Also I did not point out the research about the habitable zone of the Universe,
The Drake equation is still mostly speculation, to be sure, but the actual evidence is thus: of the planets we've studied that retain an atmosphere and liquid water, 100% have developed intelligent life. One might use the absence of signs of other intelligent life to argue that we have other evidence that it's rare, sure. But you can't then turn around and use that to explain the Fermi paradox, as that's circular: "the evidence that it's rare is we haven't found it, and the explanation for why we haven't found it is that it's rare". Doesn't fly.
Then too, how far do we think a Von Neumann probe society would end up sending probes?
Good point. Same-galaxy only, or we might as well be looking for Dyson spheres and stellar engines. The galaxy is still a pretty big place though.
While true, we've probed a lot of the surface with various deep imaging technologies looking for oil and the like. Also, since the point of the idea is for probes to relay information back to whoever's interested, and to keep doing that for geological time scales (or at least a very long time), it seems likely they'd want to stay aware from atmosphere (but then, alien minds, so who really knows).
The "Great Filter" is a very poor answer, IMO. A Great Filter before where we are now is bad science on the level of thinking we're at the center of the universe: no, sorry, we're not special.
Could there be some future hurdle that many civilizations fail to jump? Sure. But there no reason to expect an alien civilization to think the way we do about anything, really. To propose that all civilizations would be blind to some danger is absurd.
Remember the uncertainty in the Drake equation is many orders of magnitude, and even so it doesn't much matter for the Fermi Paradox. A Great Filter that takes out 90% or even 99% of civilizations doesn't solve the paradox. It only take one civilization that built von Neumann probes.
Really? That's the first real good answer to the Fermi Paradox you've heard? How about this one:
There is no combination of elements and forces and energies to implement the space fantasies you've been fed as a kid.
It doesn't take FTL travel or other science-fantasy for evidence of other civilizations to be found. However, it does make it harder to look for them.
The best answers to the Fermi paradox are:
1) We haven't looked hard enough yet - heck, we've barely started looking in our own system
2) While it might in the distant future be possible to expand to new star systems, the number of reachable systems cannot grow exponentially. From what we've seen, population either grows exponentially, or stops growing.
I'm a bit biased towards 1. While civilizations might not grow to span many systems, you'd think one civilization would send out von Neumann probes, just as a scientific legacy if nothing else. So where are they? Heck, there could be one on the Moon and we could still be missing it, and certainly anywhere else we've barely looked.
An approach that inherently heat-limits charging (rather than discharge) would seem to be the issue at hand. And I'd love to see it.
I'd also love to see something better for home energy storage, where energy density is less of an issue, and safety more important still. Though I guess if you're looking at applications competing with propane tanks, you just need to beat that, but something safe to stick in the wall of the house would be better - I'm certainly dubious about the Tesla battery given how complex and fragile the whole Li-Ion approach is.
If you care about audio quality you use a USB DAC+Headphone amp, and a real pair of wired headphones.
If you care about convenience, there were plenty of BT headphones before, this just removes the option for people who find wires more convenient than fiddling with headphone batteries.
Speaking of DACs, can anyone recommend a good USB => line level DAC, instead of a headphone amp? I want something to hook speakers to rather than headphones, and paying for a headphone amp just to get the DAC seems wasteful.
Your sarcasm aside, we're not talking about minimum wage jobs here. Unless you're still recovering from a previous disaster, if you've been working 2 years or more at a "real job", you should have 6 months expenses in savings. Do you? It's not about "stupid", it's about our failure as society to teach the most basic survival skills.
We're not hunting buffalo and avoiding wolves here. If we were, not teaching young adults how to do those things would be a failure. We're trying to live independently in a modern society. And the most basic survival skill in such a society is to have savings instead of debt, for when shit inevitable happens.
Everyone should know that. Everyone with a "real job" should have that. Where did we go wrong?
