This supreme court would probably agreed with you. In 2002, they struck down a ban of virtual child porn (from the NYT:)
"Affirming that free speech principles apply with full force in the computer age, the Supreme Court today struck down provisions of a federal law that made it a crime to create, distribute or possess ''virtual'' child pornography that used computer images or young adults rather than actual children.
The law, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, ''prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the court's latest decision upholding First Amendment protections online."
I had originally thought of picking the numbers with a tied UBI (like % of GDP) and a median-based percentage: it keeps the system voter-neutral under somewhat idealistic assumptions. Mean-based does seem to have some nicer features.
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
One other way it could work is to not even have the sliding scale: everyone gets $30,000 and pays a flat X% tax on all additional income. Set X to the number of your choice, e.g. at 40%, the person earning $75K/yr is at the neutral point, everyone earning less sees some benefit, everyone earning more funds the program to some extent. It's actually not a terrible tax system: it's just two numbers, the BI and X%, and a dollar earned is worth the same to everyone in terms of money kept.
Being blocked from doing small fixes by Sarbanes-Oxley and management. But really Sarbanes Oxley.
Prior to SOX, I could see a problem- fix it, refactor the code.. etc. or see a minor improvement- implement it, refactor the code, etc.
After SOX, I had to run everything thru the team lead who had to justify it to the manager who had to justify to the director who had to justify it to the senior director who had to justify it to the Department head, who had to justify it (in a group of other changes) to the CIO.
SOX dictates policy, not process. Nothing in SOX requires the process your company has chosen to implement. SOX basically says: do whatever the fuck you want, but it had better be understandable and sane; if you fail at that, but claim you are compliant, we can jail your senior management.
If you are lucky enough to be working for a good company, you hardly notice SOX. If your company sucks, well, senior management doesn't want to get jailed, so they make a process of hierarchical justifications that is understandable, sane, and stupid: they keep their jobs and stay out of jail.
Most college degrees show that you are basically employable in a white-collar or pink-collar job entry-level job paying $40K/year or so: you have proven you can show up, follow simple instructions, get work done on time, understand written material, write a page of text that sort of makes sense, do basic arithmetic, etc.
That's about it for 99% of college graduates. Congrats, you get to sit in a chair at work, and we know you can do the simple job we need filled. Hell, do well, and we'll even promote you to where you can earn more and actually add more value.
You went to MIT or did STEM? Great, we figure you are smart, hard-working, and have an analytical mind. That's worth $80K. We really don't care what you majored in or what courses you took. It's still a fucking entry-level job.
20 year old autodidact? Sorry, just too much uncertainty. Come back when you have a track record or a Github repository that we like.
The H1-B program is a mess, but when I look around my office:
1. There is a small group of H1-Bs who are actually competent and probably help keeping us profitable 2. There is a bunch of H1-Bs who are useless, underpaid fucks who make the codebase worse 3. There a small group of citizen programmers who are actually competent and probably help keeping us profitable 4. There is a bunch of citizen programmers who are useless, overpaid fucks who make the codebase worse
Revoking for citizenship of group 4 seems the best plan. Then we can work on group 2.
I really don't understand posters who can understand an amortization schedule, even understand how rates change over time, and then just add dollar numbers (e.g. a dollar today plus and a dollar payable in 30 years) to make a big, bad number that is supposed to make sense.
If the universe is a simulation then one can speculate on the purpose of the simulation. A good bet, based on our own world, would be it's a role playing game. If so the "players" are presumably the Elites in the game.
Ah, so we just need to look for player characters who picked a generic white-male avatar, blundered around because they picked "easy mode," but still wound up doing and completing some of the fun missions and sidequests in the game. For example:
1. Started life as a player character with extra gold 2. Flew fighter planes 3. Managed a baseball team 4. Caught fish in the "pond on own private ranch" cliche 5. Became president of USA. Bonus for second term election.
Hmm, someone like that would be unbelievable and stick out like a sore thumb.
It's not the crime, it's the coverup. This is the kind of crap that gets people sent to jail.
