with you, because regardless of what happens to the US in the years and decades going ahead, consumerism is a global trend now. China is investing heavily into Africa to move some of their production there in order to get a 'China' of their own to manufacture goods for their ever growing domestic market and so on. As long as the global population keeps increasing, which at the moment looks to be until at least the 10 billion mark, the economies will keep growing because we'll have more people and thus more people who need and want things and a better standard of living.
This is not to say that the problem of waste is unsolvable, I don't believe it is. Resources are finite, and the companies know this. What I'm hoping will happen is that the increased investment into different kinds of green and clean technologies will make waste processing a profitable business. The less materials we have left on the planet, the more valuable the already existing waste material is. The plastic in the oceans is worth a lot of money as soon as a way is developed to effectively reprocess and re-use it for production, which would create a direct economic interest for companies to not only stop throwing their waste away, but in fact to collect already existing waste and reprocess it for sale.
Sustainability is the major issue of our time. and one we will have to solve no matter what is or isn't done to address climate change, because we do have limited resources combined with economies based on the assumption of continuous growth, which is not a solvable equation.
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No. Again, the amount of the minimum wage has nothing to do with the facts that humans cannot compete with a machine specifically designed to be more cost-efficient at a given task. The fact that you still do not understand this after being given the example from China where pays are a fraction of the West baffles my mind.
Giess what? This has nothing to do with the argument.
No. There are plenty of western countries in which fast food wporkers make around or above 15 dollars an hour and are not in fact stuck in poverty. But the thing is, whether they make 5 dollars or 20 dollars an hour does not alter the fact that in 20-30 years no-one will be making anything doing these kinds of repetitive manual tasks because again no matter the awge point automation is the more efficient route to go, and that's what companies care about. Unless the societies at large address this by adopting systems like universal basic income, the vast majority of people will become stuck in poverty because they have no skillset that would allow them to find work, and assuming that everyone will simply acquire a higher education and be able to find a job is unrealistic, both because not everyone has the mental capacity to be highly educated, and secondly because there will simply not exist enough of these kinds of positions to employ everyone.
If your goal was to come off as the most stereotypical 'ignorant American', you've succeeded with flying colors. You do understand that every single industrialized country outside the US, including my own, already does this and does this with the health care costs being less than those in the US, right? Universal health care hasn't been a point of contention anywhere but in the States for several decades, as you're the only first world nation that still does not get that it's the waty to go if you want to both reduce the costs of the health care system and keep people healthier.
Again, I never claimed that, I pointed out that the root of the problem will remain totally regardless of whether the minimum wage exists or not and how much it is, and you chose to reply by wrapping yourself in the American flag and screaming about totally unrelated things.
You seriously need to do some reading on the topic(s) and educate yourself. Because if you think that automation and issues of poverty can be solved by removing or lowering the minimum wage, your level of ignorance is fast approaching that of your current president.
No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's about total cost per hour, it's about efficiency and machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing. Let's do the math.
The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay. Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages. So your equivalents in China are essentially yelling: 'yeah, how about that, priced yourself right out of a job! If you only were satisfied with working at 3 dollars a day you maybe could have kept your job for another 5 years before it was automated!"
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
No-one is saying that new job descriptions will not appear in the future. But the thing is AI - both the narrow-AI systems being developed now and in the future more generalized AI - is an entirely different shift than that of the previous 'dumb'/mechanic automation. Once AI-guided production becomes more commonplace, which will occur in the coming decades, a big chunk of humans will lose their jobs but they will also not be able to easily train themselves with a new skillset that would be of any value. The more widespread AI-based automation becomes, the cheaper it will become which will lower the marginal utility of hiring humans for most jobs. This is especially apparent on production and logistics side where humans are already most often the slowest and most inefficient part of the process. The only reason not all warehouses are fully automatic at this point is the cost, and the cost is coming down as time goes along.Once general purpose AI is reached (and there's no reason to suspect it won't be reached eventually unless one is stubborn enough to argue for some kind of a 'soul' that would make the capabilities of a human brain beyond achievable for a computerized system) then pretty much any job that requires thinking/analyzing data will be done faster and better by machines.
