"A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity."
Last mile internet access absolutely counts. It's true that US governments are doing their best to put additional artificial barriers to entry in place, but there are significant natural barriers to entry involved that have nothing to do with your government and everything to do with needing to run a cable to every single building.
This is last mile internet access, which is a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies aren't created by governments; in fact the government's role here is to step in and prevent abuse of the monopoly (or even better, to run the last mile themselves so that many ISPs can compete in offering service over it).
You should be criticising your legislators for failing to do that.
It did. Actually the 32-bit version supported up to 64 GB of RAM; the 4 GB limit is a licensing restriction. (The limit of 4 GB of address space per process is however technical and does require 64-bit to increase.)
Of course this all seems a bit backwards, because the idea was to run XP in a VM, not run VMs on XP. The high memory requirements for VMs are on the host, not on the guests.
I'm not so sure. We're talking full-time trolls using software that automates most of the work. Since we can post anonymously they don't even need to maintain accounts. Total time spent posting each message is maybe a minute or two, which would mean posting 30 posts would cost, what, $10? Not much if you have a budget big enough to pay for a full team of people to do the work.
On the other side, part of the point of all of this FUD is that it needs to be everywhere you look. Social media is certainly the best bang for your buck, but it's no good if every other site you look at is clean. Also, we have fewer active users than we used to but I believe it's still in the millions per month, and a lot of our users are the type that avoid social media in the first place and are thus hard to reach otherwise.
Between the low cost, the demographics of the site and the goal of being everywhere I suspect we're sufficiently worth it.
No, they can't. They could do double-spending attacks, but with fairly low probability and not without people noticing. They couldn't add arbitrary transactions, because transactions need to be signed by private keys that miners don't have access to. They can't commit invalid blocks because all other full nodes (crucially including the ones run by payment providers and exchanges) check the validity of blocks. They could fork and make their own chain, but anybody can do that and the fork wouldn't be very interesting if nobody was using it.
Historically, we've replaced some jobs with automation and people have migrated to other jobs that the automation wasn't capable of. This time around, we're getting to the point where AI and robotics are good enough to replace anything a human can do. Automation will be able to do your job better than you can, and you can forget migrating to another job because the robots can do the other job just as well as you can too.
That is fundamentally different from any of the last times this happened.
The content of those jobs may have changed a lot, but it's notable that despite the progress in the past century the same general jobs are still around and still being done by humans. Sure, we've always found other things to do, but those other things are mostly the same things we were doing before. What happens when that's not viable?
I'm not sure if you watched the entire video, but you sound very much like the horses at 3:30.
Mass automation of everything can massively improve our lives, but if we try to stick to the mindset of "everybody must have a job, because that's how it worked in the past" then we're going to have problems.
You can't demonstrate that a UBI isn't doable with a 5th grader doing mental mathematics.
Feel free to try, but all you've managed to do so far is insult me (and Silicon Valley's officials, and congressmen, and foreigners, and people in general, and everybody born after 1980 specifically), not actually show any of this supposedly-simple mathematics.
You should watch this video, which does a better job covering this than I could. For one thing, it points out (at 13:28) that our top 30 most common jobs, covering almost half the workforce, actually did exist 100 years ago (and it's not like the next 30 jobs are all new either).
No, there are no indications that brains are doing things that aren't possible in our universe. The fact that they exist in our universe is extreme evidence to the contrary. If you want to claim the opposite then you're going to need more than "I don't understand how they work". Every indication is that they're just a regular neural network, connected with so many links and weightings that they're very difficult to analyse, but using regular physics (chemistry, even) for the connections. We've been implementing very similar NNs in software for a while now and they work (and the software implementations are starting to give human-level performance for a lot of tasks, which is suggestive in and of itself).
It is possible that they're using some part of physics that's outside of what's currently described in our literature. This is always possible with a system that's not completely described. The fact that the possibility exists doesn't mean it's likely though; it's a lot more likely the brain is made from components we do understand, connected in ways that we don't. Again, if you want to argue that's not the case, you need to bring more to the table than "I don't get what's going on".
(It's also worth pointing out that you don't need total fundamental understanding of one implementation of a system to produce a different implementation of it.)
The difference this time is that, not only are we automating currently existing jobs, but we're also automating all of the possible replacement jobs -- because our automation is approaching the level of dexterity and flexibility of actual humans, and anything humans could move into doing could also be done by the automation. It's easy to say "retrain", but what are people going to retrain to when all of the things they are physically capable of doing are also automated? Just because it's always worked like that in the past doesn't mean it'll always work like that.