It's not about the science, it's about what Exxon did:
If their internal research showed one thing, but they publicly declared something something opposite, that's pretty bad, but probably not criminal. If they testified in a court that they believed the opposite factoids, and didn't mention the internal research, that's really bad, but if the opposing lawyers didn't find the right person to testify (like someone at Exxon who knew about the research,) they are probably still ok. If they set up secret email accounts for senior executives, and then didn't provide the emails from those accounts to the opposing lawyers during the discovery process, then that's just fraud on the court. It's like your wife "forgetting" to mention her secret bank account in the Cayman Islands during your divorce trial. Seriously, WTF?
There's a reason spacecraft are about as rigid as a tin can and submarines are built out of many tonnes of steel and titanium, and it's that one has to deal with some pressure and the other... doesn't.
Actually, the reason is a bit different: round things with excess pressure on the inside respond by getting more round and keeping their shape (think latex balloons being inflated;) round things with excess pressure on the outside respond by getting more oval/ flattish and losing their shape
So, for negative pressure things, you have to design them to avoid collapse, not true for positive pressure things. A spacecraft hull (say a dime's thickness of aluminum) can easily handle 5 atmos of pressure differential. Put it 30 feet underwater, and it will collapse like a cheap suit in the -1 atmo environment.
Bacteria living underground/underwater don't care much about radiation or earthquakes. Of course, it's bacteria, so we aren't going to be swapping porn or MP3s with them anytime soon.
I present here (not for the first time) the Woodhams Hierarchy of Epistemological Categories: 1) Stuff that you know 2) Stuff that you know where to find out 3) Stuff that you know that somebody knows 3a) Stuff that you know that nobody knows (a category irrelevant to this discussion but important to scientists.) 4) Stuff you know nothing about
So, about the same as:
1) I have drugs 2) I know where to buy drugs 3) I have a friend who can get me drugs 3a) I have drugs, and my friends don't know I do 4) I have no drugs, and have no idea how to score them
There is a lot of commonality in learning to fly airplanes and masturbate. Unlike the parent, I'll spare you two paragraphs of pointless anecdotes about my life.
I always find this funny that so many studies say "The Arctic is warming and there should be no more ice cap by 2050". I remember some US scientists said there would be no ice in the Arctic by 2013
Of course, the article says nothing of the kind:
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers
6) You had part-time tutors, learning specialists, etc come in to help as needed when you weren't getting As in a class 7) Your maid took care of doing the dishes and making your bed so you got to read, play, learn, etc in all your free time 8) You know how to behave around rich people and college professors because you were around them all the time 9) You've been to several foreign countries by age 10, often with an expert guide just for your family 10) You know how to navigate a white-table cloth restaurant, a cocktail party, an art gallery, a meet-and-greet
If you broadcast something everywhere, and people record it everywhere, it's very hard to go back and forge the past of that decentralized record.
True, but proof-of-work blockchains are a *really* expensive way to achieve the goal. It is far cheaper to have both parties just cryptographically sign a transaction and keep a copy themselves or even post it to a public repository.
Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Great, but banks don't typically have that problem in the first place because the currency is not the record.
Exactly, but the article seems to be adding confusion by talking about low-level physical implementation. It's a good rule of thumb that claiming a low-level idea will somehow punch through four or five layers of abstraction to get a high-level paradigm shift is usually wrong (maybe quantum computing will prove the exception,) but usually the high level ideas remain the same and just get better as the underlying mechanics improve. We've got a lot of experience with transputers, connection machines, GPUs, parallel grids, and other local storage-and-compute models. I doubt this will change our technology arc much.
Slashdot Mirror
This supreme court would probably agreed with you. In 2002, they struck down a ban of virtual child porn (from the NYT:)
"Affirming that free speech principles apply with full force in the computer age, the Supreme Court today struck down provisions of a federal law that made it a crime to create, distribute or possess ''virtual'' child pornography that used computer images or young adults rather than actual children.
The law, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, ''prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the court's latest decision upholding First Amendment protections online."
I'm sure your credit union would have no trouble with this physical check, then:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
That is quite elegant.