It's misguided to assume that human labor will remain competitive with super-intelligent systems indefinitely. Essentially any job that requires manual precision or quality control can already be done much more efficiently by computer-aided systems than by humans, and this trend is only going to continue.
The market does not magically optimize itself for full-employment. Humans will only be hired if they're the only way to get something done, or massively cheaper than machines. For the next 1-2 decades this will remain the case in many fields, but with the rate of advancement we're seeing already in AI and the fact that any new production facilities built in the west require a fraction of the workforce from 10-20 years ago, comparing the upcoming shift to the automation boom from the 60s onwards is not a valid comparison.
For the trip to be covered the hospital needs to confirm that the trip was required. That is, someone can take a cab or an ambulance to a hospital with the cost being 25, but unless the hospital agrees that the trip was required, the trip is not covered and will be charged from said person in its entirety.
This is enough to keep abuses minimal to my knowledge, meaning I'm at least not aware that people misusing the system would be a major issue cost-wise, even though I'm unable to provide you with exact figures as to the amount of these cases.
Here in Finland the Social Insurance Institution actually will pay for your cab ride to a hospital for the part that exceeds 25 euros. That is, if you take a cab and the cost is 300 because of a long trip, you will pay 25 euros, the rest is covered by the state. Same goes for ambulances, the patient has to pay 25 euros for the ride to a hospital/nearest point of treatment. After that, once the patient is admitted to care, if he/she needs to be moved to another hospital for exams or treatment at a better equiped facilit, it is covered for by the single payer medical system, ie. the patient doesn't pay a dime for it.
I work for the Hospital district of Helsinki and Uusimaa and as the largest district in the country we're in charge of all the highly specialized care in Finland, for example all of the really complex surgeries are handled here. Because we're one of the larger countries in Europe, this means we routinely get patients from up north in Lapland traveling distances of close to 1000 kilometers to reach urgent treatment here. In situations of extreme urgency, helicopters are used, this is usually done for example in cases where the patient has an entire limb detached due to an accident and needs to be operated within hours for recovery to be viable. Donated organs are also routinely flown in with copters,
Obviously this isn't cheap, as transfering patients over long distances costs both in time of treatment staff as well as equipment an fuel costs. All that being said, our total medical expenditure for the public system is around 4040 dollars per capita, which is about 40,8 % of the 9890 dollars per capita spent in the States, according to the OECD..
In fact, as I've said before and I'll say again: every single universal model in existence is cheaper than the current US model, which is why every other OECD member has adopted some variation of a universal model, not all of which are single payer.
The law does not say that, actually, nor is the argument MS is making; MS is not saying that handing over the data would be illegal for them to do on the EU side, but that as the search warrant being used is a domestic one, said warrant does not apply to data outside the US. The law in Europe says that Microsoft or any other corporation cannot process data concerning EU citizens outside the Union without following European law. This means 2 things:
1) If the data in question is not of European citizens but American citizens, in so far as I understand, there's nothing that prevents Microsoft from handing over the data. Although even if this is the case this doesn't mean they have to do so. But my current understanding is that nothing in the Data Protection Directive (which is about to be replaced by General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect in May this year) prevents handing over the data of non-EU citizens.
2) The data is not inaccessible to US authorities if you follow the correct procedure. Contact the authorities in the country that the data is located in and present the evidence for your case and if it is solid said authorities can force MS to hand over the data and then hand it over to the US.
The laws are meant to protect people's privacy, which is a good thing. However, this does not mean evidence for a case will always be inaccessible, or that any transfer of data from EU to the US is in all cases forbidden. it just means you need to co-operate with the local authorities to get it.
Even if the US supreme courts eventually rules against MS, that doesn't negate either of the 2 points above. Meaning, even if the supreme court decides that domestic US search warrants apply to data abroad, the US authorities still cannot compel corporations to hand over data of EU citizens without co-operation from local authorities.
