1) So they can hopefully vote slightly better 2) And they can compete better against the upcoming robots, and hopefully buying enough time for society to figure out a not too crappy way of dealing with what happens after that.
I'm always intrigued that Aristotle explanation for gravity was something along the lines of things "wanting" to return to their "natural" state (or something like that). From a psychological point of view, that kind of anthropomorphization is really intriguing.
Our theory of gravity may be more accurate, but the current _explanation_ for gravity still isn't much of an advance over Aristotle's explanation is it?
[1] The fact that the guy says when you get it wrong you'll feel tired for _days_ should tell you how insane that method is. You can probably _survive_ on that, but I doubt you will thrive.
Patents are designed to foster innovation. They give an idea value so that people will take the risk of investing in that idea whatever the scale of the inventor.
They are poorly designed then. 1) A lot of really innovative stuff only gets big after many years - takes a lot to get the market ready for your stuff. See Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of all Demos. Whereas Amazon etc get lots of money and leverage from stuff like one-click and "Shopping Cart (Web Edition)". 2) An overworked patent examiner can't tell how innovative something really is in zillions of different fields, and may not have enough to time to look for prior art by comparing broad vague claims with thousands of other broad vague claims. Might as well do a brief look, find nothing, then approve it and let the courts deal with the mess. 3) The US patent system seems to protect vague ideas more than the actual implementations. Real innovators will tell you that ideas are easy, getting the ideas into the market is the hard part. Many innovative people have more ideas than they can ever implement in their lifetime. It's the non-innovative people who only have one great idea in their lifetime and think the patent system should be a way for them to cash in on it. If you think ideas are hard and implementation is easy, you might be PHB material.
You want to encourage innovators try stuff like awarding Prizes for Innovation for various fields, with one category awarded by "Experts in the Field" and another by "Members of the Public". Hindsight is usually more accurate than foresight.
There may be zero scarcity of smurf berries and farmville farms, but despite GM etc there will be an upper bound of wheat and other food that you can produce on this planet. You might be able to survive on food produced via nuclear energy, but given that there are already significant health differences resulting from merely different diets, I doubt humans would thrive on that.
We might be able to postpone things by developing space colonies - the asteroid belts have quite a lot of resources. But most space agencies seem more interested in doing reruns of 1960s space stuff albeit with fancier technology.
I'm not disagreeing with Paul Krugman with his solution. I'm disagreeing with the claims that there is inadequate money supply, AND that printing money just to increase money supply will solve problems.
As I said previously:
Inflation just allows those printing money to tax and transfer wealth from people and redirect it to whoever/whatever they choose to favour. If they use that transferred wealth for the benefit of the country (invest in stuff that has good ROI - maybe much-needed highways or infrastructure) then the country becomes richer- the higher ROI means more wealth/goods produced and that offsets the printed money and thus there is no/low inflation. If they just use it to make themselves and their friends rich then the country becomes poorer (see Zimbabwe)."
So if the US Gov creates money and spends it for the benefit of the country things will go well, especially since the US is using the petrodollar[1].
But if the US Gov creates money and does not spend it for the benefit of the country, things won't go well for the USA despite even a great increase in "money supply".
Of course some prices are lower, but has there been a "decrease in the general price level of goods and services"? What's the current US inflation rate is it positive or negative?
. That is why conventional indicators of money supply are defective -- they do not reflect the planned intent of using the money or its velocity of movement of currency.
If you are a consumer debt holder, then inflation is terrific (the debt is easier to pay back) and deflation is bad.
Not if you don't have a job. Or there is an increase in prices of goods, but no corresponding increase in income (which seems to happen a lot in my country).
What matters to the Joe on the street is: can he buy more stuff today than he could yesterday? Will he be able to buy more stuff tomorrow? All that economics bullshit matters not to him.
Seems to me businessmen who understand things like cash flow have more useful things to teach people than most economists, and that a lot of that economics bullshit is used too often to obscure what is actually happening in the world than to describe it clearly.
Inflation is good for the USA who owes Japan, China etc trillions of US dollars. Especially when those countries know that if they are stupid enough to try to force the US Gov to pay up, the US Gov will just tell the Federal Reserve to print them all the trillions they want.