When I was new to this industry, I asked everyone I worked with who was over 50 why they still needed to work for a living. A few didn't, they just really liked their projects. The rest answered "let me tell you about my divorce". I learned that lesson early, thank goodness.
Maybe so, but that's offtopic here. These jobs are going overseas. That's the thing: I can compete with H1-Bs, they have the same cost of living I do. But the same guys living in India? Not so much.
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
Exactly! So have that money in the bank, and wait on those kids until you're financially stable. These are the most basic of life lessons. Make some minimal effort to plan you life, especially to plan for the unexpected disasters. Almost everyone will have one, and it's on you to be ready for the inevitable.
If you don't have 6 months cost-of-living saved up, and you've been working a professional job for more than a couple years, that's your fault (unless you've had a recent disaster). If you don't keep enough savings in the bank to walk off a job if the terms of that job become unreasonable, you've made yourself an indentured servant. The only people with a valid excuse to stay and train their replacement (except maliciously) are those still recovering from a different tragedy that cut down that 6 months savings. We're not talking about a minimum-wage job here.
It really sucks that we don't teach the basics of money and savings in school, and people are left to figure it out on their own - I was an idiot until my late 20s. Take every opportunity to learn about how to build financial independence. It's not all-or-nothing, and every step is a good one. For a start, when you get that first real job, keep living like a student until you've got your disaster fund built.
The average bank teller gets $10/hour, thats middle class?
Its a social, not economic distinction. My brother is an airplane pilot. Theoretically, he could make a couple hundred k in the last few years of his career. Still a working-class job. Jobs that involve factors such as physical skill, physical risk, manual labor of any sort, getting your hands literally dirty, or unions are generally working-class. (That's also why dentists are seen as less classy than doctors, despite it being a better-paying job on average after modern malpractice insurance costs - too many signs of a working-class job associated with it.)
America has a very small upper class (most Americans confuse high-income upper middle class jobs with the upper class). If anyone still living in your family worked for a living, you're not upper class. Most of the upper class is living on very modest trusts/allowances, as the wealth tends to stay concentrated, though they may live quite nicely thanks to stuff owned by someone else.
So you're theory is that people go into IT or retail management instead of HVAC work due to a learning disability? You know, you may be on to something there. Certainly the schools could do better in this area.
America doesn't have a "lower class". We have a "middle class" and a "working class". There's a lot of overlap in the pay, the distinction is mostly social, not economic. Banking teller is a middle-class job.
This class distinction is why so few people are willing to enter the skilled trades, despite a lot of advantages to that in our increasingly-outsourced world.
No idea where you're getting this crazy 150%-200% from
The federal budget is $13000 per person per year. Where would you set the UBI? Then add at least 25% for healthcare (more if you're providing for more than Medicare), and at least 10% for roads and courts and whatnot.
If we collected ALL of the taxes that are rightfully owed to the public, we would have way more than enough to fund UBI
Important rule for life: don't spent today what you think you're rightfully owed. Spend today what you're making today, and work on that other thing in parallel.
The US pays for most of the world's medical research. We do have some waste, of course mostly around the ridiculous situation where N insurance companies each have their own claim forms, often with different definitions of technical terms. Estimates of this cost vary, but it seems to be around 25% of medical costs. You know, there's a place where the government could step in wholly within it's legitimate role of standardizing trade.
Medicare does much better, but they have a fraud cost which is about the same as their reduction in paperwork costs. That might be easier to deal with if everyone was on Medicare, though. The real problem with Medicare right now is: it doesn't cover enough, and most seniors need to pay for supplemental plans to get affordable care. However, if you add in the cost of those plans, I can totally believe we provide universal (really, single-payer) care to the elderly for similar costs, and everyone else is a lot cheaper than the elderly.
But keep in mind that Medicare is massively underfunded for the coming demographics shift as the Boomers retire - it's 2x the problem as the SS underfunding.