This is a problem of all conventional armies and it relates to the game theory of such conflicts. When one side is fighting for their lives and survival they're essentially playing an infinite game, wherein the only goal is to survive. At the same time they know the enemy is not committed to staying engaged indefinitely. The Viet Cong knew that they had no chance but to fight or die, and they knew each casualty inflicted on US troops tilts the scale in their favor because the more costly in lives and resources the occupation becomes, the less likely it will be that Americans want to continue said occupation. The Afghans used the same tactic successfully against the soviets with some help from the US and are currently doing so against the NATO troops as well.
However, the game is different in a hypothetical scenario on your home soil. In a hypothetical conflict against a segment of Americans, the army does not have the option of retreating from the conflict in the same way they did in Vietnam and the Soviets did in Afghanistan-. It'd be a case wherein both sides would be locked in what's essentially an infinite game. If you look at the history of civil wars, the side with better weapons and equipment usually wins because of this. Since the conflicts only end when one side surrenders, the side better equipped to wage the war up to that point is favored.
Point being that the war of independence or Vietnam is not a valid point of comparison, because those are conflicts with a conventional army fighting on essentially foreign soil against an insurgency fighting for their very survival.
Look at your own civil war: the Union army had over double the amount of troops and better logistical and financial support networks for said troops, which allowed them to overcome the South. The same goes for the civil war we had here in Finland a 100 yeas ago: we had just become independent so we didn't even have a proper standing army yet, but one side had some thousands of troops that had received training and equipment from Germany and was more professional and disciplined, as well as having simply more men and better organisation, which allowed them to overcome the less trained and less organised and equipped red side.
But likewise, saying that with AR-15s or equivalent weapons civilians could successfully defend themselves against the US Army is equally misguided, because it's not something that's supported by historical evidence about the nature of such conflicts. Civil wars and wars of occupation are 2 different categories of fighting
As a fellow European coming from Finland that has more guns than the UK per capita (we have a large rural population and a lot of stuff that's hunted) I'm gonna try to be the guy to see both sides here.
You're correct in that, with no guns there's almost no school shootings. We've had 2 in the whole of 2000s (with a total of 18 dead including the 2 perps) and we have to my knowledge the most guns per capita of the western nations after the US. But the thing is since the constitution in the states is different, it makes very little sense in these discussions to hammer say, the British model because it's should be clear that something quite like that will never fly in the US, which is where the discussion usually ends. However thing is there is middle-ground between 'ban all guns' and status quo of the US. The whole gun control 'debate' in the US from what I've gathered is more of a shouting match of 2 sides neither of which are actually willing to work together to do something to repair the situation but are both insisting that the magical answer is somehow 'more guns' or 'less guns'. It's not just about the absolute number of firearms, it's more about what methods are taken to try and prevent mentally unstable people from acquiring weapons.
It ought to be obvious that as long as it is possible for nearly anyone to walk into a store and walk out with a gun or guns without any background checks, the amount of gun-crime will stay high. The standard counter-argument for requiring a background check and/or a doctor's statement of mental sanity (as is the case in here for example) is that it will not help because criminals will always get guns from the black market, but that's not true. I mean, obviously some segment of criminals will always be able to acquire guns illegally, but the point is that most people who commit crimes are not criminal masterminds that have the will or the ability or the mental stability to do so, so requiring some checks before one can walk out of the store with a weapon does provably reduce the amount of gun crime and deaths without removing the option of gun ownership from law-abiding, sane people. But related to this problem is the fact that all of this is handled on a local level which is what makes it so tricky. I mean, any amount of background checks or sensible vetting makes little to no difference if one can drive 30 miles out of town and get one's gun across the state line without a check. For gun control measures to work they have to be nation-wide, which means involving the federal government which immediately drives many on the right in the US into full paranoia mode.