[1] Other countries can try to do the same thing but since they are merely transferring wealth from their citizens and not the rest of the world, it is much harder to generate a net positive benefit to their country.
Note: it doesn't have to be just for phone support - it can be used by power users to do "under the hood" stuff really fast- set a static IP address, DNS, or go back to DHCP from having a static IP.
Seems like bullshit to me. If there really is inadequate money supply there wouldn't be inflation, you'd get deflation. The last I checked that was not happening at least with the US dollar.
There's nothing so magical about money more than any other item you trade with. If you create more money (and it is actually used) it becomes worth less relative to the other items in the world. If lots of people are holding your money when you create it, you just made them poorer. If your family is the only one using your money, you just made yourself richer at the expense of the rest of your family (but it affects no one else).
Now if the amount of goods in the world increases faster than the amount of money then you have deflation- the money becomes more valuable than goods - so you can buy more stuff with less money. But if it goes the other way around you get inflation. It usually takes some time for other people to realize something has changed, so the prices take a while to adjust, but it does happen eventually.
The observation by Douglas that there is not enough money to buy back goods produced by nonbankrupt companies is not a surprise. You profit by selling stuff for more than it costs to make- you retain some of that wealth. If you don't do that you go bankrupt.
As for who gets the US printed money first, it's obvious: the Federal Reserve gets the money first - they create it. And their favoured ones get the money second (they were quite secretive on who they gave the money to[1]). Perhaps the US citizens benefited from that printed money in the past (through highways and other government programmes) more than now. If that is so, maybe they as voters and citizens should inform their Gov that they want a bigger cut, or vote in a Gov that does.
If nobody prints more money but goods kept being created then the prices of goods may go down- since fewer could otherwise afford them. If your goods remain in greater demand that goods of other companies, your prices don't go down but theirs do, and you become richer than them.
Many people claim deflation is a bad thing but from my experience with PC hardware I'd say being able to buy better and more PC stuff for the same amount of US dollars year after year doesn't make me unhappy. Are you really that unhappy that the same amount of money allows you to buy more 500GB HDDs today than 10 years ago?
Inflation just allows those printing money to tax and transfer wealth from people and redirect it to whoever/whatever they choose to favour. If they use that transferred wealth for the benefit of the country (invest in stuff that has good ROI - maybe much-needed highways or infrastructure) then the country becomes richer- the higher ROI means more wealth/goods produced and that offsets the printed money and thus there is no/low inflation. If they just use it to make themselves and their friends rich then the country becomes poorer (see Zimbabwe).
It's not that complicated.
[1] Trillion dollar loans with low interest rates are the same as printing money, but the created amount is a fraction of the trillion - depends on the interest rate.
Uh, China cannot just print money since they don't own anything like the petrodollar. The Chinese Gov printing money would just transfer wealth from those holding net positive amounts of Chinese currency to the printers. In effect a tax but one that reduces faith in the currency. They'd be just like Zimbabwe: http://www.amazon.com/Zimbabwe-Trillion-Banknote-Uncirculated-Sequential/dp/B003XPJOZQ (FWIW it might be fun to use these like "casino chips" when gambling amongst friends)
In contrast when the US prints money (aka issues trillion dollar loans to itself from thin air) the rest of the world becomes relatively poorer because they happen to hold trillions of US dollars AND they also trade stuff like oil, CPUs, orange juice, wheat that are priced in US dollars.
When the US prints money the world doesn't laugh because we live in the USA's Zimbabwe.
The US people's problem is the US Mugabe (US Gov) isn't giving the US people a good cut of the printed money.
I'd say good for them - no point wasting their years in a factory job when already Foxconn is talking about replacing those very jobs with robots.
As the US worker has found out those factory jobs are among the first jobs to go. Of course with the US workers the Chinese workers were the "robots" taking their jobs (and despite what those optimists say about "luddites" etc, many never found new jobs).
Maybe the Chinese graduates can find something else, but if even they can't find something, it doesn't bode well for the US workers who'd want 4-5x higher salaries[1].
[1] FWIW a US guy just got fired recently after outsourcing his own job to China for 20% his salary (and breaching corporate policies etc). Apparently the outsourcing actually produced decent results (perhaps that US guy should go find work in outsourcing;) ).
