Do you really think that once the fiscal speed bump hits the Republicans won't try to make deals to save their precious military budget increases?
I think the Republican politicians don't really care about the military except as the visible implement which protects Americans from "the thing they're telling you to fear".
We should let congress drive over the fiscal cliff so that democrats take the blame for thier inability to see that the Bush tax cuts don't even come close to paying for the deficit, current or projected.
How about instead of killing the economy with the uncertanty of this on again - off again tax cut, why don't we simplify the tax code completey and permanently.
Seeing as how people use deficit and debt interchangeably, I'm not sure what you're referring to.
The deficit is the year to year shortfall in the budget. The debt is the volume of outstanding loans. The former is a problem to be dealt with at the moment, the latter needs to be managed but does not have to magically be paid off over some fixed timeframe.
The world, currently - and for the foreseeable future - loves US debt, and can't buy enough of it. It's buying it so voraciously that at various points over the past few years, US treasury notes have had negative yields. People were literally paying the US for the privilege of loaning it money, because on the macro-scale, the US is a stable place to invest and you ultimately have to invest somewhere. The US, for the foreseeable future, will be able to refinance it's debt in perpetuity - the current situation is that doing nothing, would whittle the debt down to nothing even faster then inflation because of the aformentioned periods of "being paid to be loaned money" situation.
Now why is all that important? Because it effects how you view deficits, and their causes. Deficits go on the debt pile, and the debt pile is only a worry if it grows at an average rate that's higher then US GDP growth (or specifically: US tax revenue growth from GDP). The US never has to repay the debt. It simply takes out new debt - possibly at lower interest rates - to refinance it. You can do this indefinitely if you're an immortal country, and GDP growth and inflation whittle the debt away without needing to do anything. The debt pile can keep growing, but provided your GDP keeps pace, it'll never affect your ability to fund your year-to-year budget. Of course, a well-managed country also chooses to strategically reduce it's debt to keep it manageable when - like now - the deficit has to rise due to poor economic conditions, or if it wants to stabilize it's budgeting further against global conditions.
Which is where this graph comes in. The US deficit, is being driven principally by the Bush tax cuts, by the bailouts necessary due to the GFC, the wars, with the rest made up of the usual increased spend a downturn brings in welfare (people out of work = more welfare payouts). The US is not terminally in deficit, it's not being sunk by the welfare system, it's being sunk by idiotic fiscal policy (and probably a fair amount of graft and corruption between government contracts to big business backers like Halliburton).
If you really want to see terminal damage to the economy, watch what happens if you dismantle social welfare further. Convert the joblessness due to the downturn into permanent unemployment and then homelessness, and take a huge chunk of the productive workforce out of the workpool forever and into your policing and hospital emergency room spending instead - because they won't just disappear.
Also, dismantling social safety nets, for all but the upper class - is the effectively actual doom to a great many people. Those who depend on them, those who will wind up depending on them in the depression, and those who are going to the victims of the rising crime rates caused by putting people into poverty.
It was to check the Soviets, but the stupidest thing America did afterwards was pull all it's funding and foreign aid from the country, and ensure that a few decades of impoverished rule by the Taliban would eventually lead to the rise of the new terrorist cells which carried out the attacks on the twin towers.
Pretending the US can pursue isolationist policies after being highly interventionist, and expect to be left alone, is ridiculous. Doubly so when your entire economy depends on the price of oil, and which in turn depends on global supply regardless of your interest in other countries or not. Suddenly withdrawing security and support is not a consequence free action. You take a bunch of people you're making promises to, or who are depending on you, and throw them to the wolves. That breeds resentment - the next generation, their children, grow up hearing their parents lament about how you can't trust Americans, grow up seeing American drones and helicopters bombing middle eastern countries (and with no education system, are very pliable as to ideas on why that's happening), and sure enough, two decades later when they're in their 20's, you get a brand new terrorist cell filled with young people utterly convinced America needs to be taught a lesson of some sort.
