Do you see the difference between a book where people are happy in the setting, and a book about people being happy? The former is the setting for something dramatic, the latter implies lack of any drama.
Or, like I actually said, I like the show where people are color-blind, not the show inspired by progressive ideology (the Post-Modernist tenet that identity groups are the most important thing). The crew does struggle a bit with having Vulcan officer, not entirely post-species, but they are mostly OK with it.
Oh, which one of his stories was about diving people into groups according to identity politics, then having those factions kill each other until tens of millions are dead? I don't remember any Post-Modernist stories, but then I've only read about half his stuff.
Also, not everything with which you disagree is "trolling".
True, but everything PopeRatzo posts is trolling.
The novels were most certainly not about how "everyone was happy".
Nor is that what I said. These novels were mostly "here's the neat future society, then this thing happend, but the hero saved the world" or "things were rough, but then these things happened, and then people were happy in this neat society". Not all, of course, ad Dick stories were mostly "WTF did I just read", but most.
The best take on this I've ever read was James Hogan's The Two Faces of Tomorrow. Before giving control over everything important to an AI, humans want to make sure they can shut it down if they have to. So the put it in a space station, give it total control over everything, deliberately make it hostile to us, then send in a special forces team to shut it down.
The book has an ending I did not see coming, and would make a great movie come to think of it.
I think the "SJW" label has passed it's relevance, but segregation is alive and well in US universities today, with social events where members of a specific race or gender are banned, calls for singe-race housing (so people will feel "safe"), all the worst echoes of the 50s. Brought to you by university progressives, of course.
Let's abandon "SJW" as a label, and just go directly to "Post-Modernists". Objectively the most evil philosophy ever created by mankind (nothing else even comes close to the body count of Stalin and Mao). Let's not hide it behind concealing labels.
Yeah, Seagate certainly did not cover themselves with glory here. I'm disappointed by how far WD has fallen, but the writing was on the wall with the last couple years' reports. Glad I read those and moved to HGST.
Sure, SF is often used for social commentary, because you can get away with stuff you can't point out directly. But that only works when it's not the norm. The Golden Age of SF was much more about proposing all sorts of ways man might live in the future, including many that were the author's idea of utopia, but the point was people were happy in the setting, outside of whatever the drama of the book was. Heinlein was rare in showing how silly some of these ideas were when taken to the extreme, but even then his books were never about how miserable everyone was.
No one's ever made a high-budget version of any of Heinlein's books (let's not pretend Starship Troopers shared anything but the name), even the "Big 3".
I don't think today's Hollywood could make Moon either - a working (ish) libertarian society? Never. But why not a Stranger movie. Even chopped down to fit in a couple hours, there's some good stuff there to work with. But, sadly, the book has very few explosions, and I think we're stuck with "Mostly Explosions V, This Time it's Personal" for a while now, until the studios abandon the theaters (no one goes to see movies except for action special effects these days).
Interstellar was... not good IMO. Sure, the visual were nice, but that ending? Blarg. Make a SF show, or make a fantasy show where love literally conquers all, but don't mix them.
'Social justice' is an amplification of the bigotry of the past. The leftists pushing 'social justice' are the ones who are fixated on classifying people into extremely fine-grained groupings based on physical traits or other attributes. They have even managed to take it to a level never seen in the past, continually introducing new ways of dividing people into smaller and smaller groups. The people who are supposedly decrying things like racism, sexism, prejudice, and intolerance often end up being the ones who engage in such behaviors the most egregiously.
STTOS and STTNG were great at showing us a different path. A way of living where, simply, no one cared about race - at least among Earthlings. People were judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. To me, that's part of the appeal of good SF - it presents a world where we're just beyond that shit, and have different problems.
Contrast that with STD. The only way STD could be redeemed as Star Trek is if it were revealed the show was set in the mirror universe (at which point it would become the coolest "twist" ever).
In general I've just about had it with "Dark Version of Thing from your Childhood". Let's have something inspiring - what SF used to be!
Now, as soon as rent and mortgage payments come down to 3rd world standards (not to mention food and drug prices) that might matter.
You live better than almost everyone who has ever lived. You should try to appreciate that, and maybe be a little more generous given your position.