I had originally thought of picking the numbers with a tied UBI (like % of GDP) and a median-based percentage: it keeps the system voter-neutral under somewhat idealistic assumptions. Mean-based does seem to have some nicer features.
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
One other way it could work is to not even have the sliding scale: everyone gets $30,000 and pays a flat X% tax on all additional income. Set X to the number of your choice, e.g. at 40%, the person earning $75K/yr is at the neutral point, everyone earning less sees some benefit, everyone earning more funds the program to some extent. It's actually not a terrible tax system: it's just two numbers, the BI and X%, and a dollar earned is worth the same to everyone in terms of money kept.
Well, you could read Anthony Courtney's Yampa Arcade paper: it describes the implementation of an arcade game in a functional system.
Being blocked from doing small fixes by Sarbanes-Oxley and management. But really Sarbanes Oxley.
Prior to SOX, I could see a problem- fix it, refactor the code.. etc. or see a minor improvement- implement it, refactor the code, etc.
After SOX, I had to run everything thru the team lead who had to justify it to the manager who had to justify to the director who had to justify it to the senior director who had to justify it to the Department head, who had to justify it (in a group of other changes) to the CIO.
SOX dictates policy, not process. Nothing in SOX requires the process your company has chosen to implement. SOX basically says: do whatever the fuck you want, but it had better be understandable and sane; if you fail at that, but claim you are compliant, we can jail your senior management.
If you are lucky enough to be working for a good company, you hardly notice SOX. If your company sucks, well, senior management doesn't want to get jailed, so they make a process of hierarchical justifications that is understandable, sane, and stupid: they keep their jobs and stay out of jail.
It tends to be for those autodidacts and other weird cases (like young college dropouts or philosophy PhDs looking to write code.)
Then again, I am usually interviewing for $200K-$800K developers, so our experiences may differ.
It's pretty damn simple:
Most college degrees show that you are basically employable in a white-collar or pink-collar job entry-level job paying $40K/year or so: you have proven you can show up, follow simple instructions, get work done on time, understand written material, write a page of text that sort of makes sense, do basic arithmetic, etc.
That's about it for 99% of college graduates. Congrats, you get to sit in a chair at work, and we know you can do the simple job we need filled. Hell, do well, and we'll even promote you to where you can earn more and actually add more value.
You went to MIT or did STEM? Great, we figure you are smart, hard-working, and have an analytical mind. That's worth $80K. We really don't care what you majored in or what courses you took. It's still a fucking entry-level job.
20 year old autodidact? Sorry, just too much uncertainty. Come back when you have a track record or a Github repository that we like.
"Fieryphoenix" and "nutcase who decides that words are not sequences of letters" are not different words. They are different forms of the same word.
The H1-B program is a mess, but when I look around my office:
1. There is a small group of H1-Bs who are actually competent and probably help keeping us profitable
2. There is a bunch of H1-Bs who are useless, underpaid fucks who make the codebase worse
3. There a small group of citizen programmers who are actually competent and probably help keeping us profitable
4. There is a bunch of citizen programmers who are useless, overpaid fucks who make the codebase worse
Revoking for citizenship of group 4 seems the best plan. Then we can work on group 2.
I really don't understand posters who can understand an amortization schedule, even understand how rates change over time, and then just add dollar numbers (e.g. a dollar today plus and a dollar payable in 30 years) to make a big, bad number that is supposed to make sense.
If the universe is a simulation then one can speculate on the purpose of the simulation. A good bet, based on our own world, would be it's a role playing game. If so the "players" are presumably the Elites in the game.
Ah, so we just need to look for player characters who picked a generic white-male avatar, blundered around because they picked "easy mode," but still wound up doing and completing some of the fun missions and sidequests in the game. For example:
1. Started life as a player character with extra gold
2. Flew fighter planes
3. Managed a baseball team
4. Caught fish in the "pond on own private ranch" cliche
5. Became president of USA. Bonus for second term election.
Hmm, someone like that would be unbelievable and stick out like a sore thumb.
It's not the crime, it's the coverup. This is the kind of crap that gets people sent to jail.