Perhaps you disagree that we're getting close to that level of automation this time around, but we're going to get to it at some point. (And I'd argue that the extremely rapid progress of AI recently suggests that we're beginning to get close.)
You're suggesting that human brains are somehow non-physical? That's... extremely unlikely.
It's true that brains are complicated. There's an awful lot of connections and state involved in the neural networks in them, all of which are different for each person, and it's very difficult to even get access to that state since cutting the brain open to get to it destroys a lot of it. But none of that suggests that brains don't run on regular physics. It just means you aren't smart enough to get your head around how they work. It's a very long leap from "I don't understand how this works" to "this must be magical".
Also, there are plenty of examples of systems that are aware of what the system itself is doing (Linux with top, to take a silly one?), so claiming that Physics doesn't allow for consciousness also seems to be a bit unfounded. It's possible to make a physical system that can monitor what it's doing, so I see no reason why a brain couldn't do it too without violating physics -- and this is true even if I don't understand how it's doing it.
Who said there was a free lunch involved? For people who are receiving benefits (which are already funded) UBI replaces the benefits, and for people who are working you introduce a UBI tax (which people will use their UBI to pay for). Between that you've covered most of the funding requirements for a UBI.
After all I guess I'm a Special Snowflake and deserve to not be required to earn a living, right? Besides which being Gen-Y I won't live long enough to see the inevitable economic collapse UBI will cause so why should I give a damn? It's the Millennials' problem not mine, right?
You have this all backwards. The problem we're facing is that between robotics and AI, automation is very soon going to be capable of doing basically everything humans can do -- and it'll be able to do it 24/7 without needing breaks and without complaining. Forget "special snowflake not wanting to work", there just isn't going to be any work for humans to do, because the machines can do it cheaper. This is the thing that risks causing an economic collapse, because nobody is going to be able to buy anything if they have no income to buy it with.
As you say, you'll probably be dead before automation gets quite that ubiquitous. I guess that's why you're not seeing it as a serious issue.
Except not. People who work will be giving their UBI back in taxes, and people on benefits will have their benefits replaced by the UBI. Neither will end up with more money than before. If suppliers could increase prices for those groups of people then they'd already have done so.
I know it's popular to make witty comments around "people are idiots"... but a UBI solves the problem of people not being able to afford basic necessities.
It doesn't solve the problem of some people refusing to buy basic necessities, but that's a different and much smaller problem, and one that already exists without a UBI anyway. If indeed it's even a problem -- if people want to starve themselves or live in the streets, then it seems reasonable to let them. But nobody should be forced to.
You don't need to pick one, you can have both just fine. I'll also point out that you don't need XUL for XUL extensions (despite the terribly inaccurate name).
I see official 32-bit builds for the latest version for both Windows and Linux? Mac I'm not sure about; it may be some kind of combined package, or perhaps 32-bit Macs are no longer a thing.
That's not how I read that definition from Wikipedia. It says that the laws and forces of supply and demand must be free from government intervention, not that the government can't do any regulation whatsoever.
From a practical viewpoint, In the real world an unregulated market is just going to end up with monopolies (along with any other abusive behavior you can imagine -- what's to stop you from sending some thugs around to your competitors' customers to break some legs and encourage them to buy from you instead?). In other words, having no regulation means you won't have a free market, which in turn means that if you actually want a free market (or at least to even get close to it) then you need regulation.
Hopefully I don't need to point out that regulation can make a market less free as well as making it more free. You obviously need to be careful about the exact content of the regulation. But you just aren't going to get a free market by having no regulation at all.
And of course... you don't always want a free market. Using subsidies to push the market towards more efficient technology faster than it otherwise would move can be a good thing, depending on how it's handled. (Ideally the market would pick the more efficient tech by itself, but that requires it to take into account all of the external costs of the inefficient tech, and it won't do that without -- you guessed it -- regulation forcing it to do that.)
I'm saying that used cars aren't some fundamental need that everybody needs to go out and keep buying on a constant basis. Heck, you just described that as ridiculous yourself.
Normally, in the real world, only a small percentage of people are buying used cars at any given time. Most people who need a car already have one they can use, after all. If that jumped to 100% buying then it'd be a massive change in the demand for used cars, and that would obviously affect the prices (not by the amount of the UBI, mind; the supply would dry up very fast and prices would raise to match those of new cars, which would presumably also rise in price since supply of those would dry up too). But -- again, limiting to the real world -- that's irrelevant to a discussion about UBI because a UBI is for universal, basic goods, which I hope I've managed to explain that used cars aren't.
