Eventually we'll need to go beyond providing for basic needs as the opportunities for economic mobility become more and more scarce with increasing automation.
At some point there will be just a small handful of opportunities for people to make their own lives better, in terms of resources. At that point everyone's lives need to be good enough (in terms of resources) that they won't feel that their lives need "improvement." Basic income needs to fill in for economic mobility as it inevitably disappears.
Ah, but modern society has an ideal breeding ground for anti-social traits - in positions of power. It's been that way since agriculture was invented, in fact.
Man that would be scary as hell, to think that the planet is heating up due to a mystery force, and you can't get any scientists to figure out what it is (even the Koch-funded climate studies came to the same conclusions as "mainstream" science). Since the mystery force breaks the greenhouse effect, that also limits the options for counteracting it.
If I was a rightwinger I'd be a big proponent of solar radiation management as a short-term solution while working furiously to build off-world colonies as a refuge from a planet that is, for all intents and purposes, haunted. The eventual goal would be for Earth to be used only as a mining/farming/manufacturing outpost for the colonies. As a super-long-term goal, interstellar travel would have to be developed in case Earth ever becomes completely uninhabitable due to the mystery force.
Hey that sounds a lot like the world of Elysium, except in Elysium the space colonists know what's happening to Earth but simply gave up on it.
That IS a conspiracy. It still suggests that the world's scientists are undermining and subverting the scientific method due to an ulterior motive.
You're suggesting that the reason wacky crank ideas that fly in the face of all the best evidence don't get funding is due to some "fashion" effect in the scientific community, rather than the fact that there's not much interest in researching dead, disproven ideas like steady-state universe theory and non-anthropogenic global warming. You took the very same conspiracy theory I linked to and simply swapped the motivation for all the world's scientists to go against the scientific method from an evil illuminati scheme, to a dogmatic adherence to fashion.
If information was unearthed tomorrow that showed that a popular newspaper in 30s Germany considered taking action to stop Hitler from rising to power, but didn't because they wanted to remain politically neutral, people today would consider them cowards. If on the other hand the story said that they did take action in secret, we'd hold them in high regard today. Facebook is far from politically neutral in terms of content anyway - think about how the platform handles gender and sexuality issues, the observance of certain holidays, and their policy on extremist content, nudity, harassment, and IP enforcement. The closest a social media platform could come to being politically neutral on content would be to work as a chaotic free-for-all.
And the Hitler comparison is not gratuitous. Again, learn from history. Or just look up what books Trump kept on his bedside table.
Hmm, this civilization sounds a lot like socialism, defying the free market's choice to completely divorce wages from productivity and all. Don't think I like that.
Better to stick to laissez-faire capitalism, where we're all free to live our lives lounging on supercar-and-helicopter-launching megayachts with hookers and giant piles of cocaine, or briefly grinding out a difficult existence where survival is the reward, as the market, in its infinitely neutral utter indifference to the state of society, sees fit.
Oh so they're lazy bums because they don't work hard, unlike previous generations, and that's why they earn less. That's the first possibility I was talking about. Those lazy bums who all got a college degree and often work two jobs afterwards, they just need to get off their asses. Makes sense.
So I fail because most people don't care about grammar and spelling anymore, and you don't want to talk about it? Damn, that's a real plot twist to leave me with!
"Vastly harder" to earn as much is a gross overstatement. There is lots of opportunity for those that simply write well and work hard.
Are you suggesting that younger people are just a bunch of lazy illiterate bums (OK, we are mostly total shit at spelling and grammar, but the world accepts this now, and my unusual ability to spell hasn't done anything for me) or is there some other reason why they need to work harder and write better, on average, than previous generations? It has to be one of the two if it's due to work ethic and writing ability.
"In tonight's special, we'll examine how we have smartphones and Xbox and super-safe cars now, and how these easily make up for the fact that you'll have a vastly harder time than your parents or grandparents did making the money to pay for these things, or getting the job that could let you pay for these things, or paying for the ridiculous level of education that could let you get the job that could pay for these things, or the house you might want to own in which to put these things and maybe raise a family at some point.
