We are nowhere near inventing that kind of AI, our current tech is not nearly good enough.
This is not a counter-argument to anything. This 'oh don't worry about it, because the tech isn't there yet' -card has been thrown around since the 60s and the 70s., and it keeps bieng thrown about despite the fact that we now already have systems with limited intelligence that were deemed 'impossible' in earlier decades (see: AlphaGo, Google translate, self-driving cars etc).
As long as we keep increasing the intelligence of our systems, the day will come when some of these systems reach human level general intelligence, at which point they will also become better at programming themselves and future AIs than humans, because even if the system is 'just' at the level of a human being, silicon based 'brains' operate around a million times faster than our grey-matter CPUs. So yeah, we're not there yet, but there's also no argument to be made currently that we're not headed there, or that we cannot eventually get there. Say it takes 50 years (as many AI researchers currently think), or hell say it takes double that, what then?`
If a probe landed on earth tomorrow which carried a message in all known languages saying: "People of Earth, we're headed your way and will be expecting to land on the 15th of August 2117, get ready!" would you expect people who'd be worried about them being potentially hostile to be content wth 'ah don't worry about it, it's a long time away, it's not like you're going to be dying by them, just your kids and grandkids!"
It's decentralized you idiot, no government can stop it.
Decentralization protects the technology behind bitcoin from being attacked by some random state actor. The infrastructure of bitcoin is pretty safe from the intervention of governments, but that does not mean that the value of bitcoin is equally untouchable. Bitcoins derive their true value from being exchangeable into fiat currencies and the governments know this, which is why they are taxed and regulated, which means their value can be affected by governments.
I'll buy that this risk reduction is real and I'll also buy that this is an important factor in, say, winning a war. But I don't buy that it works quite that way on the individual level in peacetime.
Most of us like peace and aren't trained to commit violence, making that a psychological if quite real barrier to commit violence at all. It's why even in a country with more guns than people, most people can still live a good long life and die of old age.
But that's not the point that was being made. You actually summed it up yourself when you said:
I'll buy that with easy access and lower risk, perhaps more people's threshold to use it will be met while having it available
There's a certain amount of people in any given society with violent tendencies (call it 'group A') and only some of these people will actually be willing to attempt to realize their tendencies (group B). And of those that do attempt to go through with it, only a smaller group still will have both the tools and the skills to be successful (group C). Even in a country like the US in which there are - in so far as I know - more guns than people, sure there's still knife crime, but the obvious answer to 'why would anyone use knifes when they could use a gun' is access. Acquiring a blade is vastly cheaper and easier even in the US than acquiring a gun, so for the people in group B who're willing to actually act violently but do not have the money or the capabilities (for example due to a criminal record) to acquire a weapon, knives are the go-to choice. For the same reason the US has vastly higher amounts of gun crime, and as guns are more effective at killing than blades, also homicides, than any other western nation. Ease of access and availability matters.
Same for suicide bombers: it takes less skill and preparation to strap a bomb to yourself than it does to both craft a remote detonated device, get it to place, get yourself out while making sure it's not discovered and successfully detonate it. Plus, in the case of religiously motivated martyrdom attacks which are the most common source of suicide attacks, getting yourself killed is part of the intention of the attacker. In fact data suggest that propaganda aimed at radicalizing people to commit these attacks specifically targets individuals who're already suicidal and depressed. They then ramp up the 'you're a worthless sinner and will burn in hell' rhetoric to further amp up the angst and the de-humanization of the individual himself, and then offer them a way out by which they van in the context of the doctrine of the faith, 'redeem' themselves by becoming martyrs and in the process they also get to kill themselves 'guilt free'. So for the organized groups like Isis that seek to carry out and motivate such attacks, these people (depressed/suicidal individuals) are like drones in that they're easier to come by and manipulate than people that do not want to die and have the skillset to carry out a remote detonation attack.
If you look at the conflict in the Northern Ireland a couple decades back, IRA used remote detonations because even though religion played a part in the conflict, they saw themselves as a military operation more so than 'jihadists', and for them it was disadvantageous to have their own soldiers sacrifice themselves if they could be spared. Meanwhile Isis & al don't give a rats ass whether or not random muslims in the west live or die as long as damage (and hence terror) is maximized. The individual suicidal bomber is a disposable asset for them.
So the point of De Becker is not that increased affordability and accessibility to commercial drones will increase the amount of people in group A because it likely won't, but what it can do is increase the amount of people in groups B and C. Because if it turns out that drone based attacks have a higher success/mortality rate than suicide attacks, then it becomes advantageous for these groups to move to the direction of
This topic of drones and their use for violent eds and how it's changing things just came up in a recent episode of Sam Harri's waking up podcast where he interviewed Gavin De Becker a security expert who runs a company specializing in personal protection. The main point of the interview was not drones but violence overall, however De Becker starts discussing drones towards the end of the podcast after the 2 hour 10 minute mark
His main point is this: when it comes to inflicting tissue damage, the most significant advancements in the history of weaponry have been those that have increased the distance between the attacker and the target. Such advancements reduce the risk to the assailant, thus increasing the amount of individuals willing to use these technologies to commit violence. This is why accelerated metal projectiles were such an effective discovery, and after those prior to drones the technology that's had the most impact has been remote detonated bombs, because they increase the distance between the target and the assailant even more. Drones go even further than this because they're essentially smart/guided bomb platforms or biological agent delivery systems (airborne pathogens dispersed over crowds etc)
Becker states that in his opinion commercial drones are the most significant advancement in tissue damage technology in a thousand years (ie. since bullets) because they're very cheap, very easy to use, and very hard to defend against. And the maneuverability is extremely high: drones with collective pitch can do stuff like this and it doesn't take that long for an individual to learn to pilot them.. When you add to that the fact that swarm technology already exists allowing a single operator to control up to 50 small drones that will avoid crashing into each other but can be guided to hit a single target, and that in the future the drones may well be entirely autonomous and not require even a signal to the controller, I find it hard to disagree with De Becker's estimation that this will be much, much more relevant advancement in weapon technology than people currently think.
As he points out, 'every weapon that has ever been developed has been used", we know that commercial drones are used as improvised weapons already, but this is in the very early stages. It's only a matter of time before some prominent politician/celebrity/business leader somewhere is assassinated by a drone or some terror group successfully carries out an attack in the west, and once the meme is out there, they're going to start ramping up. Compare to the use of vehicles as tools of terror; the technology itself has existed for over a century, but now that the weaponizing of personal vehicles has become a trend it's begun to spread and has started to be used even by groups pother than islamic terrorists, but a vehicle attack is very limited in scope and accuracy and can only be used to deliver random damage.
Drones are far more precise, and, when used correctly, far more deadly while at the same time being massively cheaper than vehicles. The fact that you can currently fly a drone in most western cities without much care of being caught even if you fly it in a no-fly area is a problem.
When you don't have to pay for ridiculous and harmful social programs, your tax bill goes down.
Total UK tax revenue in 2016: 716 billion £ Total cost of UK's EU membership after discounting the money you go back in different types of programs and payments: 8,6 billion £, meaning roughly 1,2 % of the total tax revenue or 131 pounds per person per year.
This is shocking to absolutely nobody with half a clue about how politics and economics work.
If you think your taxes are going to go down after this 1,2 % 'saving' boots you out of the biggest trade union in the world, you've probably gotten your political and economic education from the university of one prominent Solarium Sultan from across the Atlantic. Hint: you're going to end up paying more than that 131 pounds a year just in form of increasing inflation, unemployment and increased cost of importing/exporting goods. Not to mention that the fact that your government's expenditure goes down 1,2 % does not mean they will cut taxes by that amount, or any amount.
Honestly, this reminds me of Kronan the Swedish navy vessel that at the time of its sinking was the Navy's flagship and was sent out to crush some Danes. However, because at that time the Swedish navy chose officers based on family lineage instead of any kind of actual competence, this happened:
Around noon, some distance northeast of Hulterstad, the Swedish fleet made what the military historian Ingvar Sjöblom has described as "a widely debated maneuver". Because of misunderstandings and poorly coordinated signaling, the Swedish fleet attempted to turn and engage the allied fleet before they had sailed past the northern end of Öland, which had been agreed on before the battle. Sharp turns in rough weather were known to be perilous, especially for ships that had stability weaknesses. Kronan turned to port (left), but with too much sail, and heeled so far over that she began to flood through the open gunports
While I do not see Britts as an enemy of any kind and had wished for them to stay in the EU, as a metal fan (not the air conditioning kind) watching the UK government execute this 'widely debated maneuver' of Brexit while no-one at the helm seems to know what the plan is even in the short term, I do get reminded of the lyrics to a metal song about Kronan by the Swedish band Falconer called 'Man of the Hour':
Danes in confusion Surprisingly greet The self termination Of the Swedish fleet. Without firing a round On the stronger foe They're victory bound As "The Crown" went below.
Businesses exist to provide goods and services for a profit, which is easier if taxes are low.
Businesses exist to provide goods and services for a profit, which is easier if taxes are low.
Governments exist to serve the citizens, which is easier if the citizens have economically productive work -- like when the governments decide not to drive the businesses away with high taxes.