Cars are sometimes evoked as a comparison with people pointing out that you need to see a doctor and take part in training before you're given a license to drive a vehicle. People then point out that well, owning a car is not a constitutional right so the comparison is not valid, but that's not true. Think for a moment if it was the case that owning a car was a constitutional right. Would that mean it would make sense to make it legal to just sell a vehicle to anyone who walks through the door as long as they're of a certain age? Would that be something that would make sense for public safety overall? If not, then how come the same attitude makes sense for guns?
So to summarize; dear fellow non-american westerners: stop throwing the 'ït's so obvious, just get rid of all the guns and the problem will be solved, duh!' -card onto the table as it's not helpful in the context of the american legal landscape and overall attitude towards guns. And dear Americans: stop treating all discussion about gun control as if the advocates wanna get rid of the 2nd amendment altogether and consider the fact that there are methods of limiting the availability of guns to mentally unstable individuals that could be implemented without confiscating all of the weapons from everyone or removing the 2nd amendment.
That's some pretty impressive zoom, but can we enhance it?
Likewise, though the project is still in the early phases.
No. Aliens as a potential threat goes to the same category with the gamma ray burst and supervolcanoes meaning: if they happen there's nothing much we can do to stop them because chances are any civilization capable of interstellar travel will be so far ahead of us that if they're hostile our chances of surviving a fight with them are next to nil. Therefore just like the supervolcano and gamma ray bursts, worrying about that threat is useless as there's little we can do to affect the risk.
AI on the other hand is an entirely different thing, because it's one that we have control over, and one that has genuine potential for both helping us greatly and destroying us. It should be noted that hardly anyone who's done even cursory reading on AI fears the 'Terminator' scenario in which an AI is developed/arises that is intentionally malicious and seeks to destroy us. The real risks of AI are related both narrow/non-general AIs wrecking havoc as well as to the intelligence explosion of general AIs and the alignment problem related to that: once general AI is developed, it will become superintelligent in a very, very fast timescale because of the speed at with such an intelligence is capable of learning. As an example of this principle one needs only to look at current projects such as AlphaZero (quoting the wiki):
Thta's 8 hours of training without any knowledge of prior games to beat the best existing chess algorithm that has taken humans years to develop. This same principle scales up to more general AIs: once activated, they will surpass us in likely any field in a matter of at most weeks or months, if not sooner. This means that unless the goals of a general AI are extremely well defined, there's a genuine risk that we will unleash a system in the coming decades which can outsmart us in every field, and if its goals are improperly defined, or if it changes it goals due to some reason unknown to us (we cannot expect a general AI to have permanently fixed goals as they're capable of changing themselves) they will be capable of crippling entire societies on purpose or a s side-product of chasing some badly defined goal within days, and it's unlikely that we can produce effective countermeasures against a system that's both way ahead of us in intelligence and thinks a million times faster. What makes this all the more scary is the fact that we only have essentially one shot to get this right. If a problematic general AI is released into the world (and we cannot expect to be able to keep superintelligent systems in boxes forever) it will likely be able to seek out and thwart any attempts in developing subsequent AIs to stop it, so it's not like we can experiment un
Excellent point. Now, when you think about it, barring religious dogmatic opposition to suicide, most people are alright with suicide in certain scenarios, meaning euthanasia. I mean, if you think of someone in a terminal condition who's in terrible pain and is dying either way, it's hard to really say to this person that he/she must suffer til the end if they want to go and we have the means of making it painless for them. Most people would rather choose that I wager than lingering at the end of tubes for the final weeks or months of their lives.