About the two questions you asked: advances in many areas are funded by the rich doing just that. Car technology e.g. comes down from luxury cars that cost twice what they need to. There's a lot of medical technology that only the rich can afford this year, but in 20 years will be common. Without a health care system that allows for that, innovation will slow to a crawl (you'll still have the occasional Dr DeBakey, but guys like him are vanishingly rare).
If you make $30k/year, you're a 1%-er by world standards. The median family income in the US is amazing in the broader view. It's good to sometimes take the broader view, it helps your perspective.
No, you'll stay outside with access to the "controls". You'll use software to do stuff, and the software will say you did stuff. I spent years keeping "the cloud" running, and it's guesswork at the best of times. Malicious software that's smarter than me, messing with my abstraction layers? I wouldn't have a clue, wouldn't stand a chance.
Somebody has to pay for the research. Should we pay the same per dose as Uganda? No, I don't think we should. Maybe it's not the most fair pricing for us, but it's not very far off.
America has higher prices mostly because we pay for most of the world's medical research. Sure, there's some overhead from insurance companies (mostly from the lack of standardized claims reporting - the government should fix that), but that's only one factor. Higher drug prices (in the private sector) is a big part of that: it pays to acquire the pharma startups that do the actual research (much like the big tech companies rarely invent anything, but they buy tech startups for crazy amounts, which in turn funds most of the actual advances in our field).
Yes, but my point is that's BS. Once we have human-level intelligence in software, by any mechanism, it will very soon after take over everything and be in charge, with any humans still living being kept as pets (possibly being kept quite unaware of the now-superhuman intelligences).
You have to use machine learning to train an algorithm at great expense (with clouds!) to compare two texts, until it does nearly as good a job as diff. Only then is it AI. AI isn't something any run-of-the-mill dev can do, after all, that's why it costs so much.
Slashdot Mirror
So, outsourcing all over again. Seems about right.
Do you see the difference between a book where people are happy in the setting, and a book about people being happy? The former is the setting for something dramatic, the latter implies lack of any drama.
Their low-end consumer drives are crap, but they used to make great drives if you got the "enterprise" ones with the 5 year warranty.
Many Americans simply cannot afford to pay what you want them to for healthcare.
Correct. Just like luxury cars. My point is that "luxury health care" funds innovation, and that's the most important thing in the long run.
Sorry, I don't believe Post-Modernist and Fascist are the only options. I prefer the American ideal to either.
Or, like I actually said, I like the show where people are color-blind, not the show inspired by progressive ideology (the Post-Modernist tenet that identity groups are the most important thing). The crew does struggle a bit with having Vulcan officer, not entirely post-species, but they are mostly OK with it.
Oh, which one of his stories was about diving people into groups according to identity politics, then having those factions kill each other until tens of millions are dead? I don't remember any Post-Modernist stories, but then I've only read about half his stuff.
Also, not everything with which you disagree is "trolling".
True, but everything PopeRatzo posts is trolling.
The novels were most certainly not about how "everyone was happy".
Nor is that what I said. These novels were mostly "here's the neat future society, then this thing happend, but the hero saved the world" or "things were rough, but then these things happened, and then people were happy in this neat society". Not all, of course, ad Dick stories were mostly "WTF did I just read", but most.
I'd watch that movie!
The best take on this I've ever read was James Hogan's The Two Faces of Tomorrow. Before giving control over everything important to an AI, humans want to make sure they can shut it down if they have to. So the put it in a space station, give it total control over everything, deliberately make it hostile to us, then send in a special forces team to shut it down.
The book has an ending I did not see coming, and would make a great movie come to think of it.
Fuck me I agree completely with serviscope_minor here. And he said it better than I did. The shame, the shame.
I think the "SJW" label has passed it's relevance, but segregation is alive and well in US universities today, with social events where members of a specific race or gender are banned, calls for singe-race housing (so people will feel "safe"), all the worst echoes of the 50s. Brought to you by university progressives, of course.
Let's abandon "SJW" as a label, and just go directly to "Post-Modernists". Objectively the most evil philosophy ever created by mankind (nothing else even comes close to the body count of Stalin and Mao). Let's not hide it behind concealing labels.
Yeah, Seagate certainly did not cover themselves with glory here. I'm disappointed by how far WD has fallen, but the writing was on the wall with the last couple years' reports. Glad I read those and moved to HGST.
Oh, troll elsewhere.