It's easier for a singular company if it has to pay less taxes. But you eliminate taxes altogether, or lower them in massive amounts you start to lose key infrastructure and services critical for the operation of the whole economy, which in turn is detrimental for both the corporations and the consumers within an economy. If the US would do this for every company there'd be a massive downgrade in the standard of living.
Opposing any given tax is possible on the basis that it's 'bad for business', but that's essentially leaving out everything that's being bought by the government with the taxes to help the population. My own government collects higher taxes than in the US, but because of that I graduated without student debt, and if I manage to grow our small company to the point that we can hire full-time employees (haven't quit my day job yet but we're not in a hurry), I don't have to worry about getting them - or myself - medical insurance,
In fact it's a quite well known fact that the cost of (private) medical insurance in the US is massively higher than the per citizen cost of government funded health care here in Europe and elsewhere, which is just common sense when you realize that for the government that's 'insuring' us all, health care is a cost, so the point is to treat people effectively and with the lowest possible cost. Whereas in the US, where health is a private enterprise and one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the economy, the purpose of the hospitals is to treat the patients while also extracting as much money in the process as they can. Back before I graduated and moved to the IT side of our health care sector, I worked in hospital billing and we had to often deal with medical invoices of Finnish citizens that were treated in the US (they were often sent to us if the person lacked medical insurance as many here do) and we used to actually collect copies of them just for the ludicrous amount of overhead on them. I've seen 4 dollar aspirin pills, I've seen a simple X-ray and some stiches priced at like 1400 dollars which is equal to the price of 2-3 days of intensive care here (which the patient himself obviously doesn't pay, there's a flat fee of around 20 euros or so per day spent in hospital, the rest is covered by us). This was way before the ACA though, I do not know how that has affected it, but it is my understanding ACA deals mostly with insurers and does not set pricing rules for hospitals. Now granted it's not all because of greed, the US system is far less centralized for many reasons which also raises costs and the salaries of clinical staff tend to be higher as well (partially because doctors/nurses have such a high amount of debt when they start working that the starting salaries have to be higher for them to afford the same standard of living as someone in here coming through med school), but even with all those factors there's a lot air in the prices.
So the small (but extremely vocal) right-wing libertarian segment of my fellow countrymen who keep copypasting this 'down with the public health care system, the Free Market is the life and the way, it's better for business' mantra from the US are in fact totally wrong. It's a known fact that the alternative cost of a privatized medical system is much higher overall and ends up being paid for by either corporations directly (employer-provided insurance) or by the individuals themselves. In either case the end result is people and corporations have less disposable income, not more.
So no, it's unequivocally not true that less taxes always means 'better for business'. Of course this all hinges on what you actually do with the taxes that are collected.
Indeed. It's not illegal to post nude pictures of someone (in most western countries), however at least here in Finland there exists case law which has deemed quite clearly that publishing such photos without the consent of the person in them is a violation of privacy. It doesn't matter that you agreed to be photographed, or even took and sent the pictures yourself, that does not grant the receiver the right to redistribute them.
The site is not violating the law, but the people who are posting pictures without permission are.
Climate prediction is based on mathematical models which are trained on historical data and then carried forward to predict the future. This process has never worked in any other human endeavour. For example, the same process is used by many people in an attempt to predict the stock market. Does that ever work out? The same process is used to predict the effect of changes in the economy, such as raising the interest rates. Has that ever gone horribly wrong(*)?
You do realize what you're doing is comparing the global climate, an actual physical planetary wide system that's been here for millenia before any man was ever born, to man made social constructs and saying that because we cannot predict the latter we surely can't predict the former.
This is not sound logic. The climate and the stock market are both extremely chaotic systems meaning that small changes in some values can have huge impacts on the stability of the whole system. However what you and others making this argument always conveniently forget is that underlying the study of climate and the mathematical models themselves are actual natural sciences like chemistry. We don't have to 'guess' how the greenhouse effect works, or how much heat is absorbed/reflected by different gasses, these are all things that can be measured and tested in a lab.
Obviously because the amount of metrics that needs to be factored in to model something as vast as the global climate is so high that the models cannot be 100 % certain, and obviously there are human components in the equation that increase this uncertainty but the core of your argument is still not correct. The stock market can crash at any given time due to any number of actions and the prices plummet. For you to be able to argue that the climate is the same way, you'd have to argue that at any given moment way may spontaneously enter into an ice age, which is clearly not true.
There is no instance where a mathematical model with the complexity of Earth's climate has made reliable predictions in any way.
There's also never been a time in the history of the species when we've had access to as much computing power, machine learning and actual hard data about the state of the climate.
This is one of the real problems with the climate science debate: no model of that complexity has ever been accurate, therefore it's incorrect to be making decisions based on their results.
No. You see, the thing with the climate is: we have to make predictions because the future state of the climate has a direct impact on the survival of the species. The models that we do have reflect our current, best understanding of the climate, and they're getting better as more data come in and machine learning steps in. If you ignore the models there's essentially nothing to base our decisions on and you could argue that it's just fine for us to start burning up all the remaining oil and gas because 'who knows what's going to happen'. But that's just BS. We obviously don't know the future of the climate with certainty, but we do know enough to know that certain actions are going to make things a lot worse.
You also mentioned disease outbreak models, so think about it in this light: should we throw out our current understanding of epidemiology because the outbreak models are not (yet) all that precise? Should the doctors stop wearing gloves, should we stop vaccinations, sanitation and all these things which have a demonstrable and proven effect on lowering the rates of outbreak and infection because we're not 100 % omniscient about the time and place of future outbreaks? Huh?
So either you can listen to the people with the most information and understanding about the climate and its current state, or you can keep telling yourself that corporations and atmospheric gasses are equally unp
So, no, if you are the one person in the room that people's brains have decided stands out, there's a reason to feel threatened.
Certainly and I never claimed otherwise. What matters however is how this is solved. Shouting 'I feel threatened here please hire more people like me/put me somewhere with others of my kind so I can feel safe" does not solve the issue. In fact I'd argue it makes it worse, because now you've just confirmed to the out-group that you are indeed not one of them, but rather someone who's scared of them and hence likely not to be trusted to speak your mind when asked.
It's a trust issue. I've been a cripple all my life (cerebral palsy, won the birth lottery) and from my experience the best way to smash stereotypes and preconceptions is to ignore them and just focus on the matter at hand. Once people learn that you're just as capable as the rest of them despite your differing sex/looks/race/whatever, they will adjust, and their image of said group will adjust. If it won't, well then it's time to change jobs because at that point complaining to these people about 'persecution' or 'bullying' will just re-enforce their negative stereotype of your group.
I wonder where the cables will run through north Africa? A lot of unstable regimes there, would be easy for terrorists to cut/blow up the cables, whether overhead or underground. Not good for energy security.
You're right. But the current situation is that much of Europe's energy is supplied by Russia, which, in the current geopolitical climate, is even worse for energy security because it gives the Kremlin the power to strongarm the Union by threatening to raise prices or close the gas flow entirely.
But because radiation is scary to people who do not understand the difference between modern reactors and Chernobyl/Fukushima, my fellow Europeans seem somehow terrified by it, even though countries like France have been using it to generate over a third of all their energy for long.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying nuclear is the perfect solution. It's not. But it's a whole lot better for energy security and for the climate than continuing to use coal, oil and natural gas while we try to figure out cleaner solutions that work even in less sunny areas.
What is claimed is that women, just like men, when put in an unthreatening environment, can work equally productively You probably don't realize how threatening a room full of strange men feels to many women.
So your argument here is that women and men can work just as productively, with the exception that women cannot work with groups of strange men as that is 'threatening' to them by default? What?
When I started working full-time fresh from school as a project lead, I felt uncomfortable going into meetings where the other participants were much older, much better paid, and many of them having the power to get me fired if I screw up (and many of these people were women). Do you think when I felt anxious and nervous because of this I just grabbed my dick and suddenly everything was perfect and the stress was gone? No, over time I learned to deal with these people and I learned that they're indeed nowhere near as hostile or threatening as I assumed, and that screwing up is not the end of the world if you have the guts to admit your mistakes. Even the bosses have once been rookies.
You can't have it both ways and first proudly proclaim at first that men and women are all equal in their abilities, and then in the very next moment turn to 'but groups of men are scary to women so they need to be handled with extra-care'.That's not gender-equality in any sense of the word. As I wrote here yesterday on another story, it might still be feminism, but not all feminism is egalitarian..
Now obviously it's better for everyone if no-one feels stressed, but my point here is that the stressful/'threatening' factors in a work environment arise from a multitude of factors, the most common of which is the tension between management and employees that often exists totally independent of the reproductive organs on either side of the table,
I'm a female senior dev contractor in finance in London, and the banks pretty much get it right.
Ah yes finance. That good old industry in which people feel totally at ease with each other and are not under pressure to out-perform their fellow men and women or feel threatened at all. I've heard wild stories about bouncy castles and finger painting going on in the high-level trader meetings.:P
Musk's schedules should be taken with significant amounts of salt
You're quite right on this one. However I don't really think
he wants to move much faster than what they can manage in practice.