Nanotechnology is functionally indistinguishable to regular pathogens on most scales. Anything advanced would be at least quite similar to a virus - probably, in fact, based on the design of one.
So in reality nanotechnology as applied to medicine will be somewhat more inorganic bundles of proteins and enzymes, in a desperate attempt to stop the immune system from obliterating it.
The Grey Goo scenario of course makes a leap - it assumes that we can build something somewhat better then this. The problem of course then hinges on that pre-conception: it's not clear that anything resembling a grey goo nanite is physically possible. What would it eat? There's plenty of carbon - but the world is full of things which have tried their best to takeover the carbon environment. Silicon? Most of it's locked in oxide - you end up with a nanobot which spends all it's time trying to harvest enough sunlight to reduce minerals to a useful material.
Only that any singularity-in-any-size-of-box computer will be preceded by multiple iterations of more advanced deep learning systems like watson, that will be open for study and most likely found out to be very much refined google search as opposed to feeling and conspiring humanoid intelligences.
Strictly speaking you've just defined the majority of internet users, in so far as the aspect of them we can study (their google searches) is open and available to us.
The real issue is that none of the "solutions" advocated by the vast, vast, vast majority of the AGW crowd would remotely solve oceanic acidification. It would perhaps drop the saturation point in 100 years from what the high would be without said plans, but since saturation is so slow and we are already seeing effects that means virtually nothing. Which means the only solutions are either killing off the vast majority of humanity and hoping land based carbon sinks grow fast enough to offset the current acidification, or for humans to engineer a massive man-made carbon sequestration scheme.
Which "solutions" are you referring to. There's a lot of them. How do they fail to address ocean acidification?
However, we're driving the car now. And heading into the cliff wall with it.
The problem isn't the car, it's the number of people - as population grows WE all suffer.
i.e less people, less power required, less agriculture, less environmental stresses. The opposite is basically true too.
Everyone who has, or has had multiple children are the root multiplier of the problems we are facing today. To blame any single technology as the problem is disingenuous.
No they're not. Population has become the proxy argument for people who want to make the problem seem "unsolvable" so they can justify doing nothing. The population in nearly all western countries - those with the highest GHG emissions per capita - is stable or even into negative growth (Japan). Even if you fixed the number of people in the world, you'd still be burning fossil fuels and releasing the emissions into the atmosphere. It's a cumulative process.
And then of course you have supply issues: let's say the world population was only 1 billion, and for whatever reason was not increasing. The supply of fossil fuels would be just as large as it is today (with voracious consumption thereof), but the demand would be proportionally lower. "Gas" would be incredibly cheap. So cheap that the idea of the electric car, hybrids etc. would probably still be decades away. The American auto-industry would still be selling enormous gas guzzling SUVs since they'd be as cheap as any small car to run. Efficiency measures would likely be back where they were in the 1970s (look at all the people on/. who are just outraged they can't simply waste electricity if they choose to).
Population growth is laughably divorced from the problem of global warming, since increased population != increased GHG emission. Conversion to running a renewable energy mix in western nations would let GHG emission decline while population increased.
But the real question is what would happen if we activated it in a higher primate, like a chimp.
Of course I don't even want to begin to imaging the ethical dilemmas of that experiment, since it would amount to creating the first sentient member of a new species if it succeeded.
Why not skip school and have a friend carry her ID around... is that so hard for teachers to actually take attendance? Social problems CANNOT be solved with technology solutions... such as voting machines.
Which is what's going to happen. Wasn't this tried and immediately the kids had a system where one kid would swipe your card for you for $5?
And it's probably a good thing that drone operators do get PTSD. Not for them, obviously, but for the innocent people on the ground whose only hope of survival is that drone operator hesitating when he isn't 100% sure who he is firing at.
War has to be nasty and carry horrible consequences for both sides, otherwise it will become too easy. IMHO it already has.
I think this is naive though. It's not like in ages gone by, when war involved hacking people's limbs off with slightly sharpened steel bars, that there were less wars, or that they shorter.