You have the constitutionally-protected right against searches by the government without a warrant. There's no "except on private property" there. There's no "unless we're scared" there. The TSA is wholly unconstitutional, always has been, where private contractors doing the same thing were OK. Searches to enter a courthouse are wholly unconstitutional.
But no one cares any more. We even get trolls like this asshole arguing it's a good thing.
We're nearly there IMO, but not there yet. We're just seeing the start of the demos rising to take the kratos. Trump ousted the billionaire-supported candidates on the right (which sort-of counts, for all he's one of the billionaires, he's not in that social crowd). Bernie failed on the left, though he had some play. Brexit was approved by the people of Britain. Right-wing parties are on the rise across Europe, as they're the only ones actually listening to the people, instead of calling them dumb racists. It's never pretty when the people rise up, but were on the cusp of it, and no reason to think it will take a violent shape here, beyond a few protests.
But that's the problem in front of us. Corruption festers where the government has disdain for the people, and the "intellectuals" have disdain for real-world concerns. But it's meta-stable at best, and getting harder and harder shoves. Until we get a reset on the corruption, we're not fixing anything piecemeal (hopefully we can do it without an assassinated president this time, though I do think Trump would have been).
Sure, just don't let the government that makes the actual detailed tax law be corrupted by the most rich and powerful people. I can't think of a single time in history that has happened, except for brief interludes when revolutions have killed off the rich, and only until the newly powerful became rich. Since I don't think political violence has any place in democracy, I'm not liking that approach.
But, sure, yeah, just handwave away human nature and the lessons of history, and all sorts of Utopias could work. No argument there.
Basic Income would actually simplify the tax code.
Basic income in the US is pretty much a fantasy to begin with, but simplifying the tax code? I'll believe that after we fix spelling and the calendar, and make electrons positive.
Another thing not counted are productivity gains from people not wanting to work not being in the workforce, standing in the way
I don't get how fewer people working boosts the GDP. Sure, it might help productivity, but a net gain (meaning more tax revenue)? I don't see it.
Since you only tax what people earn, not the UBI, there does not need to be any minimum wage, the UBI covers it.
You couldn't be more wrong. Federal service union worker income is a contractual multiple of minimum wage, That's the only reason minimum wage is ever taken seriously as a political topic - it's a pay raise for a very large union. No one buying influence actually cares about the poor people earning minimum wage, that's just theater. It's all about the wages for one big union. UBI will be twisted into a reason to raise the min wage even further, somehow.
Also, with the UBI you are no longer absolutely tied to population center to be near job. You can have population spread much more and lower the cost of living, by reducing scarcity of living area due to overpopulation of certain places.
The dynamic is mostly the reverse these days. People like living in dense city centers. They want drunken nightlife within staggering distance. The jobs are going where the people are these days, as least for in-demand skilled work (and all the service jobs attached to those jobs). People are crazy.
AH, so you want a different sort of welfare - basically what was pushed as "negative income tax" mumbly years ago when I was young. While I've always like the idea, it's a very hard sell as a replacement for all other programs.
Meanwhile, isn't Finland actually just mailing everyone a check for X? Or am I confusing that with some different Scandi plan?
We've tried double taxes before in the past 100 years. Heck, we've tried just about everything imaginable. But under every plan we've never sustained federal revenue above 20% of GDP. That's about 10% more than we get now.
It's also worth pointing out that the "more progressive" you make taxes, the more the federal budget swings with the economy. For the middle class, a severe recession means 10% unemployment rather then 5%. That's a material difference in tax revenue, but doesn't cause the sort of eye-watering deficits we had recently. The upper 1% see major swings in income in recessions, as much more of their income comes from investment gains, and you don't really have those during a market crash. Sure, the "richest 100 families" may do OK, but good luck taxing them - they'll just take their income in Ireland or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Also I did not point out the research about the habitable zone of the Universe,
The Drake equation is still mostly speculation, to be sure, but the actual evidence is thus: of the planets we've studied that retain an atmosphere and liquid water, 100% have developed intelligent life. One might use the absence of signs of other intelligent life to argue that we have other evidence that it's rare, sure. But you can't then turn around and use that to explain the Fermi paradox, as that's circular: "the evidence that it's rare is we haven't found it, and the explanation for why we haven't found it is that it's rare". Doesn't fly.