Is necessarily true. I mean, Musk is a businessman as well, so he understands the importance of marketing. This animation itself is from 2015 as others have pointed out, yet as Musk just re-posted it to his Twitter it's now making the rounds in the news again. SpaceX has a lot of promise, but so far they - like many of Musks ventures - are fueled by publicity. He needs to build and maintain the company brand , and he's succeeded. SpaceX is the most well known private space company, but it won't stay that way unless it stays on the news. And when you've got no new and exciting news, you pick up a trick from master entertainers and do some of the all-time classics.
So every few month's Musk pops up when the analytics start to show it's time and brings up their project so that people won't forget. As for what the actual schedule is, that, I doubt, is a highly kept company secret that only Musk himself and the teams working on the rocket know of. As far as the rest of the world is concerned they're always just about to launch.
And I think it's gonna be a long long time 'Till touch down brings me round again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids In fact it's cold as hell And there's no one there to raise them if you did And all this science I don't understand It's just my job five days a week A rocket man, a rocket man
I have no problem with there being people who identify as feminist and focus on issues faced by women. And there's a large group of feminists who are indeed also egalitarian. But to say that equality between sexes (or races, or any other groups) is a solely feminist idea, or that all feminists support total equality between the sexes is demonstrably wrong. As an example: here in Finland due to our small population size, having Russia right next door and us not being in NATO, all men have a constitutional obligation to enter the armed forces for basic training lasting between 6-12 months. Those that do not want to can enter into 'civillian service' which is essentially doing work in different kinds of public services (museums, ministries etc) for a year. If they do neither and are not relieved of this obligation for a medical reason, they'll face some jail time.
Women can enter into the Finnish Defense Forces since the 1990s, but very few of them do, Now, if the only legit interpretation of feminism was 'equality between the sexes', all feminists would have have to either oppose the current mandatory military service for men altogether, or be for expanding it to cover all women as well, as is the case for example in Israel.
This is not the case however. I have read Finnish feminists who are for expanding it to cover women as well, but many of them are quite fine with the status quo. Other such examples can be found as well. There are feminists who are for mandatory quotas of women in corporate boards, some are even for those in parliaments. The egalitarian position is that sex should be irrelevant when selecting board members or voting because a person's sex is not indicative of his/her abilities or competence. Nevertheless a certain subgroup of modern feminists seem to not realize or care about this and are essentially about trying to force a '50-50" gender split for the sake of 'equality', not caring that such an approach by itself goes against the equality of sexes by making sex a selection criteria. In a simplified case if 10 positions are open and you have 15 male and 5 female applicants, such a person would say that the 5 female applicants must get the position purely to achieve equality of sexes, which in turn disqualifies some men purely because they're men.
Again: the point here is not to say all feminists are like this, or to demonize all feminists or say that it's wrong to be a feminist, it's not. The point is that the phrase 'feminism is the 'radical' idea that men and women should be treated equally' is not always indicative of all people who identify as feminists, nor is feminism a requirement for holding that belief.
and continuing the completely proven as bullshit Russian narrative..
I'm not American so maybe I've missed something despite my best attempts at following the events in the US closely but I am under the impression that there are several investigations underway into the Russia thing. So how come it's possible for people to claim anything to be proven, one way or the other, when the guys looking into it (Muller, the senate committee, etc) have not come out with anything yet as they're still gathering data?
I've always considered/. to be a place of (mostly) rational, science-oriented people who understand the importance and value of due process and following the evidence, but yet people from both the left and the right alike are proclaiming that they know the end result of the investigation(s) before it's even remotely completed. What the fuck is up with this shit?
The presence of this kind of rhetoric to me is worrisome because it reeks of 3rd world pseudo-Orwellian BS. People in their own little bubbles with insane amounts of confirmation bias absorbing blog posts masquerading as news and becoming convinced that they know the truth ahead of time, so that when the investigation(s) finally conclude, no matter the result, half of the people will be up and arms and shouting 'Conspiracy, conspiracy, I know the result is false, I read so at [insert news/blog outlet of choice] several months ago, clearly the establishment/'deep state' is [out to frame the innocent president/corrupt and in the back pocket of a corrupt president and lying to protect him]".
Democratic systems require an informed voter base to function. Once that is gone, once the public can be spoon fed tailor made propaganda and manipulated with relative ease into believing nearly anything without hard evidence, then the entire concept of accountability goes out the window, and truth stops mattering, by which point you might just as well elect a king and be done with it.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
I can also see people using the automatic driving to function like a second car. Right now I take mass transit, because it's far cheaper than parking and gas, which would be the bulk of the cost, and it only ads on 10-15 min to my commute. But if I could call our car from my wife's work to come take me to work, that would be tempting. An electric self-driving car would probably end up being cheaper and faster than mass transit for me, provided I sent it home or to her work for free parking.
And it's not just you that can see that, it's also the car manufacturers. In this 40 minute interview Elon Musk lists pretty much all of the scenarios you mentioned, saying it's part of how they feel people will start using their self-driving future Teslas.
No need for two cars then, really. Multiply that by a lot of people, and I can see the congestion staying the same or getting worse, despite the ability of self-driving cars to pack closer together.
Here's where it stops being as straightforward as it initially seems. You see, most people might not need a car of their own at all at that point. In that same interview Musk describes the way they see car/ride sharing working in the future. If you buy a self-driving Tesla, you can the adjust what you want it to do when you don't need it. You might set it up so that you only share it with your wife or the whole family. Or you might set it up so that it's shared with all of your friends. Or even all all app-users who have a high rating. Why? Because you can make money sharing it out (think: uber) thus helping you pay for the car itself.
So from this perspective people might be able to do by with less vehicles.- A group of friends living in close proximity might only need 1 car where they previously had 3-4.
So in the future I might not own a vehicle at all if I can reliably enough either loan one from a friend/family member when I need it or hire a self-driving car with a cheap enough rate that the price for the hours of driving a month I need to do (which at the moment is very low, I use mass-transit for work trips just as you because it's both faster and cheaper) is still lower than the cost of owning a car myself.
Or alternatively, if I do own a car I might program it via the app to act for example as follows: During weekdays keep sharing off between 8 am and 10 am and 4 pm and 6 pm to be able to take me to work and back. Excluding those time windows the car is is free to be used my family and a hand picked close circle of friends for the cost of operating expenses (ie. without a margin) or to a wider group of acquaintances at those same expenses plus a 10 % margin. The car will make sure that the car keeps itself on enough charge to be able to take me to work and back each day at those times. Then when I have longer trips coming up,. I know in advance when I'll need the car for myself for say, a weekend trip, so obviously sharing will be disabled then.
Most vehicles currently sit unused in parking lots for over 90 % of the time. With automated cars, the idea is to shrink the amount of cars and instead making it so that we have less cars which see a higher amount of use.
And even if the amount of cars stays the same or even goes up, that still doesn't mean we'll have issues with congestion as much as you think. The thing is, the self-driving cars know where each of them are, so the car can route around point of high traffic, but more importantly in high traffic areas the cars can drive at high speed at relatively close distances to each other because you don't have to leave a lot of room for the self-driving car in front of you to make an emergency stop as the reaction time of both it and your own vehicle will be superior to any human driver. When the car wants to turn or change lanes, it will notify the vehicles around it and space will be made. This allows for much higher and faster tra
So, because done right, it has benefits, that means that done wrong should be tolerated or encouraged?
That's not what he said or implied though. He pointed out that there are ways in which GMOs can be used correctly and for the benefit of everyone to get better food with less energy/demand on the soil.
The whole problem with the GMO-discussion is that people mix up 2 things, namely the scientific process of genetic modification, and the gigantic corporations that seek to make profit using the process - sometimes in ethically questionable ways.
All of the food we eat is 'genetically modified' in the sense that we've been breeding and artificially selecting for desirable traits in plants and animals for millenia, now it's just become possible to do it at way faster timescales and increasing accuracy. The fact that there is corporate greed and instances seeking to take advantage of this process for their own personal benefit at the expense of other people does not invalidate the process of gene modification itself anymore than criminals and scammers using the internet for malicious ends makes the whole of the internet a bad thing.
Well, no. First of all, fixing access does not mean fixing affordability. You can build power stations and power lines all you want to get those people access, but that doesn't mean those people can suddenly afford the price of an AC unit and the cost to run it.
According to United Nation's Millennium Development Goals (MDG) programme 270 millions or 21.9% people out of 1.2 billion of Indians lived below poverty line of $1.25 in 2011-2012.
A quick google search for 'air conditioning price in India' tells me that the low end AC units sold start at around 19 500 rupiees, which at today's exchange rate is just slightly above 300 dollars.. So that's almost a year's salary for most of the poorest 200-300 million Indians to just afford the machine. And that's just the acquisition cost. The cheaper ones are usually ones with higher power consumption (this one which I used as an example for the price has a 3 star rating), but we shouldn't be too far off even with a 3 star rating for a 1 ton machine if we assume a power consumption of about 1 kWh.
The one good thing is that increasing warming makes solar cheaper and cheaper. According to this story from last year the prices have at times shrunk to 2.62 rupiees per kWh, roughly 4 US cents.So if you run the machine for the hottest part of the day, say from 10 to 17, that's 28 cents a day.