Ancient armies had awful notions of supply chains and logistics, but it didn't slow anyone down - it was however, a lot worse for any civilians who happened to be along the route's of their marches.
Where do you draw the line at too much automation though?
If you have a robotic Humm-Vee which is designed to trigger an ambush so supporting troops and then kill the ambushers, then nothing's wrong. But if we're doing that, why not have said Humm-Vee - which can see exactly who's shooting - start returning fire on hostiles?
Knowing that, the consequence for not doing so may be that friendlies attempting to attack those hostiles get killed because they're active, or because the vantage point is bad, or even end up shooting the wrong people because they have to work on 2nd hand information about who the hostiles were.
A robot controlled remotely by a human (even if only for the kill) would accomplish the same. The human is way detached, that it would be easy to control his emotions.
Haven't we seen this movie before?
If we uplink now, Skynet will be in control of your military. But you'll be in control of Skynet, right?
Also it's not actually true that people are more detached. The rates of PTSD amongst drone controllers are apparently ridiculously high for people who are effectively non-combatants. Soldiers in the field are more or less stuck in "kill or be killed" when contact happens, whereas a guy flying a drone always knows he could have simply not pushed the button.
You're right, unions ruined everything, including child labor and slavery. Oh the good old days, when you could lock your workers in a factory, and watch them burn to death. (Actually happened)
This isn't the 1950s. The medieval Islamic world gave us a lot of inventions too, but I wouldn't say that they are a model of global capitalism today.
No but you're naive if you think the fundamentals of human nature have somehow changed that it could never happen again. It happens in China and other countries all the damn time. Child labor is a massive issue which India is only just starting to get under control. The situation improved because of the union movement.
It's worth noting that union influence on an industry also benefits non-union members. When you're required to adopt good practices and certain wage levels, it drags the bottom up.
Also no one today was alive when the union movement got started. No one has in fact experience the actual violence and murder perpetrated against early unions who were lobbying for safer working conditions (such as not being forced to work in carbon monoxide polluted environments where people were routinely dying).
That said, the lack of radiation could very well make advanced life unlikely, given the effects it'd have on mutation rate.
The effects of radiation on genetic mutation are largely unknown. We have (in fairly recent years) discovered that genetic mutation can and does occur from environmental factors other than radiation. It's a huge unknown, so to be blunt it's equally likely that the reduced radiation could actually lead to more stable mutations and an overall increased evolution rate.
I'd like to be even more specific: you don't need radiation for genetic mutation to occur. Standard DNA polymerases make mistakes all the time without any outside forces beyond thermodynamics, and simple viruses like Ebola tend to have very poorly performing RNA polymerases that make a lot of mistakes because it's advantageous to their survival to do so.
Conversely, bacteria that live in fuel rod settling pools take the opposite approach - they "staple" their DNA together with a high GC content to improve radiation resistance. There's such a diverse range of factors at play that it's ridiculous to suggest "radiation" would give us any information about whether a place could have advanced life.
Not really - the continents basically "float" on the mantle, so depending how hot it's core is that would affect how much pressure it exerted on the crust (and thus how wide it could be).
Could have been great, but they botched the presentation. Standing on top of a very high thing looks quite similar up close. But it's a mash of problems really - you can make pretty mundane stuff look amazing if your script and presentation is solid - science fiction has been doing this for years. The problem with Avatar is they had all this technology and money, but then basically decided to slack off on everything else.
Which is sad - because the original script treatment, while still having it's problems, had a lot of much better concepts in it.
You're the second person to mention this, and I've never seen anything like it in the movie. In the movie it's the satellite signal which serves as the reverse engineering basis.
The whole "source of the modern age" thing was from Transformers.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think that once the fiscal speed bump hits the Republicans won't try to make deals to save their precious military budget increases?
I think the Republican politicians don't really care about the military except as the visible implement which protects Americans from "the thing they're telling you to fear".
We should let congress drive over the fiscal cliff so that democrats take the blame for thier inability to see that the Bush tax cuts don't even come close to paying for the deficit, current or projected.