The problem arises when we start talking about mental states wherein the pain the person experiences is inside their mind. Looking at a physically healthy human being who wants to kill themselves because the pain inside their head is too large we're left confused. The medical profession approaches this from the point of view of a neurochemical disorder and maintains that it's just a glitch that can be treated, and most often it can. But the real question is, what about the cases wherein it can't? I mean there are bound to be cases in which an individual is so chronically and deeply depressed for example that despite medication or therapy they don't feel their life is worth continuing. We then bump into a sort of paradox: when thinking about whether or not it should be acceptable to let these people choose suicide just as in the case with terminal patients with physical pain, we're confronted by the notion that if they're depressed they're not thinking rationally (even though avoidance of suffering that one sees no end to is rational) and therefore we cannot let them choose death. They must be kept alive until they realize that their life is worth living, and if they do not realize that we must keep them locked up so as to make sure they don't kill themselves even if this inflicts pain upon them. Now, this approach is understandable from the point of view of doctors because the doctors are committed to trying to cure patients, so it seems to go against the ethics of a healer to give up and say: 'alright then, you can do as you please because we can't seem to help you'. That would be seen as immoral in cases wherein the pain originates in the mind, even though it's seen as the moral thing to do when we know the pain is of a physical origin.
But I think this attitude also creates a trap: people with suicidal thoughts or severe depression know that if they go and seek help they might end up putting themselves in a situation in which they remove the option of suicide from themselves while not removing the suffering. This raises the bar for going to get help because the more serious your condition, the more likely it is that you will be locked up for your own protection. Thus, getting help for such people may seem as a gamble, wherein you either get better, or extend your agony for an indefinite amount of time. This I think is why so many people who commit suicide never seek professional help or tell about their intentions to anyone.
I know it may seem counter-intuitive, but I feel if the medical field stopped treating assisted suicide as an non-option for all except people in terminal physical conditions we'd see an increase in the amount of people seeking help, and thus likely a reduction in the amount of suicides.
Based on what I just recently read this is not true.
(emphasis mine)
From what I've gathered so far es a European trying to stay on track on current events, the main issue is this: FISA applications are not public information. It is not possible to know what evidence besides the memo was used in the application and how much (if at all) the memo eventually influenced the decision. Now. to me it seems the republicans are taking full advantage of this fact and trying to portray the memo as the singular piece of evidence on which the whole thing hangs upon, because they know that they cannot be disproven without the releasing of classified material, meaning their backs are covered.
So instead we should believe a memo written by a party that has a vested interest in the investigation and does not (cannot in fact due to the classified nature) release full details on the state of the investigation and seems to be crafted precisely to appear to say something it indeed does not say (that the memo was the primary reason/piece of evidence used for the application) and thus to give a misleading picture of the state of things? Huh? How does that make sense?
Who determines what social media is and is not supposed to be a source of? I mean, Slashdot is a form of social media. Not a very modern one at that, but the existence of the karma system as well as a friend system makes it a social media even though the topics being discussed are (mainly) news. So are you saying that we should get rid of the social dimensions of this site because you don't like the fact that other people discuss news elsewhere?
More over, just like Slashdot, social media sites themselves are by and large just content aggregates. It's possible to get good news out of social media if you follow say, news organisations that share their content, or if your friends follow them and share them. The social media site is just a delivery platform for content. The kind of content you see depends on the kind of people you friend/follow. Back before current social media content was being shared and discussed on forums and boards, and before that IRC and newsgroups.
Only thing that has really changed is that now with the existence of easier to use and mobile devices these kinds of platforms have become accessible to everyone.
No, we shouldn't. The internet is not going to go away in power or influence. Instead, people need to be instructed in how to use it better. The vast majority of young people cannot differentiate sponsored content within their news feed for example. They're seeing (and being influenced by) ads without realizing they're ads. These are things that need to be taught in schools. Fact-checking is a skill that's not too difficult to learn or to teach, but for that to happen people need to start to pay more attention to the source of the information they're looking at.
New technologies require the teaching of new kinds of skills. Education these days should focus not on trying to get kids to memorize a lot of facts, but instead it should aim to teach them how to search for facts and differentiate them from fiction using the largest information network ever built by man that most western people now have access to from their pockets. Teaching kids the basics of information retrieval and how to use search engines and so on has been a part of the curriculum here in Finland for over a decade. In our neighbor to the south, Estonia, kids are allowed to look for answers on their phones during certain classes as well to help them practice this skill, and so on.