So for those living in poverty they need to spend about 1/5th of their income just to be able to operate the machine if they somehow managed to save enough money to actually buy one in the first place. Given that people with children especially tend to have other notable expenses, it's unlikely that many at those income levels will even be able to acquire such a machine. Granted, increasing supply will further bring prices down so this estimate is not fully reflective of the future, but I'm using these figures to highlight that 'fixing this issue' is just ever so slightly more complicated than just building a few solar plants and some power lines.
The new ad blocker inside Chrome won't block every ad you see on the web
Stopped reading there. Not good enough.
NEXT!
Well I don't know, we'll see if it's good enough. I use adblockers as well because as we all know so much of the ads currently online are utter shit and annoying, but honestly static text ads and short video ads before video content I don't have a problem with.
I generally keep adblock disabled while watching youtube channels/content from streams that I like because it's a way of giving at least some support to the content creators. Sure the alternative way which I've experimented with is to provide support to channels via say, Patreon, but while that's doable for a few channels, not all of them have patreon accounts plus doing it for several channels involves too much micromanaging. I'd actually be willing to try out youtube red if it was available in Europe.
Generally speaking the problem with the internet as it now stands is that everyone wants everything for low cost or for free, yet the ad-culture of the net has (rightfully) turned people so much against advertisements that it's becoming increasingly difficult to fund anything by ads. Google is at heart and advertising company that also happens to own and operate a search engine and a lot of others stuff, but they have run their business quite successfully with ad-driven content throughout the years and most people don't find the google ads that appear next to searches and in gmail too annoying.
If everyone started using effective adblocking the industry would likely react by making the ads more intrusive. "It looks like you're trying to view some content but have adblock enabled, please watch this video before proceeding, pay us 5 cents or exit the site." Either that or, what to a limited extent is already happening on youtube, which is that the ads are moved to within the content itself. So you have no ad before the video, but the 6 minute video is preceded by a 2 minute intro of "Hey it's [insert content creator here], before I get to the video I want you guys to know about this awesome deal the folks at [company] told me about..." This is done because both advertisers and content creators are keenly aware of the increasing ease and rate of adblocking, so they will find ways around it, and I consider these much, much more annoying than just watching a straight out 30 second ad before the video during which I can go grab myself a beer from the fridge anyway.
While some people may think microtransactions are the way to lower the amount of ads and move away from the ad-funded model of websites, I think it makes sense for large players like Google to try and find the middle-way between 'no ads and you pay cash for everything' and the flashing beeping hellscape of noisy ads that's currently used. It's clear that the advertising industry is so huge that it won't be going anywhere, and its clear that the consumers are not happy with the current model of advertising online, so this arms-race of 'you make a better ad-blocker, we're going to sneak the ads inside of your podcasts' is not a beneficial route to take for anyone. Not for the consumers and most certainly not for the content creators who then have to choose between taking annoying brand deals and shilling shitty products or alternatively begging for donations from the viewers.
While I don't think very highly of the marketing industry, I do appreciate the fact that ad-revenue driven models have allowed for individual people to be able to sustain themselves with their own content. If you told someone 15 years ago that in less than 2 decades we'll have people who make their money by playing games and letting other people watch while they run a few ads on the side, nearly no-one would've believed you.
Consider where one candidate gets 60% and another gets 40%. The best system is almost certainly not one that gives 100% of the outcome to the 60%'r, but its still clearly better than giving 0% of the outcome to the 60%
Exactly because of this many countries (such as we here in the Nordics) have ditched the single candidate districts and moved towards proportional representation. It's not perfect either, but it works around this issues especially. Instead of the current binary '2 man enter 1 man leave' -from of Thunderdome politics you could just as well merge the districts so that instead of picking 1 guy from each district, you pick say, 10 and assign the seats so that the party that the 60 % party gets 6 seats for 6 of their most voted candidates and the 40 % party gets 4 seats for their top 4 guys respectively.
But this also has the 'downside' from the point of view of the established american parties that it makes gerrymandering a lot more difficult because it means you no longer get to engineer the districts so that the other side gets no power at all despite getting close to half of the votes.
You couldn't have refuted your own point better in a single sentence. You have the entire chain of cause and effect backwards.
You see, the only reason services like Netfix and Spotify now exist is because of piracy. I remember when people, even at this very site, were scoffing and ridiculing the idea of a cheap streaming service. '10 bucks to listen to millions of songs? Hah, the record companies will never allow it, look at the prices on Itunes! Look at how much a CD costs! They'll never agree to such pricing, if you want streaming anywhere, listen to the radio!" But they had to.
You see, record companies, much like Elsevier, have had to face the fat that the service they originally provided, access to information in a physical format, is pretty much dead and the service that replaced it, access to information in a digital format, does not and cannot be priced in the same way. Consumers are not idiots. If you tell someone to pay them 18 euros for a physical album and then tell them the exactly same content over a digital medium with a fraction of the costs of the physical medium costs nearly the same they're going to know you're lying.
If it was up to record companies and movie studios we'd all still be paying 5 euros a pop for 24 hour rentals and 4 times that for downloads riddled with massive amounts of DRM making cross-device/platform playback near impossible. But the advent of piracy gave the consumers a choice that was both more affordable and more to the point better in quality. They groaned and the grumbled, but eventually they started giving in when they realize this is an existential threat to their existence.
And just in the same way, I hope, Sci-Hub will usher in the era of 'Sciflix' where you can pick the fields you want to follow and get access to ALL articles from those fields at a price that's affordable even to private citizens.
"But the publishers will never allow it. Look at how much journal access costs now! Look at the prices of individual articles! If you want widespread access just use your campus network or library!"
The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
You are basically saying only rich people should be starting a business. How about you fuck off?
No, no he isn't Funding != starting. He's saying you shouldn't start a business and fund it yourself if that puts you in personal risk of bankruptcy. There's a major difference between that and 'only rich people should start companies." I've started one company so far, a year ago, with very minimal capital because we don't need to make heavy investments as a small IT-firm with all of us being able to work from home. If the company goes under, the amount of money that each of us will lose is such that it won't be a major problem.
Startups fail at such a high rate mostly because people starting them don't realize how long it can take to start turning a profit. Even companies with solid business ideas and skillful people can fail because they haven't budgeted for the fact that they may well be running at a loss for the first 2-3 years. This creates a feedback-loop of failure wherein the urgency to get money flowing to the firm often drives them to push stuff out to market sooner than would be wise, which further contributes to their downfall.
If you're planning on setting up a business and the monthly operating costs are such that you and the other owners cannot cover them by yourselves without risking your own financial safety, then you need to seek outside funding. That's the whole reason shares were invented in the first place: limited liability.
The issue here is that certain types of ICOs function exactly like securities but have been unregulated. If this would have been kept going this opens a door for financial institutions to circumvent securities-related regulations by changing their securities into coins. It cannot be argued that this needs to be allowed 'for the sake of poor people getting funding for their startups' any more than it can be argued that I should be allowed to run a Ponzi.scheme to collect capital for my company.
I can't imagine the mosques would be different especially in light of the fact that the PRC's authority is probably much more greatly threaten by its Islamic population than their domestic Christian groups.
I fully agree. However my point was just to highlight that the enemy is not exactly stupid when it comes to electronic monitoring. I mean, the game theory to this is quite simple in China: try to recruit someone online and you're very likely to get locked up. The risk is high even doing it in person because as you say they're probably watching most of the communities, but that risk is still smaller than trying to recruit strangers from the net.
Even if you do the real talking offline, you've probably been in contact via phone or chat before that if nothing else then just to agree where and when to meet.
Except that's not usually how recruitment works. The enemy is aware that electronic communication is monitored, so even in the West the majority of first contacts by recruiters are made in person. In mosques, cafes etc. The idea that 'online recruitment' is how all the extremists are recruited is misguided. Online propaganda and 'recruitment' are mainly aimed at psychologically unstable individuals with the goal of pushing them over the edge and committing a lone wolf type of attack.
If they actually want to recruit someone to be trained and be a part of a coordinated plot, they will not make first contact online, even in the west, let alone in China with the government now openly confirming to them that all communications are tracked.
This will make people at lot more aware and vigilant about their data security...
You've hit the nail on the head. This actually makes the position of the extremists arguably easier. Now you don't have to second guess whether or not your phone is being monitored, you can count on it and work around it. And the solution doesn't have to be fancy or technical: you just setup a set of code word/phrases via snail mail using everyday common phrases, and instead of sending "proceed with the next stage of the operation", you send "pick up milk and rice from the store".
Which is to say: the point of eavesdropping on potentially dangerous individuals is negated by the idiocy of asking these people to assist you in their own eavesdropping by installing the required software.
But the Chinese are not dumb enough to not realize this, which means the real cause of this is something else entirely: first it's a PR move to appease the populace by appearing to do 'something' to react to the threat, but more importantly this gives the authorities a convenient reason to detain anyone for 10 days. I mean, all they have to do is 'inspect' the phone and remove the app and BAM the guy's away for 10 days while you go through and mic his apartment and car, and if need be plant some evidence so that he can be jailed for longer. Or they can just change the log files they have from the apps to include something suspicious and arrest anyone on terrorism charges on that grounds. It's not like the chain of evidence in the Chinese system is reliable: they control the log and the phones, so that means you provably said what they claim you said, after all that's what the records show.