Then too, how far do we think a Von Neumann probe society would end up sending probes?
Good point. Same-galaxy only, or we might as well be looking for Dyson spheres and stellar engines. The galaxy is still a pretty big place though.
While true, we've probed a lot of the surface with various deep imaging technologies looking for oil and the like. Also, since the point of the idea is for probes to relay information back to whoever's interested, and to keep doing that for geological time scales (or at least a very long time), it seems likely they'd want to stay aware from atmosphere (but then, alien minds, so who really knows).
The "Great Filter" is a very poor answer, IMO. A Great Filter before where we are now is bad science on the level of thinking we're at the center of the universe: no, sorry, we're not special.
Could there be some future hurdle that many civilizations fail to jump? Sure. But there no reason to expect an alien civilization to think the way we do about anything, really. To propose that all civilizations would be blind to some danger is absurd.
Remember the uncertainty in the Drake equation is many orders of magnitude, and even so it doesn't much matter for the Fermi Paradox. A Great Filter that takes out 90% or even 99% of civilizations doesn't solve the paradox. It only take one civilization that built von Neumann probes.
Really? That's the first real good answer to the Fermi Paradox you've heard? How about this one:
There is no combination of elements and forces and energies to implement the space fantasies you've been fed as a kid.
It doesn't take FTL travel or other science-fantasy for evidence of other civilizations to be found. However, it does make it harder to look for them.
The best answers to the Fermi paradox are:
1) We haven't looked hard enough yet - heck, we've barely started looking in our own system
2) While it might in the distant future be possible to expand to new star systems, the number of reachable systems cannot grow exponentially. From what we've seen, population either grows exponentially, or stops growing.
I'm a bit biased towards 1. While civilizations might not grow to span many systems, you'd think one civilization would send out von Neumann probes, just as a scientific legacy if nothing else. So where are they? Heck, there could be one on the Moon and we could still be missing it, and certainly anywhere else we've barely looked.
An approach that inherently heat-limits charging (rather than discharge) would seem to be the issue at hand. And I'd love to see it.
I'd also love to see something better for home energy storage, where energy density is less of an issue, and safety more important still. Though I guess if you're looking at applications competing with propane tanks, you just need to beat that, but something safe to stick in the wall of the house would be better - I'm certainly dubious about the Tesla battery given how complex and fragile the whole Li-Ion approach is.
If you care about audio quality you use a USB DAC+Headphone amp, and a real pair of wired headphones.
If you care about convenience, there were plenty of BT headphones before, this just removes the option for people who find wires more convenient than fiddling with headphone batteries.
Speaking of DACs, can anyone recommend a good USB => line level DAC, instead of a headphone amp? I want something to hook speakers to rather than headphones, and paying for a headphone amp just to get the DAC seems wasteful.
Your sarcasm aside, we're not talking about minimum wage jobs here. Unless you're still recovering from a previous disaster, if you've been working 2 years or more at a "real job", you should have 6 months expenses in savings. Do you? It's not about "stupid", it's about our failure as society to teach the most basic survival skills.
We're not hunting buffalo and avoiding wolves here. If we were, not teaching young adults how to do those things would be a failure. We're trying to live independently in a modern society. And the most basic survival skill in such a society is to have savings instead of debt, for when shit inevitable happens.
Everyone should know that. Everyone with a "real job" should have that. Where did we go wrong?
My "disasters" were two ex-wives
When I was new to this industry, I asked everyone I worked with who was over 50 why they still needed to work for a living. A few didn't, they just really liked their projects. The rest answered "let me tell you about my divorce". I learned that lesson early, thank goodness.