Now, if you were to make an analogy where used cars were a universal, basic need, then that would of course involve a world where everybody is buying used cars constantly (and that has welfare payments for used cars, since they are after all a basic need for everybody in this analogy). Those are the implications of "universal, basic need". And in that world, the percentage of people buying used cars would be close to 100%. In that world, introducing a UBI payment for used cars would have a very small impact on the number of people buying used cars, in much the same way that a UBI payment in our world bumps the number of people buying food and accommodation up only very slightly (because everybody is already buying those anyway).
But if this whole concept of an analogy is too complicated for you to follow, then go ahead and forget about it. Imagine we were talking about food instead. Basically everybody is already buying food, so a UBI isn't going to impact the demand much, and the prices are already as high as the market will bear, and most of the people receiving the UBI will either pay it back in taxes or will stop receiving their current welfare payments. So how will a UBI of $x dollars increase the price of food by $x?
It's not a very relevant analogy if it's not going to involve a universal, basic need, because UBIs are explicitly for universal, basic needs only. They aren't designed to let you live a life of luxury or anything, they're explicitly just for the bare necessities. "Universal". "Basic". These words are in the name because they mean things, not just because they sound pretty. A UBI isn't for things that 5% of people are buying, it's for things that >99% of people are buying.
If you've decided that used cars is a bad and unusable analogy, then that's fine. I'd be okay with an answer that explains using the cost of food or something else that we can both agree is universal in the real world.
That's in the real world. In the analogy, we're using used cars as an example of a universal, basic need, so in the analogy rich people do buy used cars. In the analogy, everybody buys used cars. That's what "universal" means.
Feel free to use housing or food instead if you can't cope with that. But really, if you had an explanation for how your original assertion could happen, you would've given it by now. I hope I've made the point that a UBI would not in fact raise prices by the amount that you claimed.
Okay, so come on then, answer the question. We have a good that's in universal demand (used cars in the analogy), and we give everyone 5k to buy their used cars with, but we tax back most or all of it from most people (or remove their existing welfare-for-used-cars payments). Demand doesn't budge much because it was already universal, and the price that the market can bear doesn't move much because most people don't have more money in the end than the did before.
Slashdot Mirror
"A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity."
Last mile internet access absolutely counts. It's true that US governments are doing their best to put additional artificial barriers to entry in place, but there are significant natural barriers to entry involved that have nothing to do with your government and everything to do with needing to run a cable to every single building.
This is last mile internet access, which is a natural monopoly. Natural monopolies aren't created by governments; in fact the government's role here is to step in and prevent abuse of the monopoly (or even better, to run the last mile themselves so that many ISPs can compete in offering service over it).
You should be criticising your legislators for failing to do that.
It did. Actually the 32-bit version supported up to 64 GB of RAM; the 4 GB limit is a licensing restriction. (The limit of 4 GB of address space per process is however technical and does require 64-bit to increase.)
Of course this all seems a bit backwards, because the idea was to run XP in a VM, not run VMs on XP. The high memory requirements for VMs are on the host, not on the guests.
I'm not so sure. We're talking full-time trolls using software that automates most of the work. Since we can post anonymously they don't even need to maintain accounts. Total time spent posting each message is maybe a minute or two, which would mean posting 30 posts would cost, what, $10? Not much if you have a budget big enough to pay for a full team of people to do the work.
On the other side, part of the point of all of this FUD is that it needs to be everywhere you look. Social media is certainly the best bang for your buck, but it's no good if every other site you look at is clean. Also, we have fewer active users than we used to but I believe it's still in the millions per month, and a lot of our users are the type that avoid social media in the first place and are thus hard to reach otherwise.
Between the low cost, the demographics of the site and the goal of being everywhere I suspect we're sufficiently worth it.
No, they can't. They could do double-spending attacks, but with fairly low probability and not without people noticing. They couldn't add arbitrary transactions, because transactions need to be signed by private keys that miners don't have access to. They can't commit invalid blocks because all other full nodes (crucially including the ones run by payment providers and exchanges) check the validity of blocks. They could fork and make their own chain, but anybody can do that and the fork wouldn't be very interesting if nobody was using it.
They can't do "anything they want".
Historically, we've replaced some jobs with automation and people have migrated to other jobs that the automation wasn't capable of. This time around, we're getting to the point where AI and robotics are good enough to replace anything a human can do. Automation will be able to do your job better than you can, and you can forget migrating to another job because the robots can do the other job just as well as you can too.
That is fundamentally different from any of the last times this happened.