Quadcopters! Netflix! And the minor annoying quibbles they totally overshadow, on tonight's EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!"
Addendum - just checked a CentOS server, and rm --help says that --preserve-root is enabled by default, and has to be overridden with --no-preserve-root.
It's true, if you have only one offline backup there are short periods of total risk involved. If you have more than one offline backup though, you just do one at a time and there's never any window of time when all your backups could be taken out by a lightning strike/malware/hilarious accidental deletion.
With newer versions of rm you can also use --preserve-root to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
This is a decent idea in itself but I'm not sure the increased competition would give enough motive to voluntarily enact net neutrality. For example, there's a lot of competition among cellular providers and data plans with zero-rated services (Facebook, Netflix etc) are still common. It's a big guy vs. little guy problem - data providers can safely collude with the big guy and few people will be upset. It still stifles competition, perhaps even moreso in the long term than more targeted or self-serving arrangements.
You define "free" by the standard of laissez-faire capitalism, that people who live in a system closer to this ideal are more "free." Even if they work skilled jobs and can hardly support themselves while a small ownership class reaps ludicrous, astronomical wealth for sitting around and owning things. That's certainly an evil outcome IMO.
This system is a lot like a paperclip maximizer. I found an interesting discussion on that very analogy here:
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually we'll need to go beyond providing for basic needs as the opportunities for economic mobility become more and more scarce with increasing automation.
At some point there will be just a small handful of opportunities for people to make their own lives better, in terms of resources. At that point everyone's lives need to be good enough (in terms of resources) that they won't feel that their lives need "improvement." Basic income needs to fill in for economic mobility as it inevitably disappears.
Ah, but modern society has an ideal breeding ground for anti-social traits - in positions of power. It's been that way since agriculture was invented, in fact.
I wrote a post on the same hypothetical scenario a few days ago, with a non-suicide option for this admittedly frightening scenario:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Good username/post combo!
I'm wondering if it suffers from some of the other problems that plague biometrics - is the "brainprint" unhashable, and will it change with age?
Not a dead end, just a difficult rut, modern "AI" uses layered neural networks.
I refuse to pooh-pooh every advancement short of Chappie or a shiny silver Robin Williams standing in front of me though.
Man that would be scary as hell, to think that the planet is heating up due to a mystery force, and you can't get any scientists to figure out what it is (even the Koch-funded climate studies came to the same conclusions as "mainstream" science). Since the mystery force breaks the greenhouse effect, that also limits the options for counteracting it.
If I was a rightwinger I'd be a big proponent of solar radiation management as a short-term solution while working furiously to build off-world colonies as a refuge from a planet that is, for all intents and purposes, haunted. The eventual goal would be for Earth to be used only as a mining/farming/manufacturing outpost for the colonies. As a super-long-term goal, interstellar travel would have to be developed in case Earth ever becomes completely uninhabitable due to the mystery force.
Hey that sounds a lot like the world of Elysium, except in Elysium the space colonists know what's happening to Earth but simply gave up on it.
That IS a conspiracy. It still suggests that the world's scientists are undermining and subverting the scientific method due to an ulterior motive.
You're suggesting that the reason wacky crank ideas that fly in the face of all the best evidence don't get funding is due to some "fashion" effect in the scientific community, rather than the fact that there's not much interest in researching dead, disproven ideas like steady-state universe theory and non-anthropogenic global warming. You took the very same conspiracy theory I linked to and simply swapped the motivation for all the world's scientists to go against the scientific method from an evil illuminati scheme, to a dogmatic adherence to fashion.
You have no opinion on climate change, yet you link to a climate conspiracy blog and a pseudoscience website...
Not clear what weird conspiracy applies in this case
It is clear: The Evil Liberal Science Conspiracy. Global warming denialism cannot work without it.