So in the end this is just a way of making sure they have the ability to jail anyone at any time for any reason, which they've had all along, but usually it's been a slightly longer process, this seems to be just a step to make it easier and faster.
Gen. Paul Selva probably understands that this is currently not his government, and recent administrations either have not gotten the memo or are playing their cards very close to their chest. I suspect he is much more worried about creating efficient killing machines that get co-opted and controlled by his adversaries than some AI going rogue and asserting their position atop Earth's food chain.
Way back a decade ago I used to play a lot of (now unfortunately dead) Source engine mod Dystopia which included both an FPS element and a separate 'game-within-a-game' cyberspace that certain people could access and perform objectives/actions that affected the 'meatspace' AKA the physical world.
There often were deliberate choke points on the maps that teams tried to maintain control of. Many of them had thermal turrets on them with friend/foe detection that'd automatically waste anything crossing their range in a second. So here's what I did, quite often: wait for a break in the fighting, have a teammate lob a couple of EMP grenades to the other side temporarily disabling the turrets' ability to auto-aim, and then run as fast as I could past everyone with active camouflage (ie. near invisibility) on. By this time the fighting would usually start again but I'd keep going 'til I made it to the turret control terminal, jacked in, waited for the turrets to go back online and the enemy team to take their positions and then flip the friend/foe settings on the turrets turning them against the enemy team. It was fun because you'd actually get credited for the kills the turrets made, so it was a convenient way of slaughtering the entire enemy team in 5 seconds. If this succeeded we'd often steamroll the rest of the match purely on the inertia that this gave us.
When playing defense on similar objectives I was always super paranoid of this possibility, so unless we had a guy actively camping in cyberspace or someone actually defending the terminal in meatspace, we'd always disable/shoot our own turrets down because of this. The risk of getting them hacked at any point and having the entire team killed without any prior warning was not worth the tactical support that they provided.
I believe mr. Selva understands this principle. Autonomous killbots may be fine and well if you can just send them by themselves against a group of hostiles, but you do not want, under any conditions, your own troops accompanied by efficient killing machines that can be turned against them by a single skilled enemy combatant.
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This is not a counter-argument to anything. This 'oh don't worry about it, because the tech isn't there yet' -card has been thrown around since the 60s and the 70s., and it keeps bieng thrown about despite the fact that we now already have systems with limited intelligence that were deemed 'impossible' in earlier decades (see: AlphaGo, Google translate, self-driving cars etc).
As long as we keep increasing the intelligence of our systems, the day will come when some of these systems reach human level general intelligence, at which point they will also become better at programming themselves and future AIs than humans, because even if the system is 'just' at the level of a human being, silicon based 'brains' operate around a million times faster than our grey-matter CPUs. So yeah, we're not there yet, but there's also no argument to be made currently that we're not headed there, or that we cannot eventually get there. Say it takes 50 years (as many AI researchers currently think), or hell say it takes double that, what then?`
If a probe landed on earth tomorrow which carried a message in all known languages saying: "People of Earth, we're headed your way and will be expecting to land on the 15th of August 2117, get ready!" would you expect people who'd be worried about them being potentially hostile to be content wth 'ah don't worry about it, it's a long time away, it's not like you're going to be dying by them, just your kids and grandkids!"
Decentralization protects the technology behind bitcoin from being attacked by some random state actor. The infrastructure of bitcoin is pretty safe from the intervention of governments, but that does not mean that the value of bitcoin is equally untouchable. Bitcoins derive their true value from being exchangeable into fiat currencies and the governments know this, which is why they are taxed and regulated, which means their value can be affected by governments.
But that's not the point that was being made. You actually summed it up yourself when you said:
There's a certain amount of people in any given society with violent tendencies (call it 'group A') and only some of these people will actually be willing to attempt to realize their tendencies (group B). And of those that do attempt to go through with it, only a smaller group still will have both the tools and the skills to be successful (group C). Even in a country like the US in which there are - in so far as I know - more guns than people, sure there's still knife crime, but the obvious answer to 'why would anyone use knifes when they could use a gun' is access. Acquiring a blade is vastly cheaper and easier even in the US than acquiring a gun, so for the people in group B who're willing to actually act violently but do not have the money or the capabilities (for example due to a criminal record) to acquire a weapon, knives are the go-to choice. For the same reason the US has vastly higher amounts of gun crime, and as guns are more effective at killing than blades, also homicides, than any other western nation. Ease of access and availability matters.
Same for suicide bombers: it takes less skill and preparation to strap a bomb to yourself than it does to both craft a remote detonated device, get it to place, get yourself out while making sure it's not discovered and successfully detonate it. Plus, in the case of religiously motivated martyrdom attacks which are the most common source of suicide attacks, getting yourself killed is part of the intention of the attacker. In fact data suggest that propaganda aimed at radicalizing people to commit these attacks specifically targets individuals who're already suicidal and depressed. They then ramp up the 'you're a worthless sinner and will burn in hell' rhetoric to further amp up the angst and the de-humanization of the individual himself, and then offer them a way out by which they van in the context of the doctrine of the faith, 'redeem' themselves by becoming martyrs and in the process they also get to kill themselves 'guilt free'. So for the organized groups like Isis that seek to carry out and motivate such attacks, these people (depressed/suicidal individuals) are like drones in that they're easier to come by and manipulate than people that do not want to die and have the skillset to carry out a remote detonation attack.
If you look at the conflict in the Northern Ireland a couple decades back, IRA used remote detonations because even though religion played a part in the conflict, they saw themselves as a military operation more so than 'jihadists', and for them it was disadvantageous to have their own soldiers sacrifice themselves if they could be spared. Meanwhile Isis & al don't give a rats ass whether or not random muslims in the west live or die as long as damage (and hence terror) is maximized. The individual suicidal bomber is a disposable asset for them.
So the point of De Becker is not that increased affordability and accessibility to commercial drones will increase the amount of people in group A because it likely won't, but what it can do is increase the amount of people in groups B and C. Because if it turns out that drone based attacks have a higher success/mortality rate than suicide attacks, then it becomes advantageous for these groups to move to the direction of
This topic of drones and their use for violent eds and how it's changing things just came up in a recent episode of Sam Harri's waking up podcast where he interviewed Gavin De Becker a security expert who runs a company specializing in personal protection. The main point of the interview was not drones but violence overall, however De Becker starts discussing drones towards the end of the podcast after the 2 hour 10 minute mark
His main point is this: when it comes to inflicting tissue damage, the most significant advancements in the history of weaponry have been those that have increased the distance between the attacker and the target. Such advancements reduce the risk to the assailant, thus increasing the amount of individuals willing to use these technologies to commit violence. This is why accelerated metal projectiles were such an effective discovery, and after those prior to drones the technology that's had the most impact has been remote detonated bombs, because they increase the distance between the target and the assailant even more. Drones go even further than this because they're essentially smart/guided bomb platforms or biological agent delivery systems (airborne pathogens dispersed over crowds etc)
Becker states that in his opinion commercial drones are the most significant advancement in tissue damage technology in a thousand years (ie. since bullets) because they're very cheap, very easy to use, and very hard to defend against. And the maneuverability is extremely high: drones with collective pitch can do stuff like this and it doesn't take that long for an individual to learn to pilot them.. When you add to that the fact that swarm technology already exists allowing a single operator to control up to 50 small drones that will avoid crashing into each other but can be guided to hit a single target, and that in the future the drones may well be entirely autonomous and not require even a signal to the controller, I find it hard to disagree with De Becker's estimation that this will be much, much more relevant advancement in weapon technology than people currently think.
As he points out, 'every weapon that has ever been developed has been used", we know that commercial drones are used as improvised weapons already, but this is in the very early stages. It's only a matter of time before some prominent politician/celebrity/business leader somewhere is assassinated by a drone or some terror group successfully carries out an attack in the west, and once the meme is out there, they're going to start ramping up. Compare to the use of vehicles as tools of terror; the technology itself has existed for over a century, but now that the weaponizing of personal vehicles has become a trend it's begun to spread and has started to be used even by groups pother than islamic terrorists, but a vehicle attack is very limited in scope and accuracy and can only be used to deliver random damage.
Drones are far more precise, and, when used correctly, far more deadly while at the same time being massively cheaper than vehicles. The fact that you can currently fly a drone in most western cities without much care of being caught even if you fly it in a no-fly area is a problem.
Total UK tax revenue in 2016: 716 billion £
Total cost of UK's EU membership after discounting the money you go back in different types of programs and payments: 8,6 billion £, meaning roughly 1,2 % of the total tax revenue or 131 pounds per person per year.
If you think your taxes are going to go down after this 1,2 % 'saving' boots you out of the biggest trade union in the world, you've probably gotten your political and economic education from the university of one prominent Solarium Sultan from across the Atlantic. Hint: you're going to end up paying more than that 131 pounds a year just in form of increasing inflation, unemployment and increased cost of importing/exporting goods. Not to mention that the fact that your government's expenditure goes down 1,2 % does not mean they will cut taxes by that amount, or any amount.