This is actually at the core of the problem of income inequality. As Thomas Piketty points out in Capital in the 21st century:
When a tiny fraction of the top 1 % owns nearly half of everything, and the bottom 90 % owns practically nothing besides their residences (and 75 % of all publicly held debt (source)), and the above conditions being true this division is only going to grow unless something is done, it should be clear that this model is not sustainable.
"Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels - levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies." [pg. 26]
Or, or you could do any number of things other than 'writing checks'. Secondly of course it makes no sense to tax it away entirely, no-one's even proposing that. Through your history you've previously had high marginal rates for those making the most money, and despite that people still kept investing and making money because as long as you don't tax a 100 % of it, there's still going to be an incentive to make more. You could tax inherited wealth / dividends above say tens of millions at a marginal tax rate of something like 70-80 % and use said money to provide for example universal health care and education to the lower and middle-classes which would not only significantly improve their quality of life, it would also allow increased social mobility by allowing people to educate themselves without having to take massive amounts of debt in a situation wherein a degree is a requirement - but no longer a guarantee - of getting a well paying job. Not to mention all the other possibilities such as reducing the amount of debt the government has to take, funding infrastructure building, research, etc. Eventually automation and AIs will make most current jobs (even the white-collar ones) obsolote, at which point if you wish to maintain domestic demands for goods and services, the only way for that to happen is via something like universal basic income. The companies need less and less paid staff to run their operations going ahead, but at the same time less and less staff means less and less demand for products as less people are getting paid unless something is done. You can't stop the technological progress causing machines to overtake humans in efficiency, so really the one thing you can change for more easily is taxation.
Of course I'm not American but neither is the nature of this problem: income inequality is going up nearly across the board in the west, the US is just the case wherein it has gone on for the longest time.
Couple of important points you're missing here. Firstly: in tech especially these days you might not even have to convince a group of VC investors, if you've got promising technology one of the larger tech players might well be willing to invest in you. Alphabet/Google and the rest are funding quite a lot of small companies these days. Secondly: if your plan is to develop a sustainable business that will end up making you a lot of money, then going public might not be the best approach to begin with. The more stock you/the original founders keep on yourself, the more you're going to get out of the company when it starts turning a profit, regardless of whether you go public eventually or not.
When you add to this the points mentioned in the summary: namely that the amount of capital required by new companies is going down (software especially is nowhere near as capital heavy as it used to be) and hat going public makes you subject to stricter transparency rules which might not be ideal competition-wise, it's clear that unless you absolutely have to go public due to not being able to get funding elsewhere (or for some reason requiring large amounts of it), it often makes no sense for a startup to go public as a means of getting funding.
Erm... as someone who's had cerebral palsy since birth due to damage to the motor cortex caused during a premature birth I have some news for you: the consequences of brain damage are not limited to headaches and migraines.
Exactly. And if you look at what chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which to my knowledge is the most common neurodegenerative condition for contact sport athletes with repeated head injury causes, you'll find a whole host of symptoms, quoting the wiki:
You're right about this entirely. The main issue with keeping people on topic is that if they disregard the facts presented it's hard to gain any common ground. That is, you can press a solid point backed up by data all you want in a discussion, but if the opposing side flatout refuses to give any weight to the data then the discussion gets stuck and people often quit the discussion, as he eventually did without getting back to me.
No, that's not what I think. The point is I was trying to base my argument on facts and numbers, and he wasn't even looking at said facts or providing any counters to the figures presented. I'm entirely open to being wrong if I'm given good reasons for why I'm wrong, he didn't. He just stated his opinion with nothing to essentially back it up., it's based on assumptions about nuclear energy which are not in line with the facts that we do have about nuclear safety and the environmental cost of nuclear vs. something like solar. So he makes a claim, doesn't back it up with anything. I try to show him why the claim is false, and he ignores the data (for example the fact that per kilowatt hour produced nuclear has caused the least deaths) and simply moves on to state something else.