From what I understand about the case he wasn't expelled for demonstrating the problem by "pressing the detonator". He was expelled for coming back days later without permission to see what else would blow up.
Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites, to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected.
A bit harsh (and the NDA signing under duress is unfair) perhaps but I think he should learn from that as it applies in the nonacademic world too.
In the outside world if you find a problem, report it, and you're lucky that they don't shoot you the messenger, you certainly shouldn't push your luck by continuing to look for problems without permission especially by running automated scanners like Acunetix!
All my proposal does is force them to be clear about which money really is in the USA and which isn't.
Will they really move? Ask yourself why are they moving all those trillions to the USA instead of keeping it elsewhere. Low interest rates don't make sense unless they are borrowing from the banks using that foreign money as collateral. If they can use that foreign money as collateral to US banks then that foreign money is really theirs and thus should be taxed.
Being able to move trillions of foreign money to the USA and use it in the USA without being taxed corporate rates on it is a bit unfair to the foreign countries. So maybe the current system is unfair but benefits the USA and the US people shouldn't grumble so much about it?;)
If they want fair then I think my proposal is fair. It is definitely fairer than those other proposals which advocate somehow taxing all those profits that are generated outside the USA AND stay outside the USA. To me those profits belong to the tax jurisdictions of other countries, why should the USA get a cut of that? Those proposals would cause foreign companies and people to move out of the USA - since just having a presence in the USA might cause ALL your entities outside the USA to be taxed.
As I said: "you shouldn't get to declare it in your financials locally nor use it locally."
So long as the US company doesn't get to use the money in Europe, and it doesn't appear on the US books, the European money shouldn't be taxed in the US. If the money is made and used in Europe I don't see why it should be taxed in the USA. Can you give me a good and fair reason? But the moment the US company can somehow declare or use the European money that's the moment the money should be taxed in the USA.
If I make money in Europe and it stays in Europe why should I be taxed in the USA? But if I'm going to claim to the US banks and investors that I have lots of money in the USA because of the European money, why shouldn't I be either taxed or prosecuted for fraud?
If the European countries don't mind not taxing the European entity and letting it transfer the European profits tax free to Ireland then that's their prerogative/problem.
Currently these companies are getting away with what even many mobsters are unable to do - publicly declaring the ownership of lots of money and not get taxed on it.;) And get higher stock prices too!
Lastly apparently there are ways of transferring money from overseas to the USA without getting taxed - this is if the US company is losing money. So such loopholes should probably be closed if my proposal is to be implemented.
No. But if companies include and locally declare the foreign profits/revenue as part of their profits or revenue (or as collateral when borrowing from banks etc) then they should be taxed on it, but minus whatever tax they have already paid in the foreign country on it. If they have already paid a lot then it's zero if they paid zero then it's the full amount.
If it isn't your profit and it isn't your money you shouldn't have to pay tax on it. But if you claim that it's your money, why shouldn't you be taxed on it?
They both include international revenue as part of their financials.
So if you don't want your foreign money taxed, just leave it overseas, pay whatever tax due overseas (which could be 0%) BUT you shouldn't get to declare it in your financials locally nor use it locally. If you want to use it locally, you have to pay the tax (after subtracting whatever overseas tax you've already paid on it).
This increase in aggregate demand leads many economists to believe that technological change, although disruptive of individual careers and particular firms, cannot lead to systemic unemployment, but actually increases employment due to its expansionary effect on the economy
OK just pretend the workers in China, Vietnam, India etc are robots and taking the low end "robotic" jobs from the US workers. How well is that working out for the workers in the USA so far? Things generally getting better?
So if the workers in China themselves are replaced by robots things will get even better for the workers in the USA?
Maybe things might get better for the workers in China[1] but I don't see such a rosy picture for the US low end workers.
What happened is the farmers were able to feed more and more people - thus the food prices remained affordable.
In the USA a single farmer can feed about 155 people. Maybe that figure can keep going up. But if the supply of other goods go up the farmer may start charging more for his produce. There are just so many Farmville coins a farmer will want in return for his real farm goods. Whereas if you have to eat, you have to eat.
OK perhaps someone makes a robot farmer - in which case the other humans to human farmer ratio goes up. But the robot farmer doesn't want your music, iphones etc. The robot farmer's owner might but a farming monopoly would be even easier at that point and monopolies can get ugly. Especially if the population grows and the amount of food produced does not meet the growth in demand.