Honestly, this reminds me of Kronan the Swedish navy vessel that at the time of its sinking was the Navy's flagship and was sent out to crush some Danes. However, because at that time the Swedish navy chose officers based on family lineage instead of any kind of actual competence, this happened:
While I do not see Britts as an enemy of any kind and had wished for them to stay in the EU, as a metal fan (not the air conditioning kind) watching the UK government execute this 'widely debated maneuver' of Brexit while no-one at the helm seems to know what the plan is even in the short term, I do get reminded of the lyrics to a metal song about Kronan by the Swedish band Falconer called 'Man of the Hour':
It's easier for a singular company if it has to pay less taxes. But you eliminate taxes altogether, or lower them in massive amounts you start to lose key infrastructure and services critical for the operation of the whole economy, which in turn is detrimental for both the corporations and the consumers within an economy. If the US would do this for every company there'd be a massive downgrade in the standard of living.
Opposing any given tax is possible on the basis that it's 'bad for business', but that's essentially leaving out everything that's being bought by the government with the taxes to help the population. My own government collects higher taxes than in the US, but because of that I graduated without student debt, and if I manage to grow our small company to the point that we can hire full-time employees (haven't quit my day job yet but we're not in a hurry), I don't have to worry about getting them - or myself - medical insurance,
In fact it's a quite well known fact that the cost of (private) medical insurance in the US is massively higher than the per citizen cost of government funded health care here in Europe and elsewhere, which is just common sense when you realize that for the government that's 'insuring' us all, health care is a cost, so the point is to treat people effectively and with the lowest possible cost. Whereas in the US, where health is a private enterprise and one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the economy, the purpose of the hospitals is to treat the patients while also extracting as much money in the process as they can. Back before I graduated and moved to the IT side of our health care sector, I worked in hospital billing and we had to often deal with medical invoices of Finnish citizens that were treated in the US (they were often sent to us if the person lacked medical insurance as many here do) and we used to actually collect copies of them just for the ludicrous amount of overhead on them. I've seen 4 dollar aspirin pills, I've seen a simple X-ray and some stiches priced at like 1400 dollars which is equal to the price of 2-3 days of intensive care here (which the patient himself obviously doesn't pay, there's a flat fee of around 20 euros or so per day spent in hospital, the rest is covered by us). This was way before the ACA though, I do not know how that has affected it, but it is my understanding ACA deals mostly with insurers and does not set pricing rules for hospitals. Now granted it's not all because of greed, the US system is far less centralized for many reasons which also raises costs and the salaries of clinical staff tend to be higher as well (partially because doctors/nurses have such a high amount of debt when they start working that the starting salaries have to be higher for them to afford the same standard of living as someone in here coming through med school), but even with all those factors there's a lot air in the prices.
So the small (but extremely vocal) right-wing libertarian segment of my fellow countrymen who keep copypasting this 'down with the public health care system, the Free Market is the life and the way, it's better for business' mantra from the US are in fact totally wrong. It's a known fact that the alternative cost of a privatized medical system is much higher overall and ends up being paid for by either corporations directly (employer-provided insurance) or by the individuals themselves. In either case the end result is people and corporations have less disposable income, not more.
So no, it's unequivocally not true that less taxes always means 'better for business'. Of course this all hinges on what you actually do with the taxes that are collected.
Indeed. It's not illegal to post nude pictures of someone (in most western countries), however at least here in Finland there exists case law which has deemed quite clearly that publishing such photos without the consent of the person in them is a violation of privacy. It doesn't matter that you agreed to be photographed, or even took and sent the pictures yourself, that does not grant the receiver the right to redistribute them.
The site is not violating the law, but the people who are posting pictures without permission are.
You do realize what you're doing is comparing the global climate, an actual physical planetary wide system that's been here for millenia before any man was ever born, to man made social constructs and saying that because we cannot predict the latter we surely can't predict the former.
This is not sound logic. The climate and the stock market are both extremely chaotic systems meaning that small changes in some values can have huge impacts on the stability of the whole system. However what you and others making this argument always conveniently forget is that underlying the study of climate and the mathematical models themselves are actual natural sciences like chemistry. We don't have to 'guess' how the greenhouse effect works, or how much heat is absorbed/reflected by different gasses, these are all things that can be measured and tested in a lab.
Obviously because the amount of metrics that needs to be factored in to model something as vast as the global climate is so high that the models cannot be 100 % certain, and obviously there are human components in the equation that increase this uncertainty but the core of your argument is still not correct. The stock market can crash at any given time due to any number of actions and the prices plummet. For you to be able to argue that the climate is the same way, you'd have to argue that at any given moment way may spontaneously enter into an ice age, which is clearly not true.
There's also never been a time in the history of the species when we've had access to as much computing power, machine learning and actual hard data about the state of the climate.
No. You see, the thing with the climate is: we have to make predictions because the future state of the climate has a direct impact on the survival of the species. The models that we do have reflect our current, best understanding of the climate, and they're getting better as more data come in and machine learning steps in.
If you ignore the models there's essentially nothing to base our decisions on and you could argue that it's just fine for us to start burning up all the remaining oil and gas because 'who knows what's going to happen'. But that's just BS. We obviously don't know the future of the climate with certainty, but we do know enough to know that certain actions are going to make things a lot worse.
You also mentioned disease outbreak models, so think about it in this light: should we throw out our current understanding of epidemiology because the outbreak models are not (yet) all that precise? Should the doctors stop wearing gloves, should we stop vaccinations, sanitation and all these things which have a demonstrable and proven effect on lowering the rates of outbreak and infection because we're not 100 % omniscient about the time and place of future outbreaks? Huh?
So either you can listen to the people with the most information and understanding about the climate and its current state, or you can keep telling yourself that corporations and atmospheric gasses are equally unp
Certainly and I never claimed otherwise. What matters however is how this is solved. Shouting 'I feel threatened here please hire more people like me/put me somewhere with others of my kind so I can feel safe" does not solve the issue. In fact I'd argue it makes it worse, because now you've just confirmed to the out-group that you are indeed not one of them, but rather someone who's scared of them and hence likely not to be trusted to speak your mind when asked.
It's a trust issue. I've been a cripple all my life (cerebral palsy, won the birth lottery) and from my experience the best way to smash stereotypes and preconceptions is to ignore them and just focus on the matter at hand. Once people learn that you're just as capable as the rest of them despite your differing sex/looks/race/whatever, they will adjust, and their image of said group will adjust. If it won't, well then it's time to change jobs because at that point complaining to these people about 'persecution' or 'bullying' will just re-enforce their negative stereotype of your group.
You're right. But the current situation is that much of Europe's energy is supplied by Russia, which, in the current geopolitical climate, is even worse for energy security because it gives the Kremlin the power to strongarm the Union by threatening to raise prices or close the gas flow entirely.
If only there was a mineral of some sort in the ground that could be used to generate energy via nuclear fission that was safer per kilowatt than other energy production sources,and if only someone had devised ways of storing the radioactive waste safely...
But because radiation is scary to people who do not understand the difference between modern reactors and Chernobyl/Fukushima, my fellow Europeans seem somehow terrified by it, even though countries like France have been using it to generate over a third of all their energy for long.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying nuclear is the perfect solution. It's not. But it's a whole lot better for energy security and for the climate than continuing to use coal, oil and natural gas while we try to figure out cleaner solutions that work even in less sunny areas.
So your argument here is that women and men can work just as productively, with the exception that women cannot work with groups of strange men as that is 'threatening' to them by default? What?
When I started working full-time fresh from school as a project lead, I felt uncomfortable going into meetings where the other participants were much older, much better paid, and many of them having the power to get me fired if I screw up (and many of these people were women). Do you think when I felt anxious and nervous because of this I just grabbed my dick and suddenly everything was perfect and the stress was gone? No, over time I learned to deal with these people and I learned that they're indeed nowhere near as hostile or threatening as I assumed, and that screwing up is not the end of the world if you have the guts to admit your mistakes. Even the bosses have once been rookies.
You can't have it both ways and first proudly proclaim at first that men and women are all equal in their abilities, and then in the very next moment turn to 'but groups of men are scary to women so they need to be handled with extra-care'.That's not gender-equality in any sense of the word. As I wrote here yesterday on another story, it might still be feminism, but not all feminism is egalitarian..
Now obviously it's better for everyone if no-one feels stressed, but my point here is that the stressful/'threatening' factors in a work environment arise from a multitude of factors, the most common of which is the tension between management and employees that often exists totally independent of the reproductive organs on either side of the table,
Ah yes finance. That good old industry in which people feel totally at ease with each other and are not under pressure to out-perform their fellow men and women or feel threatened at all. I've heard wild stories about bouncy castles and finger painting going on in the high-level trader meetings. :P
You're quite right on this one. However I don't really think
Is necessarily true. I mean, Musk is a businessman as well, so he understands the importance of marketing. This animation itself is from 2015 as others have pointed out, yet as Musk just re-posted it to his Twitter it's now making the rounds in the news again. SpaceX has a lot of promise, but so far they - like many of Musks ventures - are fueled by publicity. He needs to build and maintain the company brand , and he's succeeded. SpaceX is the most well known private space company, but it won't stay that way unless it stays on the news. And when you've got no new and exciting news, you pick up a trick from master entertainers and do some of the all-time classics.