If information was unearthed tomorrow that showed that a popular newspaper in 30s Germany considered taking action to stop Hitler from rising to power, but didn't because they wanted to remain politically neutral, people today would consider them cowards. If on the other hand the story said that they did take action in secret, we'd hold them in high regard today. Facebook is far from politically neutral in terms of content anyway - think about how the platform handles gender and sexuality issues, the observance of certain holidays, and their policy on extremist content, nudity, harassment, and IP enforcement. The closest a social media platform could come to being politically neutral on content would be to work as a chaotic free-for-all.
And the Hitler comparison is not gratuitous. Again, learn from history. Or just look up what books Trump kept on his bedside table.
Hmm, this civilization sounds a lot like socialism, defying the free market's choice to completely divorce wages from productivity and all. Don't think I like that.
Better to stick to laissez-faire capitalism, where we're all free to live our lives lounging on supercar-and-helicopter-launching megayachts with hookers and giant piles of cocaine, or briefly grinding out a difficult existence where survival is the reward, as the market, in its infinitely neutral utter indifference to the state of society, sees fit.
Oh so they're lazy bums because they don't work hard, unlike previous generations, and that's why they earn less. That's the first possibility I was talking about. Those lazy bums who all got a college degree and often work two jobs afterwards, they just need to get off their asses. Makes sense.
So I fail because most people don't care about grammar and spelling anymore, and you don't want to talk about it? Damn, that's a real plot twist to leave me with!
"Vastly harder" to earn as much is a gross overstatement. There is lots of opportunity for those that simply write well and work hard.
Are you suggesting that younger people are just a bunch of lazy illiterate bums (OK, we are mostly total shit at spelling and grammar, but the world accepts this now, and my unusual ability to spell hasn't done anything for me) or is there some other reason why they need to work harder and write better, on average, than previous generations? It has to be one of the two if it's due to work ethic and writing ability.
"In tonight's special, we'll examine how we have smartphones and Xbox and super-safe cars now, and how these easily make up for the fact that you'll have a vastly harder time than your parents or grandparents did making the money to pay for these things, or getting the job that could let you pay for these things, or paying for the ridiculous level of education that could let you get the job that could pay for these things, or the house you might want to own in which to put these things and maybe raise a family at some point.
Quadcopters! Netflix! And the minor annoying quibbles they totally overshadow, on tonight's EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!"
"we never claimed there was a guarantee of a reward"
You make it sound terrible, it's called "equality of opportunity." Also available in the jungle!
Addendum - just checked a CentOS server, and rm --help says that --preserve-root is enabled by default, and has to be overridden with --no-preserve-root.
It's true, if you have only one offline backup there are short periods of total risk involved. If you have more than one offline backup though, you just do one at a time and there's never any window of time when all your backups could be taken out by a lightning strike/malware/hilarious accidental deletion.
With newer versions of rm you can also use --preserve-root to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
This is a decent idea in itself but I'm not sure the increased competition would give enough motive to voluntarily enact net neutrality. For example, there's a lot of competition among cellular providers and data plans with zero-rated services (Facebook, Netflix etc) are still common. It's a big guy vs. little guy problem - data providers can safely collude with the big guy and few people will be upset. It still stifles competition, perhaps even moreso in the long term than more targeted or self-serving arrangements.
They're the same, except for the capacity of unladen packets to carry coconuts.
This should've been linked in TFA/TFS somewhere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I take it that you consider gay men and lesbian women using the same bathrooms as everyone else to also be a problem then?
You define "free" by the standard of laissez-faire capitalism, that people who live in a system closer to this ideal are more "free." Even if they work skilled jobs and can hardly support themselves while a small ownership class reaps ludicrous, astronomical wealth for sitting around and owning things. That's certainly an evil outcome IMO.
This system is a lot like a paperclip maximizer. I found an interesting discussion on that very analogy here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Prior art has never been a hindrance before...
Good point, I forgot about that.