Another thing: the banks might own the farm, the human farm owner and the robots indirectly - via the loans.
Yeah that's one of my concerns - we might build a Strong AI by just putting stuff together and not fully understanding it. It would work, but we would likely end up creating more evil and suffering in the world - on our part, by abusing and enslaving it.
And looking at the jokers working in that field and their results I doubt they really know what they are doing.
Heck I bet many of those "Strong AI" charlatans can't even produce something more "Strong AI" than the two paramecium being eaten in the second video.
Not saying those tiny creatures are that smart, but how stupid are they really? Just because they lack our physical ability and senses doesn't automatically make them stupid.
I don't think we really understand how those tiny creatures work and yet many assume we know how the big creatures work.
What if the big creatures are mostly exoskeletons for the tiny creatures? e.g. the neurons in your brain are not that stupid, they have "locked in syndrome" and need the rest of the body for senses and movement etc.
Another thing how many organizational systems do we have that make 1000 humans smarter than 1 human? 1000 humans being able to do more than 1 human is not the same as being smarter. So how do our brains organize all that and make the supposedly dumb neurons come up with such high levels of smartness?
Augmentation = making us able to do more stuff. Vehicles, computers, tools, even eye-wear augment us and allow us to do more. Stronger, faster, better memory, better senses.
With better and better technology we can augment ourselves even more. Wearable computers like Google's can be a next step. The control interfaces could change as technology improves.
Making strong human-like AI on the other hand = building a more independent entity with its own motivations.
Self driving vehicles might be considered a step towards strong AI but it actually isn't necessary to have a strong AI in order to have a good self-driving vehicle. You just want one that doesn't crash or destroy/kill stuff. You don't need a vehicle that has its own motivations, learns a lot from the surrounding world and then decides to pick its own destinations (and then we enslave it and prevent it from going to those destinations)- do we really need a vehicle like that? How would building something like this make the world a better place?
I'd think we'd be enslaving it, so it would certainly be encumbered.;)
And as you say, it would certainly be encumbered by our choices (or nonchoices) when building it - there's no such thing as no defaults, in the absence of chosen defaults you have defacto defaults;).
I'd prefer that researchers spend time augmenting humans rather than creating AI especially strong AI. We already have plenty of human and nonhuman entities in this world, we're not doing such a great job with them. Why create AIs? To enslave them?
There is a subtle but still significant difference between augmenting humans (or animals) and creating new entities.
There are plenty of things you can do to augment humans: - background facial and object recognition - artificial eidetic memory - easy automatic context-sensitive scheduling of tasks and reminders - virtual telepathy and telekinesis ( control could be through gestures or actual thought patterns - brain computer interfaces are improving). - maybe even automatic potential collision detection.
And then there's the military stuff (anti-camouflage, military object recognition, etc).
having the ability to quickly and easily change the component is a blessing.
AFAIK companies like Google and Facebook don't change components.
They don't even swap out individual machines- they swap out entire racks when enough of the machines in the racks are faulty.
When you have say 1+ million servers and only 30000 employees total where probably only 300-3000 are involved in the hardware problems, then you can't really inspect and fix each machine.
Those who might be interested could be companies in cheaper countries (where labour costs are much lower) who can refurbish the computers or identify and sell parts that seem to be OK, in which case they'd offer to buy faulty racks from Google.
Kaspersky are being completely ridiculous if they think the current cyberweapons are much worse than nukes. With nukes we can knock out computers with EMP, even if they are not connected to any network at all. Don't even have to be close enough to vaporize stuff. We can wipe out most major cities in the world with our existing nukes.
Cyberweapons aren't going to stop all or even most of our computers from working. As for the computers that hold our money, the bankers and their friends have probably lost more money than any malware or hacking will. Most banks have backups of data too, and there's usually some sort of checking to ensure that banks don't create or destroy money without authorization.
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Every human needs a better education.
1) So they can hopefully vote slightly better
2) And they can compete better against the upcoming robots, and hopefully buying enough time for society to figure out a not too crappy way of dealing with what happens after that.