It's not the case that we were coming to different conclusions based on the same data because he didn't base his argument on any data, thus the facts I presented to him in support of my argument had no impact on the discussion whatsoever. He didn't dispute the numbers, he didn't provide any numbers to back up his own position but simply moved on to the next talking point. The basis for his opinion was emotional, not factual, if it was factual he would have been able to provide some of those facts to support his view, instead what he did is, in a nutshell, simply state that radiation is bad (because of chernobyl & Fukushima) and therefore all nuclear power is bad/dangerous.
Because the renewable technology itself is manufactured using non-renewable materials. Solar panel construction for example generates around 300 times the amount of waste per unit of energy produced than nuclear, because the manufacturing of the panels themselves requires lots of heavy metals that are toxic (cadmium, gallium, indium, selenium etc), and also in limited supply and need to be mined from places like China, where the rare earth mining industry is already generating a lot of environmental issues.
Secondly there's the issue of storing the energy created. If we were to attempt to do it using current battery packs it would be extremely costly to the environment as lithium is also in limited supply and has to be dug up from the ground, and replaced after the batteries get worn. Not to mention this approach would not be sustainable, as we cannot indefinitely keep making lithium batteries, and especially since the demand for lithium batteries is going to skyrocket to begin with with the increasing amount of electric vehicles.
If/when we get better ways of storing energy created by renewable sources then we may be in a situation wherein it makes sense. At the current level of both production and storage equipment, a fully renewable approach does not seem to me to be environmentally sound considering the manufacturing processes and material demands involved, and the strain these put on the environment,
The battery technology is simply nowhere near the point wherein enough storage could be realistically built to manage the whole grid with renewables. Batteries are made of perishing resources and have a limited lifespan
This is not to say something like this couldn't be achieved in the future if tech evolves, but using the current state of battery technology, essentially scaled up lithium-ion batteries it's not doable.
This is true unfortunately and it's not limited to politics by any means. I was having a discussion yesterday on FB about energy policies and there was a guy arguing for '100 % solar'/renewable approach. I went in explaining to him why this is not feasible and would in fact do a lot of damage to the environment and that we should favor a mix of renewables and nuclear as that's the best combo to go with if we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly and effectively. He then came back with the typical fear mongering arguments about how radiation is scary and so on, and we had a back and forth where I tried to the best of my ability to counter his points with actual facts and figures about energy production, emissions, deaths per kilowatt hour etc etc. He never contested any of my points even, he just threw in the next objection he had in mind. After a few comments of this he finally came back with, and this is a direct quote: "you are entitled to have your opinion but I am afraid this will not affect/change mine. Sorry" In other words: 'I'm free to ignore facts that don't fit with my ideology'.
This is the fundamental issue with the net/social media in its current state. Since it's driven by algorithms that are geared to maximise time on site and engagement, those algorithms do 2 primary things: firstly the surround you with people and content that's in line with yours, because people like reading stuff they agree with, and secondly they drop in the occasional piece of information/news/opinion that's likely to make you angry, because angry people are more engaged and pay more attention, thereby improving the effectiveness of advertising.
People are naturally inclined to be more accepting evidence supporting a claim they already believe in, and the algorithms online have pushed this to overdrive. People on one side of an issue, and people on another side of an issue, all equally convinced that no-one in their right mind could be on the other . This makes conversation, actual, fact-based conversation, almost impossible, and simultaneously makes utilising social media for political/ideological propaganda really easy, because it's build to divide people into groups of likeminded people What the guy was likely doing to me in the energy discussion was throwing talking points at me that he had heard/seen made before by other members of his bubble. He wasn't arguing so much as he was lobbing memes at me, and in the end, when none of those memes worked, he resorted to 'well, that's like just your opinion man.'
The same phenomenon is going in globally with politics. People by and large don't discuss issues and facts, they take different kind of political memes and throw them at each other, with the end result being that the other side only usually gets angry and counters with their own memes. This is super effective in keeping people engaged on the site, it's precisely what the platforms aim to do and it's simultaneously toxic for any actual discussion about facts, because any fact-based arguments have a memetic counter to them.