The content of those jobs may have changed a lot, but it's notable that despite the progress in the past century the same general jobs are still around and still being done by humans. Sure, we've always found other things to do, but those other things are mostly the same things we were doing before. What happens when that's not viable?
I'm not sure if you watched the entire video, but you sound very much like the horses at 3:30.
Mass automation of everything can massively improve our lives, but if we try to stick to the mindset of "everybody must have a job, because that's how it worked in the past" then we're going to have problems.
You can't demonstrate that a UBI isn't doable with a 5th grader doing mental mathematics.
Feel free to try, but all you've managed to do so far is insult me (and Silicon Valley's officials, and congressmen, and foreigners, and people in general, and everybody born after 1980 specifically), not actually show any of this supposedly-simple mathematics.
You should watch this video, which does a better job covering this than I could. For one thing, it points out (at 13:28) that our top 30 most common jobs, covering almost half the workforce, actually did exist 100 years ago (and it's not like the next 30 jobs are all new either).
If that's your translation, then you ignored most or all of the comment.
No, there are no indications that brains are doing things that aren't possible in our universe. The fact that they exist in our universe is extreme evidence to the contrary. If you want to claim the opposite then you're going to need more than "I don't understand how they work". Every indication is that they're just a regular neural network, connected with so many links and weightings that they're very difficult to analyse, but using regular physics (chemistry, even) for the connections. We've been implementing very similar NNs in software for a while now and they work (and the software implementations are starting to give human-level performance for a lot of tasks, which is suggestive in and of itself).
It is possible that they're using some part of physics that's outside of what's currently described in our literature. This is always possible with a system that's not completely described. The fact that the possibility exists doesn't mean it's likely though; it's a lot more likely the brain is made from components we do understand, connected in ways that we don't. Again, if you want to argue that's not the case, you need to bring more to the table than "I don't get what's going on".
(It's also worth pointing out that you don't need total fundamental understanding of one implementation of a system to produce a different implementation of it.)
The difference this time is that, not only are we automating currently existing jobs, but we're also automating all of the possible replacement jobs -- because our automation is approaching the level of dexterity and flexibility of actual humans, and anything humans could move into doing could also be done by the automation. It's easy to say "retrain", but what are people going to retrain to when all of the things they are physically capable of doing are also automated? Just because it's always worked like that in the past doesn't mean it'll always work like that.
Perhaps you disagree that we're getting close to that level of automation this time around, but we're going to get to it at some point. (And I'd argue that the extremely rapid progress of AI recently suggests that we're beginning to get close.)
Human brains aren't exactly reliable either, so apparently that's not a requirement for the "I" part.
You're suggesting that human brains are somehow non-physical? That's... extremely unlikely.
It's true that brains are complicated. There's an awful lot of connections and state involved in the neural networks in them, all of which are different for each person, and it's very difficult to even get access to that state since cutting the brain open to get to it destroys a lot of it. But none of that suggests that brains don't run on regular physics. It just means you aren't smart enough to get your head around how they work. It's a very long leap from "I don't understand how this works" to "this must be magical".
Also, there are plenty of examples of systems that are aware of what the system itself is doing (Linux with top, to take a silly one?), so claiming that Physics doesn't allow for consciousness also seems to be a bit unfounded. It's possible to make a physical system that can monitor what it's doing, so I see no reason why a brain couldn't do it too without violating physics -- and this is true even if I don't understand how it's doing it.
No, they couldn't. Did you forget that people who are working will be using their UBI to pay the UBI tax?
Who said there was a free lunch involved? For people who are receiving benefits (which are already funded) UBI replaces the benefits, and for people who are working you introduce a UBI tax (which people will use their UBI to pay for). Between that you've covered most of the funding requirements for a UBI.
After all I guess I'm a Special Snowflake and deserve to not be required to earn a living, right? Besides which being Gen-Y I won't live long enough to see the inevitable economic collapse UBI will cause so why should I give a damn? It's the Millennials' problem not mine, right?
You have this all backwards. The problem we're facing is that between robotics and AI, automation is very soon going to be capable of doing basically everything humans can do -- and it'll be able to do it 24/7 without needing breaks and without complaining. Forget "special snowflake not wanting to work", there just isn't going to be any work for humans to do, because the machines can do it cheaper. This is the thing that risks causing an economic collapse, because nobody is going to be able to buy anything if they have no income to buy it with.
As you say, you'll probably be dead before automation gets quite that ubiquitous. I guess that's why you're not seeing it as a serious issue.
Except not. People who work will be giving their UBI back in taxes, and people on benefits will have their benefits replaced by the UBI. Neither will end up with more money than before. If suppliers could increase prices for those groups of people then they'd already have done so.