I'm always intrigued that Aristotle explanation for gravity was something along the lines of things "wanting" to return to their "natural" state (or something like that). From a psychological point of view, that kind of anthropomorphization is really intriguing.
Our theory of gravity may be more accurate, but the current _explanation_ for gravity still isn't much of an advance over Aristotle's explanation is it?
Instead of that insanity[1] I'd recommend two sleeps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783
[1] The fact that the guy says when you get it wrong you'll feel tired for _days_ should tell you how insane that method is. You can probably _survive_ on that, but I doubt you will thrive.
Patents are designed to foster innovation. They give an idea value so that people will take the risk of investing in that idea whatever the scale of the inventor.
They are poorly designed then.
1) A lot of really innovative stuff only gets big after many years - takes a lot to get the market ready for your stuff. See Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of all Demos. Whereas Amazon etc get lots of money and leverage from stuff like one-click and "Shopping Cart (Web Edition)".
2) An overworked patent examiner can't tell how innovative something really is in zillions of different fields, and may not have enough to time to look for prior art by comparing broad vague claims with thousands of other broad vague claims. Might as well do a brief look, find nothing, then approve it and let the courts deal with the mess.
3) The US patent system seems to protect vague ideas more than the actual implementations. Real innovators will tell you that ideas are easy, getting the ideas into the market is the hard part. Many innovative people have more ideas than they can ever implement in their lifetime. It's the non-innovative people who only have one great idea in their lifetime and think the patent system should be a way for them to cash in on it. If you think ideas are hard and implementation is easy, you might be PHB material.
You want to encourage innovators try stuff like awarding Prizes for Innovation for various fields, with one category awarded by "Experts in the Field" and another by "Members of the Public". Hindsight is usually more accurate than foresight.
Yeah, esp all that "post scarcity" bullshit.
There may be zero scarcity of smurf berries and farmville farms, but despite GM etc there will be an upper bound of wheat and other food that you can produce on this planet. You might be able to survive on food produced via nuclear energy, but given that there are already significant health differences resulting from merely different diets, I doubt humans would thrive on that.
We might be able to postpone things by developing space colonies - the asteroid belts have quite a lot of resources. But most space agencies seem more interested in doing reruns of 1960s space stuff albeit with fancier technology.
I'm not disagreeing with Paul Krugman with his solution. I'm disagreeing with the claims that there is inadequate money supply, AND that printing money just to increase money supply will solve problems.
As I said previously:
Inflation just allows those printing money to tax and transfer wealth from people and redirect it to whoever/whatever they choose to favour. If they use that transferred wealth for the benefit of the country (invest in stuff that has good ROI - maybe much-needed highways or infrastructure) then the country becomes richer- the higher ROI means more wealth/goods produced and that offsets the printed money and thus there is no/low inflation. If they just use it to make themselves and their friends rich then the country becomes poorer (see Zimbabwe)."
So if the US Gov creates money and spends it for the benefit of the country things will go well, especially since the US is using the petrodollar[1].
But if the US Gov creates money and does not spend it for the benefit of the country, things won't go well for the USA despite even a great increase in "money supply".
Of course some prices are lower, but has there been a "decrease in the general price level of goods and services"? What's the current US inflation rate is it positive or negative?
. That is why conventional indicators of money supply are defective -- they do not reflect the planned intent of using the money or its velocity of movement of currency.
If you are a consumer debt holder, then inflation is terrific (the debt is easier to pay back) and deflation is bad.
Not if you don't have a job. Or there is an increase in prices of goods, but no corresponding increase in income (which seems to happen a lot in my country).
What matters to the Joe on the street is: can he buy more stuff today than he could yesterday? Will he be able to buy more stuff tomorrow? All that economics bullshit matters not to him.
Seems to me businessmen who understand things like cash flow have more useful things to teach people than most economists, and that a lot of that economics bullshit is used too often to obscure what is actually happening in the world than to describe it clearly.
Inflation is good for the USA who owes Japan, China etc trillions of US dollars. Especially when those countries know that if they are stupid enough to try to force the US Gov to pay up, the US Gov will just tell the Federal Reserve to print them all the trillions they want.
[1] Other countries can try to do the same thing but since they are merely transferring wealth from their citizens and not the rest of the world, it is much harder to generate a net positive benefit to their country.