Sure, SF is often used for social commentary, because you can get away with stuff you can't point out directly. But that only works when it's not the norm. The Golden Age of SF was much more about proposing all sorts of ways man might live in the future, including many that were the author's idea of utopia, but the point was people were happy in the setting, outside of whatever the drama of the book was. Heinlein was rare in showing how silly some of these ideas were when taken to the extreme, but even then his books were never about how miserable everyone was.
No one's ever made a high-budget version of any of Heinlein's books (let's not pretend Starship Troopers shared anything but the name), even the "Big 3".
I don't think today's Hollywood could make Moon either - a working (ish) libertarian society? Never. But why not a Stranger movie. Even chopped down to fit in a couple hours, there's some good stuff there to work with. But, sadly, the book has very few explosions, and I think we're stuck with "Mostly Explosions V, This Time it's Personal" for a while now, until the studios abandon the theaters (no one goes to see movies except for action special effects these days).
Interstellar was ... not good IMO. Sure, the visual were nice, but that ending? Blarg. Make a SF show, or make a fantasy show where love literally conquers all, but don't mix them.
'Social justice' is an amplification of the bigotry of the past. The leftists pushing 'social justice' are the ones who are fixated on classifying people into extremely fine-grained groupings based on physical traits or other attributes. They have even managed to take it to a level never seen in the past, continually introducing new ways of dividing people into smaller and smaller groups. The people who are supposedly decrying things like racism, sexism, prejudice, and intolerance often end up being the ones who engage in such behaviors the most egregiously.
STTOS and STTNG were great at showing us a different path. A way of living where, simply, no one cared about race - at least among Earthlings. People were judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. To me, that's part of the appeal of good SF - it presents a world where we're just beyond that shit, and have different problems.
Contrast that with STD. The only way STD could be redeemed as Star Trek is if it were revealed the show was set in the mirror universe (at which point it would become the coolest "twist" ever).
In general I've just about had it with "Dark Version of Thing from your Childhood". Let's have something inspiring - what SF used to be!
Now, as soon as rent and mortgage payments come down to 3rd world standards (not to mention food and drug prices) that might matter.
You live better than almost everyone who has ever lived. You should try to appreciate that, and maybe be a little more generous given your position.
About the two questions you asked: advances in many areas are funded by the rich doing just that. Car technology e.g. comes down from luxury cars that cost twice what they need to. There's a lot of medical technology that only the rich can afford this year, but in 20 years will be common. Without a health care system that allows for that, innovation will slow to a crawl (you'll still have the occasional Dr DeBakey, but guys like him are vanishingly rare).
You mean some Americans are wealthy.
If you make $30k/year, you're a 1%-er by world standards. The median family income in the US is amazing in the broader view. It's good to sometimes take the broader view, it helps your perspective.
Yeah, but that's only because you missed the starting gun, no one told you when to run.
No, you'll stay outside with access to the "controls". You'll use software to do stuff, and the software will say you did stuff. I spent years keeping "the cloud" running, and it's guesswork at the best of times. Malicious software that's smarter than me, messing with my abstraction layers? I wouldn't have a clue, wouldn't stand a chance.
Somebody has to pay for the research. Should we pay the same per dose as Uganda? No, I don't think we should. Maybe it's not the most fair pricing for us, but it's not very far off.
I'd rather have health care advance quickly, even if we have to pay more. America is a wealthy nation, after all.
America has higher prices mostly because we pay for most of the world's medical research. Sure, there's some overhead from insurance companies (mostly from the lack of standardized claims reporting - the government should fix that), but that's only one factor. Higher drug prices (in the private sector) is a big part of that: it pays to acquire the pharma startups that do the actual research (much like the big tech companies rarely invent anything, but they buy tech startups for crazy amounts, which in turn funds most of the actual advances in our field).
Yes, but my point is that's BS. Once we have human-level intelligence in software, by any mechanism, it will very soon after take over everything and be in charge, with any humans still living being kept as pets (possibly being kept quite unaware of the now-superhuman intelligences).
You can't just use "diff" and call it AI.
You have to use machine learning to train an algorithm at great expense (with clouds!) to compare two texts, until it does nearly as good a job as diff. Only then is it AI. AI isn't something any run-of-the-mill dev can do, after all, that's why it costs so much.