Maybe so, but that's offtopic here. These jobs are going overseas. That's the thing: I can compete with H1-Bs, they have the same cost of living I do. But the same guys living in India? Not so much.
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
Exactly! So have that money in the bank, and wait on those kids until you're financially stable. These are the most basic of life lessons. Make some minimal effort to plan you life, especially to plan for the unexpected disasters. Almost everyone will have one, and it's on you to be ready for the inevitable.
If you don't have 6 months cost-of-living saved up, and you've been working a professional job for more than a couple years, that's your fault (unless you've had a recent disaster). If you don't keep enough savings in the bank to walk off a job if the terms of that job become unreasonable, you've made yourself an indentured servant. The only people with a valid excuse to stay and train their replacement (except maliciously) are those still recovering from a different tragedy that cut down that 6 months savings. We're not talking about a minimum-wage job here.
It really sucks that we don't teach the basics of money and savings in school, and people are left to figure it out on their own - I was an idiot until my late 20s. Take every opportunity to learn about how to build financial independence. It's not all-or-nothing, and every step is a good one. For a start, when you get that first real job, keep living like a student until you've got your disaster fund built.
The average bank teller gets $10/hour, thats middle class?
Its a social, not economic distinction. My brother is an airplane pilot. Theoretically, he could make a couple hundred k in the last few years of his career. Still a working-class job. Jobs that involve factors such as physical skill, physical risk, manual labor of any sort, getting your hands literally dirty, or unions are generally working-class. (That's also why dentists are seen as less classy than doctors, despite it being a better-paying job on average after modern malpractice insurance costs - too many signs of a working-class job associated with it.)
America has a very small upper class (most Americans confuse high-income upper middle class jobs with the upper class). If anyone still living in your family worked for a living, you're not upper class. Most of the upper class is living on very modest trusts/allowances, as the wealth tends to stay concentrated, though they may live quite nicely thanks to stuff owned by someone else.
So you're theory is that people go into IT or retail management instead of HVAC work due to a learning disability? You know, you may be on to something there. Certainly the schools could do better in this area.
They're like herpes: they come back after a while.
America doesn't have a "lower class". We have a "middle class" and a "working class". There's a lot of overlap in the pay, the distinction is mostly social, not economic. Banking teller is a middle-class job.
This class distinction is why so few people are willing to enter the skilled trades, despite a lot of advantages to that in our increasingly-outsourced world.
It's a medical school - they don't have a Computer Science department.
No idea where you're getting this crazy 150%-200% from
The federal budget is $13000 per person per year. Where would you set the UBI? Then add at least 25% for healthcare (more if you're providing for more than Medicare), and at least 10% for roads and courts and whatnot.
If we collected ALL of the taxes that are rightfully owed to the public, we would have way more than enough to fund UBI
Important rule for life: don't spent today what you think you're rightfully owed. Spend today what you're making today, and work on that other thing in parallel.
The US pays for most of the world's medical research. We do have some waste, of course mostly around the ridiculous situation where N insurance companies each have their own claim forms, often with different definitions of technical terms. Estimates of this cost vary, but it seems to be around 25% of medical costs. You know, there's a place where the government could step in wholly within it's legitimate role of standardizing trade.
Medicare does much better, but they have a fraud cost which is about the same as their reduction in paperwork costs. That might be easier to deal with if everyone was on Medicare, though. The real problem with Medicare right now is: it doesn't cover enough, and most seniors need to pay for supplemental plans to get affordable care. However, if you add in the cost of those plans, I can totally believe we provide universal (really, single-payer) care to the elderly for similar costs, and everyone else is a lot cheaper than the elderly.
But keep in mind that Medicare is massively underfunded for the coming demographics shift as the Boomers retire - it's 2x the problem as the SS underfunding.