It's not about the science, it's about what Exxon did:
If their internal research showed one thing, but they publicly declared something something opposite, that's pretty bad, but probably not criminal.
If they testified in a court that they believed the opposite factoids, and didn't mention the internal research, that's really bad, but if the opposing lawyers didn't find the right person to testify (like someone at Exxon who knew about the research,) they are probably still ok.
If they set up secret email accounts for senior executives, and then didn't provide the emails from those accounts to the opposing lawyers during the discovery process, then that's just fraud on the court. It's like your wife "forgetting" to mention her secret bank account in the Cayman Islands during your divorce trial. Seriously, WTF?
The market solution is to give you a $10 off coupon on healthcare for your service in Houston.
As Paul Ryan explained, if you want cheap healthcare you should have made better life decisions, like becoming a congressman rather than an astronaut.
There's a reason spacecraft are about as rigid as a tin can and submarines are built out of many tonnes of steel and titanium, and it's that one has to deal with some pressure and the other... doesn't.
Actually, the reason is a bit different: round things with excess pressure on the inside respond by getting more round and keeping their shape (think latex balloons being inflated;) round things with excess pressure on the outside respond by getting more oval/ flattish and losing their shape
So, for negative pressure things, you have to design them to avoid collapse, not true for positive pressure things. A spacecraft hull (say a dime's thickness of aluminum) can easily handle 5 atmos of pressure differential. Put it 30 feet underwater, and it will collapse like a cheap suit in the -1 atmo environment.
Bacteria living underground/underwater don't care much about radiation or earthquakes. Of course, it's bacteria, so we aren't going to be swapping porn or MP3s with them anytime soon.
I present here (not for the first time) the Woodhams Hierarchy of Epistemological Categories:
1) Stuff that you know
2) Stuff that you know where to find out
3) Stuff that you know that somebody knows
3a) Stuff that you know that nobody knows (a category irrelevant to this discussion but important to scientists.)
4) Stuff you know nothing about
So, about the same as:
1) I have drugs
2) I know where to buy drugs
3) I have a friend who can get me drugs
3a) I have drugs, and my friends don't know I do
4) I have no drugs, and have no idea how to score them
There is a lot of commonality in learning to fly airplanes and masturbate. Unlike the parent, I'll spare you two paragraphs of pointless anecdotes about my life.
I always find this funny that so many studies say "The Arctic is warming and there should be no more ice cap by 2050". I remember some US scientists said there would be no ice in the Arctic by 2013
Of course, the article says nothing of the kind:
Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers
Oh, I actually picked five things true of my own kids. But good to know they are in some book.
As we used to joke on Wall Street: Harvard is a hedge fund with a small academic charity on the side.
All true, and for the top 1%:
6) You had part-time tutors, learning specialists, etc come in to help as needed when you weren't getting As in a class
7) Your maid took care of doing the dishes and making your bed so you got to read, play, learn, etc in all your free time
8) You know how to behave around rich people and college professors because you were around them all the time
9) You've been to several foreign countries by age 10, often with an expert guide just for your family
10) You know how to navigate a white-table cloth restaurant, a cocktail party, an art gallery, a meet-and-greet
If you broadcast something everywhere, and people record it everywhere, it's very hard to go back and forge the past of that decentralized record.
True, but proof-of-work blockchains are a *really* expensive way to achieve the goal. It is far cheaper to have both parties just cryptographically sign a transaction and keep a copy themselves or even post it to a public repository.
Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Great, but banks don't typically have that problem in the first place because the currency is not the record.
Exactly, but the article seems to be adding confusion by talking about low-level physical implementation. It's a good rule of thumb that claiming a low-level idea will somehow punch through four or five layers of abstraction to get a high-level paradigm shift is usually wrong (maybe quantum computing will prove the exception,) but usually the high level ideas remain the same and just get better as the underlying mechanics improve. We've got a lot of experience with transputers, connection machines, GPUs, parallel grids, and other local storage-and-compute models. I doubt this will change our technology arc much.
Funny. Your politico-geek papers are in good standing.