Yes, but the problem is that groundwater reserves are not infinite. Due to heavy demand by agriculture, you're currently using them faster than they're being refilled. Quoting the link ('Groundwater Depletion in the United States (1900–2008)' by U.S department of the interior):
If nothing is done to make water use sustainable, then getting fresh water is going to get a lot more energy intensive and costly when the aquifers start running dry.
That's pretty much exactly what it is. Erdogan was elected with a very very slim margin and he knows the country is split in the middle. The cities are highly educated and well off and in favour of a secular state and against totalitarianism. The countryside, Erdogan's base, is less educated, more conservative and more religious, and this is the group he's been pandering to the whole time. This is why he's slowly dismantling the secular basis of the state and inching it closer to a theocracy, which is for example why they made a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in schools. His goal is obviously to ensure that his base stays ignorant so he can continue to enjoy their support.
Whether or not the 'coup' was an actual attempt or state-sanctioned theatrics to justify the subsequent actions doesn't even really matter at this point. What matters is that Erdogan's done after that is unjustifiable: he's thrown out judges, teachers, shut down newspapers and stations, increased censorship and blocking of sites online, and so on. At the same time he's been consolidating more power for himself and amped up the campaign against the Kurds, despite the fact that the Kurds are in fact helping to combat Isis, , but he knows that all totalitarian states need both internal and external enemies. For him the internal enemies are now the 'Gulenists' as well as the Kurds at times and the external enemy is Isis.
Not to mentioned with the courts now manned by Erdogan approved judges, what do you think are the chances for a fair trial for someone accused of treason? I mean this article demonstrates the standard of evidence that passes in the courts, it's essentially: 'you've visited these sites/used this app/shared this content, that makes you an enemy of the state'. Think about the fact that about half the country never voted for him, so how easy do you think it will be to find something 'anti-Erdogan'/anti Justice and development party that they've shared/liked at some point? Hell, if I was Turkish this comment alone would likely make me a candidate for facing a trial. I know for a fact that my Turkish ex-girlfriend who's an outspoken atheist and has been active in demonstrations against Erdogan for years certainly has a profile that makes her a target for prosecution, but I do not know if she's still free or not. And she's no 'Gulenist' as she's against the whole religion to begin with, but again, that doesn't matter to tyrants.
So yeah, the country with 2nd largest army in NATO after the US and previously the largest muslim majority secular state is slowly turning into a totalitarian islamist theocracy and the attitude of the entire West is mostly 'oh well, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, can't be helped'.
I 100 % agree with you, but there's a major dilemma here: it's not just about whether or not one cares about the environment, consumption is the cornerstone of the economy. It's the main driver of economic growth, which is why the idea that we should build more durable goods and buy less instead of more is one of the few major heretical beliefs in our time. I mean, for contrast I live in a society that compared to the US is far to the left with higher taxes and universal systems of education and health care, and even in here every single party in the parliament, including those on the left, is committed to economic growth. So when you say:
I'll have to disagree with you, because regardless of what happens to the US in the years and decades going ahead, consumerism is a global trend now. China is investing heavily into Africa to move some of their production there in order to get a 'China' of their own to manufacture goods for their ever growing domestic market and so on. As long as the global population keeps increasing, which at the moment looks to be until at least the 10 billion mark, the economies will keep growing because we'll have more people and thus more people who need and want things and a better standard of living.
This is not to say that the problem of waste is unsolvable, I don't believe it is. Resources are finite, and the companies know this. What I'm hoping will happen is that the increased investment into different kinds of green and clean technologies will make waste processing a profitable business. The less materials we have left on the planet, the more valuable the already existing waste material is. The plastic in the oceans is worth a lot of money as soon as a way is developed to effectively reprocess and re-use it for production, which would create a direct economic interest for companies to not only stop throwing their waste away, but in fact to collect already existing waste and reprocess it for sale.
Sustainability is the major issue of our time. and one we will have to solve no matter what is or isn't done to address climate change, because we do have limited resources combined with economies based on the assumption of continuous growth, which is not a solvable equation.