So every few month's Musk pops up when the analytics start to show it's time and brings up their project so that people won't forget. As for what the actual schedule is, that, I doubt, is a highly kept company secret that only Musk himself and the teams working on the rocket know of. As far as the rest of the world is concerned they're always just about to launch.
The word you're looking for is egalitarianism.
I have no problem with there being people who identify as feminist and focus on issues faced by women. And there's a large group of feminists who are indeed also egalitarian. But to say that equality between sexes (or races, or any other groups) is a solely feminist idea, or that all feminists support total equality between the sexes is demonstrably wrong. As an example: here in Finland due to our small population size, having Russia right next door and us not being in NATO, all men have a constitutional obligation to enter the armed forces for basic training lasting between 6-12 months. Those that do not want to can enter into 'civillian service' which is essentially doing work in different kinds of public services (museums, ministries etc) for a year. If they do neither and are not relieved of this obligation for a medical reason, they'll face some jail time.
Women can enter into the Finnish Defense Forces since the 1990s, but very few of them do, Now, if the only legit interpretation of feminism was 'equality between the sexes', all feminists would have have to either oppose the current mandatory military service for men altogether, or be for expanding it to cover all women as well, as is the case for example in Israel.
This is not the case however. I have read Finnish feminists who are for expanding it to cover women as well, but many of them are quite fine with the status quo. Other such examples can be found as well. There are feminists who are for mandatory quotas of women in corporate boards, some are even for those in parliaments. The egalitarian position is that sex should be irrelevant when selecting board members or voting because a person's sex is not indicative of his/her abilities or competence. Nevertheless a certain subgroup of modern feminists seem to not realize or care about this and are essentially about trying to force a '50-50" gender split for the sake of 'equality', not caring that such an approach by itself goes against the equality of sexes by making sex a selection criteria. In a simplified case if 10 positions are open and you have 15 male and 5 female applicants, such a person would say that the 5 female applicants must get the position purely to achieve equality of sexes, which in turn disqualifies some men purely because they're men.
Again: the point here is not to say all feminists are like this, or to demonize all feminists or say that it's wrong to be a feminist, it's not. The point is that the phrase 'feminism is the 'radical' idea that men and women should be treated equally' is not always indicative of all people who identify as feminists, nor is feminism a requirement for holding that belief.
I'm not American so maybe I've missed something despite my best attempts at following the events in the US closely but I am under the impression that there are several investigations underway into the Russia thing. So how come it's possible for people to claim anything to be proven, one way or the other, when the guys looking into it (Muller, the senate committee, etc) have not come out with anything yet as they're still gathering data?
I've always considered /. to be a place of (mostly) rational, science-oriented people who understand the importance and value of due process and following the evidence, but yet people from both the left and the right alike are proclaiming that they know the end result of the investigation(s) before it's even remotely completed. What the fuck is up with this shit?
The presence of this kind of rhetoric to me is worrisome because it reeks of 3rd world pseudo-Orwellian BS. People in their own little bubbles with insane amounts of confirmation bias absorbing blog posts masquerading as news and becoming convinced that they know the truth ahead of time, so that when the investigation(s) finally conclude, no matter the result, half of the people will be up and arms and shouting 'Conspiracy, conspiracy, I know the result is false, I read so at [insert news/blog outlet of choice] several months ago, clearly the establishment/'deep state' is [out to frame the innocent president/corrupt and in the back pocket of a corrupt president and lying to protect him]".
Democratic systems require an informed voter base to function. Once that is gone, once the public can be spoon fed tailor made propaganda and manipulated with relative ease into believing nearly anything without hard evidence, then the entire concept of accountability goes out the window, and truth stops mattering, by which point you might just as well elect a king and be done with it.
-1984
And it's not just you that can see that, it's also the car manufacturers.
In this 40 minute interview
Elon Musk lists pretty much all of the scenarios you mentioned, saying it's part of how they feel people will start using their self-driving future Teslas.
Here's where it stops being as straightforward as it initially seems. You see, most people might not need a car of their own at all at that point. In that same interview Musk describes the way they see car/ride sharing working in the future. If you buy a self-driving Tesla, you can the adjust what you want it to do when you don't need it. You might set it up so that you only share it with your wife or the whole family. Or you might set it up so that it's shared with all of your friends. Or even all all app-users who have a high rating. Why? Because you can make money sharing it out (think: uber) thus helping you pay for the car itself.
So from this perspective people might be able to do by with less vehicles.- A group of friends living in close proximity might only need 1 car where they previously had 3-4.
So in the future I might not own a vehicle at all if I can reliably enough either loan one from a friend/family member when I need it or hire a self-driving car with a cheap enough rate that the price for the hours of driving a month I need to do (which at the moment is very low, I use mass-transit for work trips just as you because it's both faster and cheaper) is still lower than the cost of owning a car myself.
Or alternatively, if I do own a car I might program it via the app to act for example as follows:
During weekdays keep sharing off between 8 am and 10 am and 4 pm and 6 pm to be able to take me to work and back. Excluding those time windows the car is is free to be used my family and a hand picked close circle of friends for the cost of operating expenses (ie. without a margin) or to a wider group of acquaintances at those same expenses plus a 10 % margin. The car will make sure that the car keeps itself on enough charge to be able to take me to work and back each day at those times. Then when I have longer trips coming up,. I know in advance when I'll need the car for myself for say, a weekend trip, so obviously sharing will be disabled then.
Most vehicles currently sit unused in parking lots for over 90 % of the time. With automated cars, the idea is to shrink the amount of cars and instead making it so that we have less cars which see a higher amount of use.
And even if the amount of cars stays the same or even goes up, that still doesn't mean we'll have issues with congestion as much as you think. The thing is, the self-driving cars know where each of them are, so the car can route around point of high traffic, but more importantly in high traffic areas the cars can drive at high speed at relatively close distances to each other because you don't have to leave a lot of room for the self-driving car in front of you to make an emergency stop as the reaction time of both it and your own vehicle will be superior to any human driver. When the car wants to turn or change lanes, it will notify the vehicles around it and space will be made. This allows for much higher and faster tra
That's not what he said or implied though. He pointed out that there are ways in which GMOs can be used correctly and for the benefit of everyone to get better food with less energy/demand on the soil.
The whole problem with the GMO-discussion is that people mix up 2 things, namely the scientific process of genetic modification, and the gigantic corporations that seek to make profit using the process - sometimes in ethically questionable ways.
All of the food we eat is 'genetically modified' in the sense that we've been breeding and artificially selecting for desirable traits in plants and animals for millenia, now it's just become possible to do it at way faster timescales and increasing accuracy. The fact that there is corporate greed and instances seeking to take advantage of this process for their own personal benefit at the expense of other people does not invalidate the process of gene modification itself anymore than criminals and scammers using the internet for malicious ends makes the whole of the internet a bad thing.
Well, no. First of all, fixing access does not mean fixing affordability. You can build power stations and power lines all you want to get those people access, but that doesn't mean those people can suddenly afford the price of an AC unit and the cost to run it.
(wiki)
A quick google search for 'air conditioning price in India' tells me that the low end AC units sold start at around 19 500 rupiees, which at today's exchange rate is just slightly above 300 dollars.. So that's almost a year's salary for most of the poorest 200-300 million Indians to just afford the machine. And that's just the acquisition cost. The cheaper ones are usually ones with higher power consumption (this one which I used as an example for the price has a 3 star rating), but we shouldn't be too far off even with a 3 star rating for a 1 ton machine if we assume a power consumption of about 1 kWh.
The one good thing is that increasing warming makes solar cheaper and cheaper. According to this story from last year the prices have at times shrunk to 2.62 rupiees per kWh, roughly 4 US cents.So if you run the machine for the hottest part of the day, say from 10 to 17, that's 28 cents a day.
So for those living in poverty they need to spend about 1/5th of their income just to be able to operate the machine if they somehow managed to save enough money to actually buy one in the first place. Given that people with children especially tend to have other notable expenses, it's unlikely that many at those income levels will even be able to acquire such a machine. Granted, increasing supply will further bring prices down so this estimate is not fully reflective of the future, but I'm using these figures to highlight that 'fixing this issue' is just ever so slightly more complicated than just building a few solar plants and some power lines.
Well I don't know, we'll see if it's good enough. I use adblockers as well because as we all know so much of the ads currently online are utter shit and annoying, but honestly static text ads and short video ads before video content I don't have a problem with.
I generally keep adblock disabled while watching youtube channels/content from streams that I like because it's a way of giving at least some support to the content creators. Sure the alternative way which I've experimented with is to provide support to channels via say, Patreon, but while that's doable for a few channels, not all of them have patreon accounts plus doing it for several channels involves too much micromanaging. I'd actually be willing to try out youtube red if it was available in Europe.
Generally speaking the problem with the internet as it now stands is that everyone wants everything for low cost or for free, yet the ad-culture of the net has (rightfully) turned people so much against advertisements that it's becoming increasingly difficult to fund anything by ads. Google is at heart and advertising company that also happens to own and operate a search engine and a lot of others stuff, but they have run their business quite successfully with ad-driven content throughout the years and most people don't find the google ads that appear next to searches and in gmail too annoying.