How about instead of killing the economy with the uncertanty of this on again - off again tax cut, why don't we simplify the tax code completey and permanently.
Seeing as how people use deficit and debt interchangeably, I'm not sure what you're referring to.
The deficit is the year to year shortfall in the budget. The debt is the volume of outstanding loans. The former is a problem to be dealt with at the moment, the latter needs to be managed but does not have to magically be paid off over some fixed timeframe.
The world, currently - and for the foreseeable future - loves US debt, and can't buy enough of it. It's buying it so voraciously that at various points over the past few years, US treasury notes have had negative yields. People were literally paying the US for the privilege of loaning it money, because on the macro-scale, the US is a stable place to invest and you ultimately have to invest somewhere. The US, for the foreseeable future, will be able to refinance it's debt in perpetuity - the current situation is that doing nothing, would whittle the debt down to nothing even faster then inflation because of the aformentioned periods of "being paid to be loaned money" situation.
Now why is all that important? Because it effects how you view deficits, and their causes. Deficits go on the debt pile, and the debt pile is only a worry if it grows at an average rate that's higher then US GDP growth (or specifically: US tax revenue growth from GDP). The US never has to repay the debt. It simply takes out new debt - possibly at lower interest rates - to refinance it. You can do this indefinitely if you're an immortal country, and GDP growth and inflation whittle the debt away without needing to do anything. The debt pile can keep growing, but provided your GDP keeps pace, it'll never affect your ability to fund your year-to-year budget. Of course, a well-managed country also chooses to strategically reduce it's debt to keep it manageable when - like now - the deficit has to rise due to poor economic conditions, or if it wants to stabilize it's budgeting further against global conditions.
Which is where this graph comes in. The US deficit, is being driven principally by the Bush tax cuts, by the bailouts necessary due to the GFC, the wars, with the rest made up of the usual increased spend a downturn brings in welfare (people out of work = more welfare payouts). The US is not terminally in deficit, it's not being sunk by the welfare system, it's being sunk by idiotic fiscal policy (and probably a fair amount of graft and corruption between government contracts to big business backers like Halliburton).
If you really want to see terminal damage to the economy, watch what happens if you dismantle social welfare further. Convert the joblessness due to the downturn into permanent unemployment and then homelessness, and take a huge chunk of the productive workforce out of the workpool forever and into your policing and hospital emergency room spending instead - because they won't just disappear.
Also, dismantling social safety nets, for all but the upper class - is the effectively actual doom to a great many people. Those who depend on them, those who will wind up depending on them in the depression, and those who are going to the victims of the rising crime rates caused by putting people into poverty.
Why were you in Afgahnistan during the Cold War?
It was to check the Soviets, but the stupidest thing America did afterwards was pull all it's funding and foreign aid from the country, and ensure that a few decades of impoverished rule by the Taliban would eventually lead to the rise of the new terrorist cells which carried out the attacks on the twin towers.
Pretending the US can pursue isolationist policies after being highly interventionist, and expect to be left alone, is ridiculous. Doubly so when your entire economy depends on the price of oil, and which in turn depends on global supply regardless of your interest in other countries or not. Suddenly withdrawing security and support is not a consequence free action. You take a bunch of people you're making promises to, or who are depending on you, and throw them to the wolves. That breeds resentment - the next generation, their children, grow up hearing their parents lament about how you can't trust Americans, grow up seeing American drones and helicopters bombing middle eastern countries (and with no education system, are very pliable as to ideas on why that's happening), and sure enough, two decades later when they're in their 20's, you get a brand new terrorist cell filled with young people utterly convinced America needs to be taught a lesson of some sort.
Nanotechnology is functionally indistinguishable to regular pathogens on most scales. Anything advanced would be at least quite similar to a virus - probably, in fact, based on the design of one.
So in reality nanotechnology as applied to medicine will be somewhat more inorganic bundles of proteins and enzymes, in a desperate attempt to stop the immune system from obliterating it.