You have the constitutionally-protected right against searches by the government without a warrant. There's no "except on private property" there. There's no "unless we're scared" there. The TSA is wholly unconstitutional, always has been, where private contractors doing the same thing were OK. Searches to enter a courthouse are wholly unconstitutional.
But no one cares any more. We even get trolls like this asshole arguing it's a good thing.
Ah, so Finland is just mailing everyone a check for X then. Will be an interesting experiment.
We're nearly there IMO, but not there yet. We're just seeing the start of the demos rising to take the kratos. Trump ousted the billionaire-supported candidates on the right (which sort-of counts, for all he's one of the billionaires, he's not in that social crowd). Bernie failed on the left, though he had some play. Brexit was approved by the people of Britain. Right-wing parties are on the rise across Europe, as they're the only ones actually listening to the people, instead of calling them dumb racists. It's never pretty when the people rise up, but were on the cusp of it, and no reason to think it will take a violent shape here, beyond a few protests.
But that's the problem in front of us. Corruption festers where the government has disdain for the people, and the "intellectuals" have disdain for real-world concerns. But it's meta-stable at best, and getting harder and harder shoves. Until we get a reset on the corruption, we're not fixing anything piecemeal (hopefully we can do it without an assassinated president this time, though I do think Trump would have been).
Sure, just don't let the government that makes the actual detailed tax law be corrupted by the most rich and powerful people. I can't think of a single time in history that has happened, except for brief interludes when revolutions have killed off the rich, and only until the newly powerful became rich. Since I don't think political violence has any place in democracy, I'm not liking that approach.
But, sure, yeah, just handwave away human nature and the lessons of history, and all sorts of Utopias could work. No argument there.
Basic Income would actually simplify the tax code.
Basic income in the US is pretty much a fantasy to begin with, but simplifying the tax code? I'll believe that after we fix spelling and the calendar, and make electrons positive.
Another thing not counted are productivity gains from people not wanting to work not being in the workforce, standing in the way
I don't get how fewer people working boosts the GDP. Sure, it might help productivity, but a net gain (meaning more tax revenue)? I don't see it.
Since you only tax what people earn, not the UBI, there does not need to be any minimum wage, the UBI covers it.
You couldn't be more wrong. Federal service union worker income is a contractual multiple of minimum wage, That's the only reason minimum wage is ever taken seriously as a political topic - it's a pay raise for a very large union. No one buying influence actually cares about the poor people earning minimum wage, that's just theater. It's all about the wages for one big union. UBI will be twisted into a reason to raise the min wage even further, somehow.
Also, with the UBI you are no longer absolutely tied to population center to be near job. You can have population spread much more and lower the cost of living, by reducing scarcity of living area due to overpopulation of certain places.
The dynamic is mostly the reverse these days. People like living in dense city centers. They want drunken nightlife within staggering distance. The jobs are going where the people are these days, as least for in-demand skilled work (and all the service jobs attached to those jobs). People are crazy.
AH, so you want a different sort of welfare - basically what was pushed as "negative income tax" mumbly years ago when I was young. While I've always like the idea, it's a very hard sell as a replacement for all other programs.
Meanwhile, isn't Finland actually just mailing everyone a check for X? Or am I confusing that with some different Scandi plan?
We've tried double taxes before in the past 100 years. Heck, we've tried just about everything imaginable. But under every plan we've never sustained federal revenue above 20% of GDP. That's about 10% more than we get now.
It's also worth pointing out that the "more progressive" you make taxes, the more the federal budget swings with the economy. For the middle class, a severe recession means 10% unemployment rather then 5%. That's a material difference in tax revenue, but doesn't cause the sort of eye-watering deficits we had recently. The upper 1% see major swings in income in recessions, as much more of their income comes from investment gains, and you don't really have those during a market crash. Sure, the "richest 100 families" may do OK, but good luck taxing them - they'll just take their income in Ireland or whatever.