If everyone started using effective adblocking the industry would likely react by making the ads more intrusive. "It looks like you're trying to view some content but have adblock enabled, please watch this video before proceeding, pay us 5 cents or exit the site." Either that or, what to a limited extent is already happening on youtube, which is that the ads are moved to within the content itself. So you have no ad before the video, but the 6 minute video is preceded by a 2 minute intro of "Hey it's [insert content creator here], before I get to the video I want you guys to know about this awesome deal the folks at [company] told me about..." This is done because both advertisers and content creators are keenly aware of the increasing ease and rate of adblocking, so they will find ways around it, and I consider these much, much more annoying than just watching a straight out 30 second ad before the video during which I can go grab myself a beer from the fridge anyway.
While some people may think microtransactions are the way to lower the amount of ads and move away from the ad-funded model of websites, I think it makes sense for large players like Google to try and find the middle-way between 'no ads and you pay cash for everything' and the flashing beeping hellscape of noisy ads that's currently used. It's clear that the advertising industry is so huge that it won't be going anywhere, and its clear that the consumers are not happy with the current model of advertising online, so this arms-race of 'you make a better ad-blocker, we're going to sneak the ads inside of your podcasts' is not a beneficial route to take for anyone. Not for the consumers and most certainly not for the content creators who then have to choose between taking annoying brand deals and shilling shitty products or alternatively begging for donations from the viewers.
While I don't think very highly of the marketing industry, I do appreciate the fact that ad-revenue driven models have allowed for individual people to be able to sustain themselves with their own content. If you told someone 15 years ago that in less than 2 decades we'll have people who make their money by playing games and letting other people watch while they run a few ads on the side, nearly no-one would've believed you.
Exactly because of this many countries (such as we here in the Nordics) have ditched the single candidate districts and moved towards proportional representation. It's not perfect either, but it works around this issues especially. Instead of the current binary '2 man enter 1 man leave' -from of Thunderdome politics you could just as well merge the districts so that instead of picking 1 guy from each district, you pick say, 10 and assign the seats so that the party that the 60 % party gets 6 seats for 6 of their most voted candidates and the 40 % party gets 4 seats for their top 4 guys respectively.
But this also has the 'downside' from the point of view of the established american parties that it makes gerrymandering a lot more difficult because it means you no longer get to engineer the districts so that the other side gets no power at all despite getting close to half of the votes.
You couldn't have refuted your own point better in a single sentence. You have the entire chain of cause and effect backwards.
You see, the only reason services like Netfix and Spotify now exist is because of piracy. I remember when people, even at this very site, were scoffing and ridiculing the idea of a cheap streaming service. '10 bucks to listen to millions of songs? Hah, the record companies will never allow it, look at the prices on Itunes! Look at how much a CD costs! They'll never agree to such pricing, if you want streaming anywhere, listen to the radio!" But they had to.
You see, record companies, much like Elsevier, have had to face the fat that the service they originally provided, access to information in a physical format, is pretty much dead and the service that replaced it, access to information in a digital format, does not and cannot be priced in the same way. Consumers are not idiots. If you tell someone to pay them 18 euros for a physical album and then tell them the exactly same content over a digital medium with a fraction of the costs of the physical medium costs nearly the same they're going to know you're lying.
If it was up to record companies and movie studios we'd all still be paying 5 euros a pop for 24 hour rentals and 4 times that for downloads riddled with massive amounts of DRM making cross-device/platform playback near impossible. But the advent of piracy gave the consumers a choice that was both more affordable and more to the point better in quality. They groaned and the grumbled, but eventually they started giving in when they realize this is an existential threat to their existence.
And just in the same way, I hope, Sci-Hub will usher in the era of 'Sciflix' where you can pick the fields you want to follow and get access to ALL articles from those fields at a price that's affordable even to private citizens.
"But the publishers will never allow it. Look at how much journal access costs now! Look at the prices of individual articles! If you want widespread access just use your campus network or library!"
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
No, no he isn't Funding != starting. He's saying you shouldn't start a business and fund it yourself if that puts you in personal risk of bankruptcy. There's a major difference between that and 'only rich people should start companies." I've started one company so far, a year ago, with very minimal capital because we don't need to make heavy investments as a small IT-firm with all of us being able to work from home. If the company goes under, the amount of money that each of us will lose is such that it won't be a major problem.
Startups fail at such a high rate mostly because people starting them don't realize how long it can take to start turning a profit. Even companies with solid business ideas and skillful people can fail because they haven't budgeted for the fact that they may well be running at a loss for the first 2-3 years. This creates a feedback-loop of failure wherein the urgency to get money flowing to the firm often drives them to push stuff out to market sooner than would be wise, which further contributes to their downfall.
If you're planning on setting up a business and the monthly operating costs are such that you and the other owners cannot cover them by yourselves without risking your own financial safety, then you need to seek outside funding. That's the whole reason shares were invented in the first place: limited liability.
The issue here is that certain types of ICOs function exactly like securities but have been unregulated. If this would have been kept going this opens a door for financial institutions to circumvent securities-related regulations by changing their securities into coins. It cannot be argued that this needs to be allowed 'for the sake of poor people getting funding for their startups' any more than it can be argued that I should be allowed to run a Ponzi.scheme to collect capital for my company.
I fully agree. However my point was just to highlight that the enemy is not exactly stupid when it comes to electronic monitoring. I mean, the game theory to this is quite simple in China: try to recruit someone online and you're very likely to get locked up. The risk is high even doing it in person because as you say they're probably watching most of the communities, but that risk is still smaller than trying to recruit strangers from the net.
Except that's not usually how recruitment works. The enemy is aware that electronic communication is monitored, so even in the West the majority of first contacts by recruiters are made in person. In mosques, cafes etc. The idea that 'online recruitment' is how all the extremists are recruited is misguided. Online propaganda and 'recruitment' are mainly aimed at psychologically unstable individuals with the goal of pushing them over the edge and committing a lone wolf type of attack.
If they actually want to recruit someone to be trained and be a part of a coordinated plot, they will not make first contact online, even in the west, let alone in China with the government now openly confirming to them that all communications are tracked.
You've hit the nail on the head. This actually makes the position of the extremists arguably easier. Now you don't have to second guess whether or not your phone is being monitored, you can count on it and work around it. And the solution doesn't have to be fancy or technical: you just setup a set of code word/phrases via snail mail using everyday common phrases, and instead of sending "proceed with the next stage of the operation", you send "pick up milk and rice from the store".
Which is to say: the point of eavesdropping on potentially dangerous individuals is negated by the idiocy of asking these people to assist you in their own eavesdropping by installing the required software.
But the Chinese are not dumb enough to not realize this, which means the real cause of this is something else entirely: first it's a PR move to appease the populace by appearing to do 'something' to react to the threat, but more importantly this gives the authorities a convenient reason to detain anyone for 10 days. I mean, all they have to do is 'inspect' the phone and remove the app and BAM the guy's away for 10 days while you go through and mic his apartment and car, and if need be plant some evidence so that he can be jailed for longer. Or they can just change the log files they have from the apps to include something suspicious and arrest anyone on terrorism charges on that grounds. It's not like the chain of evidence in the Chinese system is reliable: they control the log and the phones, so that means you provably said what they claim you said, after all that's what the records show.
So in the end this is just a way of making sure they have the ability to jail anyone at any time for any reason, which they've had all along, but usually it's been a slightly longer process, this seems to be just a step to make it easier and faster.
Way back a decade ago I used to play a lot of (now unfortunately dead) Source engine mod Dystopia which included both an FPS element and a separate 'game-within-a-game' cyberspace that certain people could access and perform objectives/actions that affected the 'meatspace' AKA the physical world.
There often were deliberate choke points on the maps that teams tried to maintain control of. Many of them had thermal turrets on them with friend/foe detection that'd automatically waste anything crossing their range in a second. So here's what I did, quite often: wait for a break in the fighting, have a teammate lob a couple of EMP grenades to the other side temporarily disabling the turrets' ability to auto-aim, and then run as fast as I could past everyone with active camouflage (ie. near invisibility) on. By this time the fighting would usually start again but I'd keep going 'til I made it to the turret control terminal, jacked in, waited for the turrets to go back online and the enemy team to take their positions and then flip the friend/foe settings on the turrets turning them against the enemy team. It was fun because you'd actually get credited for the kills the turrets made, so it was a convenient way of slaughtering the entire enemy team in 5 seconds. If this succeeded we'd often steamroll the rest of the match purely on the inertia that this gave us.
When playing defense on similar objectives I was always super paranoid of this possibility, so unless we had a guy actively camping in cyberspace or someone actually defending the terminal in meatspace, we'd always disable/shoot our own turrets down because of this. The risk of getting them hacked at any point and having the entire team killed without any prior warning was not worth the tactical support that they provided.
I believe mr. Selva understands this principle. Autonomous killbots may be fine and well if you can just send them by themselves against a group of hostiles, but you do not want, under any conditions, your own troops accompanied by efficient killing machines that can be turned against them by a single skilled enemy combatant.