The Grey Goo scenario of course makes a leap - it assumes that we can build something somewhat better then this. The problem of course then hinges on that pre-conception: it's not clear that anything resembling a grey goo nanite is physically possible. What would it eat? There's plenty of carbon - but the world is full of things which have tried their best to takeover the carbon environment. Silicon? Most of it's locked in oxide - you end up with a nanobot which spends all it's time trying to harvest enough sunlight to reduce minerals to a useful material.
Only that any singularity-in-any-size-of-box computer will be preceded by multiple iterations of more advanced deep learning systems like watson, that will be open for study and most likely found out to be very much refined google search as opposed to feeling and conspiring humanoid intelligences.
Strictly speaking you've just defined the majority of internet users, in so far as the aspect of them we can study (their google searches) is open and available to us.
Beware a group of elites telling you what to do!
Listen instead to your president. Trust what he says completely.
The real issue is that none of the "solutions" advocated by the vast, vast, vast majority of the AGW crowd would remotely solve oceanic acidification. It would perhaps drop the saturation point in 100 years from what the high would be without said plans, but since saturation is so slow and we are already seeing effects that means virtually nothing. Which means the only solutions are either killing off the vast majority of humanity and hoping land based carbon sinks grow fast enough to offset the current acidification, or for humans to engineer a massive man-made carbon sequestration scheme.
Which "solutions" are you referring to. There's a lot of them. How do they fail to address ocean acidification?
However, we're driving the car now. And heading into the cliff wall with it.
The problem isn't the car, it's the number of people - as population grows WE all suffer.
i.e less people, less power required, less agriculture, less environmental stresses. The opposite is basically true too.
Everyone who has, or has had multiple children are the root multiplier of the problems we are facing today. To blame any single technology as the problem is disingenuous.
No they're not. Population has become the proxy argument for people who want to make the problem seem "unsolvable" so they can justify doing nothing. The population in nearly all western countries - those with the highest GHG emissions per capita - is stable or even into negative growth (Japan). Even if you fixed the number of people in the world, you'd still be burning fossil fuels and releasing the emissions into the atmosphere. It's a cumulative process.
And then of course you have supply issues: let's say the world population was only 1 billion, and for whatever reason was not increasing. The supply of fossil fuels would be just as large as it is today (with voracious consumption thereof), but the demand would be proportionally lower. "Gas" would be incredibly cheap. So cheap that the idea of the electric car, hybrids etc. would probably still be decades away. The American auto-industry would still be selling enormous gas guzzling SUVs since they'd be as cheap as any small car to run. Efficiency measures would likely be back where they were in the 1970s (look at all the people on /. who are just outraged they can't simply waste electricity if they choose to).
Population growth is laughably divorced from the problem of global warming, since increased population != increased GHG emission. Conversion to running a renewable energy mix in western nations would let GHG emission decline while population increased.
It's very unlikely it codes for sentience.
But the real question is what would happen if we activated it in a higher primate, like a chimp.
Of course I don't even want to begin to imaging the ethical dilemmas of that experiment, since it would amount to creating the first sentient member of a new species if it succeeded.
Well, it's never to early to start learning how to perform minor surgery...
Why not skip school and have a friend carry her ID around... is that so hard for teachers to actually take attendance? Social problems CANNOT be solved with technology solutions... such as voting machines.
Which is what's going to happen. Wasn't this tried and immediately the kids had a system where one kid would swipe your card for you for $5?
Agreeing with this.
Although conversely my experience with the open-source radeon drivers has been pretty good.
And it's probably a good thing that drone operators do get PTSD. Not for them, obviously, but for the innocent people on the ground whose only hope of survival is that drone operator hesitating when he isn't 100% sure who he is firing at.
War has to be nasty and carry horrible consequences for both sides, otherwise it will become too easy. IMHO it already has.
I think this is naive though. It's not like in ages gone by, when war involved hacking people's limbs off with slightly sharpened steel bars, that there were less wars, or that they shorter.