Yeah, exactly. The designers of some popular modern GUIs are crap.
Any crappy OS can run one process well at a time. A good OS lets you run 1000 or more processes.
Any crappy UI lets you do one task at a time. A good UI lets you do way more than one task at a time.
If your GUI isn't much better than "gnu screen" or "DOS" in task management it really sucks.
I'd prefer something like this: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/29001/
Note: it doesn't have to be just for phone support - it can be used by power users to do "under the hood" stuff really fast- set a static IP address, DNS, or go back to DHCP from having a static IP.
Seems like bullshit to me. If there really is inadequate money supply there wouldn't be inflation, you'd get deflation. The last I checked that was not happening at least with the US dollar.
There's nothing so magical about money more than any other item you trade with. If you create more money (and it is actually used) it becomes worth less relative to the other items in the world. If lots of people are holding your money when you create it, you just made them poorer. If your family is the only one using your money, you just made yourself richer at the expense of the rest of your family (but it affects no one else).
Now if the amount of goods in the world increases faster than the amount of money then you have deflation- the money becomes more valuable than goods - so you can buy more stuff with less money. But if it goes the other way around you get inflation.
It usually takes some time for other people to realize something has changed, so the prices take a while to adjust, but it does happen eventually.
The observation by Douglas that there is not enough money to buy back goods produced by nonbankrupt companies is not a surprise. You profit by selling stuff for more than it costs to make- you retain some of that wealth. If you don't do that you go bankrupt.
As for who gets the US printed money first, it's obvious: the Federal Reserve gets the money first - they create it. And their favoured ones get the money second (they were quite secretive on who they gave the money to[1]). Perhaps the US citizens benefited from that printed money in the past (through highways and other government programmes) more than now. If that is so, maybe they as voters and citizens should inform their Gov that they want a bigger cut, or vote in a Gov that does.
If nobody prints more money but goods kept being created then the prices of goods may go down- since fewer could otherwise afford them. If your goods remain in greater demand that goods of other companies, your prices don't go down but theirs do, and you become richer than them.
Many people claim deflation is a bad thing but from my experience with PC hardware I'd say being able to buy better and more PC stuff for the same amount of US dollars year after year doesn't make me unhappy. Are you really that unhappy that the same amount of money allows you to buy more 500GB HDDs today than 10 years ago?
Inflation just allows those printing money to tax and transfer wealth from people and redirect it to whoever/whatever they choose to favour. If they use that transferred wealth for the benefit of the country (invest in stuff that has good ROI - maybe much-needed highways or infrastructure) then the country becomes richer- the higher ROI means more wealth/goods produced and that offsets the printed money and thus there is no/low inflation. If they just use it to make themselves and their friends rich then the country becomes poorer (see Zimbabwe).
It's not that complicated.
[1] Trillion dollar loans with low interest rates are the same as printing money, but the created amount is a fraction of the trillion - depends on the interest rate.
Uh, China cannot just print money since they don't own anything like the petrodollar. The Chinese Gov printing money would just transfer wealth from those holding net positive amounts of Chinese currency to the printers. In effect a tax but one that reduces faith in the currency. They'd be just like Zimbabwe: http://www.amazon.com/Zimbabwe-Trillion-Banknote-Uncirculated-Sequential/dp/B003XPJOZQ (FWIW it might be fun to use these like "casino chips" when gambling amongst friends)
In contrast when the US prints money (aka issues trillion dollar loans to itself from thin air) the rest of the world becomes relatively poorer because they happen to hold trillions of US dollars AND they also trade stuff like oil, CPUs, orange juice, wheat that are priced in US dollars.
When the US prints money the world doesn't laugh because we live in the USA's Zimbabwe.
The US people's problem is the US Mugabe (US Gov) isn't giving the US people a good cut of the printed money.
I'd say good for them - no point wasting their years in a factory job when already Foxconn is talking about replacing those very jobs with robots.
;) ).
As the US worker has found out those factory jobs are among the first jobs to go. Of course with the US workers the Chinese workers were the "robots" taking their jobs (and despite what those optimists say about "luddites" etc, many never found new jobs).
Maybe the Chinese graduates can find something else, but if even they can't find something, it doesn't bode well for the US workers who'd want 4-5x higher salaries[1].