I know it's popular to make witty comments around "people are idiots"... but a UBI solves the problem of people not being able to afford basic necessities.
It doesn't solve the problem of some people refusing to buy basic necessities, but that's a different and much smaller problem, and one that already exists without a UBI anyway. If indeed it's even a problem -- if people want to starve themselves or live in the streets, then it seems reasonable to let them. But nobody should be forced to.
You don't need to pick one, you can have both just fine. I'll also point out that you don't need XUL for XUL extensions (despite the terribly inaccurate name).
I see official 32-bit builds for the latest version for both Windows and Linux? Mac I'm not sure about; it may be some kind of combined package, or perhaps 32-bit Macs are no longer a thing.
That's not how I read that definition from Wikipedia. It says that the laws and forces of supply and demand must be free from government intervention, not that the government can't do any regulation whatsoever.
From a practical viewpoint, In the real world an unregulated market is just going to end up with monopolies (along with any other abusive behavior you can imagine -- what's to stop you from sending some thugs around to your competitors' customers to break some legs and encourage them to buy from you instead?). In other words, having no regulation means you won't have a free market, which in turn means that if you actually want a free market (or at least to even get close to it) then you need regulation.
Hopefully I don't need to point out that regulation can make a market less free as well as making it more free. You obviously need to be careful about the exact content of the regulation. But you just aren't going to get a free market by having no regulation at all.
And of course... you don't always want a free market. Using subsidies to push the market towards more efficient technology faster than it otherwise would move can be a good thing, depending on how it's handled. (Ideally the market would pick the more efficient tech by itself, but that requires it to take into account all of the external costs of the inefficient tech, and it won't do that without -- you guessed it -- regulation forcing it to do that.)
I'm saying that used cars aren't some fundamental need that everybody needs to go out and keep buying on a constant basis. Heck, you just described that as ridiculous yourself.
Normally, in the real world, only a small percentage of people are buying used cars at any given time. Most people who need a car already have one they can use, after all. If that jumped to 100% buying then it'd be a massive change in the demand for used cars, and that would obviously affect the prices (not by the amount of the UBI, mind; the supply would dry up very fast and prices would raise to match those of new cars, which would presumably also rise in price since supply of those would dry up too). But -- again, limiting to the real world -- that's irrelevant to a discussion about UBI because a UBI is for universal, basic goods, which I hope I've managed to explain that used cars aren't.
Now, if you were to make an analogy where used cars were a universal, basic need, then that would of course involve a world where everybody is buying used cars constantly (and that has welfare payments for used cars, since they are after all a basic need for everybody in this analogy). Those are the implications of "universal, basic need". And in that world, the percentage of people buying used cars would be close to 100%. In that world, introducing a UBI payment for used cars would have a very small impact on the number of people buying used cars, in much the same way that a UBI payment in our world bumps the number of people buying food and accommodation up only very slightly (because everybody is already buying those anyway).
But if this whole concept of an analogy is too complicated for you to follow, then go ahead and forget about it. Imagine we were talking about food instead. Basically everybody is already buying food, so a UBI isn't going to impact the demand much, and the prices are already as high as the market will bear, and most of the people receiving the UBI will either pay it back in taxes or will stop receiving their current welfare payments. So how will a UBI of $x dollars increase the price of food by $x?
It's not a very relevant analogy if it's not going to involve a universal, basic need, because UBIs are explicitly for universal, basic needs only. They aren't designed to let you live a life of luxury or anything, they're explicitly just for the bare necessities. "Universal". "Basic". These words are in the name because they mean things, not just because they sound pretty. A UBI isn't for things that 5% of people are buying, it's for things that >99% of people are buying.
If you've decided that used cars is a bad and unusable analogy, then that's fine. I'd be okay with an answer that explains using the cost of food or something else that we can both agree is universal in the real world.
That's in the real world. In the analogy, we're using used cars as an example of a universal, basic need, so in the analogy rich people do buy used cars. In the analogy, everybody buys used cars. That's what "universal" means.
Feel free to use housing or food instead if you can't cope with that. But really, if you had an explanation for how your original assertion could happen, you would've given it by now. I hope I've made the point that a UBI would not in fact raise prices by the amount that you claimed.
Okay, so come on then, answer the question. We have a good that's in universal demand (used cars in the analogy), and we give everyone 5k to buy their used cars with, but we tax back most or all of it from most people (or remove their existing welfare-for-used-cars payments). Demand doesn't budge much because it was already universal, and the price that the market can bear doesn't move much because most people don't have more money in the end than the did before.
How will the prices jump by 5k?