Ancient armies had awful notions of supply chains and logistics, but it didn't slow anyone down - it was however, a lot worse for any civilians who happened to be along the route's of their marches.
Where do you draw the line at too much automation though?
If you have a robotic Humm-Vee which is designed to trigger an ambush so supporting troops and then kill the ambushers, then nothing's wrong. But if we're doing that, why not have said Humm-Vee - which can see exactly who's shooting - start returning fire on hostiles?
Knowing that, the consequence for not doing so may be that friendlies attempting to attack those hostiles get killed because they're active, or because the vantage point is bad, or even end up shooting the wrong people because they have to work on 2nd hand information about who the hostiles were.
A robot controlled remotely by a human (even if only for the kill) would accomplish the same. The human is way detached, that it would be easy to control his emotions.
Haven't we seen this movie before?
If we uplink now, Skynet will be in control of your military. But you'll be in control of Skynet, right?
Also it's not actually true that people are more detached. The rates of PTSD amongst drone controllers are apparently ridiculously high for people who are effectively non-combatants. Soldiers in the field are more or less stuck in "kill or be killed" when contact happens, whereas a guy flying a drone always knows he could have simply not pushed the button.
Check boxes in synaptic?
This sounds very much like you were customizing, since proprietary drivers are handled through Jockey (the "Additional Drivers" dialog).
Or you know, just get ahead of the game with the superior product, undercut the market and take over.
Everyone wants solid-state mass storage on a large scale, and the market flocks to the lowest cost-per-gigabyte.
You're right, unions ruined everything, including child labor and slavery. Oh the good old days, when you could lock your workers in a factory, and watch them burn to death. (Actually happened)
This isn't the 1950s. The medieval Islamic world gave us a lot of inventions too, but I wouldn't say that they are a model of global capitalism today.
No but you're naive if you think the fundamentals of human nature have somehow changed that it could never happen again. It happens in China and other countries all the damn time. Child labor is a massive issue which India is only just starting to get under control. The situation improved because of the union movement.
It's worth noting that union influence on an industry also benefits non-union members. When you're required to adopt good practices and certain wage levels, it drags the bottom up.
Also no one today was alive when the union movement got started. No one has in fact experience the actual violence and murder perpetrated against early unions who were lobbying for safer working conditions (such as not being forced to work in carbon monoxide polluted environments where people were routinely dying).
That said, the lack of radiation could very well make advanced life unlikely, given the effects it'd have on mutation rate.
The effects of radiation on genetic mutation are largely unknown. We have (in fairly recent years) discovered that genetic mutation can and does occur from environmental factors other than radiation. It's a huge unknown, so to be blunt it's equally likely that the reduced radiation could actually lead to more stable mutations and an overall increased evolution rate.
I'd like to be even more specific: you don't need radiation for genetic mutation to occur. Standard DNA polymerases make mistakes all the time without any outside forces beyond thermodynamics, and simple viruses like Ebola tend to have very poorly performing RNA polymerases that make a lot of mistakes because it's advantageous to their survival to do so.
Conversely, bacteria that live in fuel rod settling pools take the opposite approach - they "staple" their DNA together with a high GC content to improve radiation resistance. There's such a diverse range of factors at play that it's ridiculous to suggest "radiation" would give us any information about whether a place could have advanced life.
Not really - the continents basically "float" on the mantle, so depending how hot it's core is that would affect how much pressure it exerted on the crust (and thus how wide it could be).
Could have been great, but they botched the presentation. Standing on top of a very high thing looks quite similar up close. But it's a mash of problems really - you can make pretty mundane stuff look amazing if your script and presentation is solid - science fiction has been doing this for years. The problem with Avatar is they had all this technology and money, but then basically decided to slack off on everything else.
Which is sad - because the original script treatment, while still having it's problems, had a lot of much better concepts in it.
When does that show up?
You're the second person to mention this, and I've never seen anything like it in the movie. In the movie it's the satellite signal which serves as the reverse engineering basis.
The whole "source of the modern age" thing was from Transformers.