[1] FWIW a US guy just got fired recently after outsourcing his own job to China for 20% his salary (and breaching corporate policies etc). Apparently the outsourcing actually produced decent results (perhaps that US guy should go find work in outsourcing
From what I understand about the case he wasn't expelled for demonstrating the problem by "pressing the detonator". He was expelled for coming back days later without permission to see what else would blow up.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/20/youth-expelled-from-montreal-college-after-finding-sloppy-coding-that-compromised-security-of-250000-students-personal-data/
Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites, to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected.
A bit harsh (and the NDA signing under duress is unfair) perhaps but I think he should learn from that as it applies in the nonacademic world too.
In the outside world if you find a problem, report it, and you're lucky that they don't shoot you the messenger, you certainly shouldn't push your luck by continuing to look for problems without permission especially by running automated scanners like Acunetix!
All my proposal does is force them to be clear about which money really is in the USA and which isn't.
;)
Will they really move? Ask yourself why are they moving all those trillions to the USA instead of keeping it elsewhere. Low interest rates don't make sense unless they are borrowing from the banks using that foreign money as collateral. If they can use that foreign money as collateral to US banks then that foreign money is really theirs and thus should be taxed.
Being able to move trillions of foreign money to the USA and use it in the USA without being taxed corporate rates on it is a bit unfair to the foreign countries. So maybe the current system is unfair but benefits the USA and the US people shouldn't grumble so much about it?
If they want fair then I think my proposal is fair. It is definitely fairer than those other proposals which advocate somehow taxing all those profits that are generated outside the USA AND stay outside the USA. To me those profits belong to the tax jurisdictions of other countries, why should the USA get a cut of that? Those proposals would cause foreign companies and people to move out of the USA - since just having a presence in the USA might cause ALL your entities outside the USA to be taxed.
As I said: "you shouldn't get to declare it in your financials locally nor use it locally."
;) And get higher stock prices too!
So long as the US company doesn't get to use the money in Europe, and it doesn't appear on the US books, the European money shouldn't be taxed in the US. If the money is made and used in Europe I don't see why it should be taxed in the USA. Can you give me a good and fair reason? But the moment the US company can somehow declare or use the European money that's the moment the money should be taxed in the USA.
If I make money in Europe and it stays in Europe why should I be taxed in the USA? But if I'm going to claim to the US banks and investors that I have lots of money in the USA because of the European money, why shouldn't I be either taxed or prosecuted for fraud?
If the European countries don't mind not taxing the European entity and letting it transfer the European profits tax free to Ireland then that's their prerogative/problem.
Currently these companies are getting away with what even many mobsters are unable to do - publicly declaring the ownership of lots of money and not get taxed on it.
Lastly apparently there are ways of transferring money from overseas to the USA without getting taxed - this is if the US company is losing money. So such loopholes should probably be closed if my proposal is to be implemented.
No. But if companies include and locally declare the foreign profits/revenue as part of their profits or revenue (or as collateral when borrowing from banks etc) then they should be taxed on it, but minus whatever tax they have already paid in the foreign country on it. If they have already paid a lot then it's zero if they paid zero then it's the full amount.
If it isn't your profit and it isn't your money you shouldn't have to pay tax on it. But if you claim that it's your money, why shouldn't you be taxed on it?
Examples: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/10/25Apple-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results.html
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q4_google_earnings.html
They both include international revenue as part of their financials.
So if you don't want your foreign money taxed, just leave it overseas, pay whatever tax due overseas (which could be 0%) BUT you shouldn't get to declare it in your financials locally nor use it locally. If you want to use it locally, you have to pay the tax (after subtracting whatever overseas tax you've already paid on it).
This increase in aggregate demand leads many economists to believe that technological change, although disruptive of individual careers and particular firms, cannot lead to systemic unemployment, but actually increases employment due to its expansionary effect on the economy
OK just pretend the workers in China, Vietnam, India etc are robots and taking the low end "robotic" jobs from the US workers. How well is that working out for the workers in the USA so far? Things generally getting better?
So if the workers in China themselves are replaced by robots things will get even better for the workers in the USA?
Maybe things might get better for the workers in China[1] but I don't see such a rosy picture for the US low end workers.
[1] As a recent story shows workers in China can do much of the job of a worker in the USA for a fifth the cost: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/16/software-developer-outsources-own-job
What happened is the farmers were able to feed more and more people - thus the food prices remained affordable.
In the USA a single farmer can feed about 155 people. Maybe that figure can keep going up. But if the supply of other goods go up the farmer may start charging more for his produce. There are just so many Farmville coins a farmer will want in return for his real farm goods. Whereas if you have to eat, you have to eat.
OK perhaps someone makes a robot farmer - in which case the other humans to human farmer ratio goes up. But the robot farmer doesn't want your music, iphones etc. The robot farmer's owner might but a farming monopoly would be even easier at that point and monopolies can get ugly. Especially if the population grows and the amount of food produced does not meet the growth in demand.
Another thing: the banks might own the farm, the human farm owner and the robots indirectly - via the loans.
Yeah that's one of my concerns - we might build a Strong AI by just putting stuff together and not fully understanding it. It would work, but we would likely end up creating more evil and suffering in the world - on our part, by abusing and enslaving it.
And looking at the jokers working in that field and their results I doubt they really know what they are doing.
I actually suspect that all our current AIs aren't actually as "Strong AI" as a mere white blood cell or amoeba:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_xh-bkiv_c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvOz4V699gk
Heck I bet many of those "Strong AI" charlatans can't even produce something more "Strong AI" than the two paramecium being eaten in the second video.
Not saying those tiny creatures are that smart, but how stupid are they really? Just because they lack our physical ability and senses doesn't automatically make them stupid.
I don't think we really understand how those tiny creatures work and yet many assume we know how the big creatures work.
What if the big creatures are mostly exoskeletons for the tiny creatures? e.g. the neurons in your brain are not that stupid, they have "locked in syndrome" and need the rest of the body for senses and movement etc.
Another thing how many organizational systems do we have that make 1000 humans smarter than 1 human? 1000 humans being able to do more than 1 human is not the same as being smarter. So how do our brains organize all that and make the supposedly dumb neurons come up with such high levels of smartness?
Augmentation = making us able to do more stuff. Vehicles, computers, tools, even eye-wear augment us and allow us to do more. Stronger, faster, better memory, better senses.
With better and better technology we can augment ourselves even more. Wearable computers like Google's can be a next step. The control interfaces could change as technology improves.
Making strong human-like AI on the other hand = building a more independent entity with its own motivations.
Self driving vehicles might be considered a step towards strong AI but it actually isn't necessary to have a strong AI in order to have a good self-driving vehicle. You just want one that doesn't crash or destroy/kill stuff. You don't need a vehicle that has its own motivations, learns a lot from the surrounding world and then decides to pick its own destinations (and then we enslave it and prevent it from going to those destinations)- do we really need a vehicle like that? How would building something like this make the world a better place?
I'd think we'd be enslaving it, so it would certainly be encumbered. ;)
;).
And as you say, it would certainly be encumbered by our choices (or nonchoices) when building it - there's no such thing as no defaults, in the absence of chosen defaults you have defacto defaults
Then there is the Hardware backdoor from China, using the ASIC chip in US Military components
Citation please?
If you're talking about the Actel chip, it wasn't done by the Chinese: http://www.csoonline.com/article/707542/china-not-to-blame-for-backdoor-in-us-military-chip
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html#MEDIA
I'd prefer that researchers spend time augmenting humans rather than creating AI especially strong AI. We already have plenty of human and nonhuman entities in this world, we're not doing such a great job with them. Why create AIs? To enslave them?
There is a subtle but still significant difference between augmenting humans (or animals) and creating new entities.
There are plenty of things you can do to augment humans:
- background facial and object recognition
- artificial eidetic memory
- easy automatic context-sensitive scheduling of tasks and reminders
- virtual telepathy and telekinesis ( control could be through gestures or actual thought patterns - brain computer interfaces are improving).
- maybe even automatic potential collision detection.
And then there's the military stuff (anti-camouflage, military object recognition, etc).
having the ability to quickly and easily change the component is a blessing.
AFAIK companies like Google and Facebook don't change components.
They don't even swap out individual machines- they swap out entire racks when enough of the machines in the racks are faulty.
When you have say 1+ million servers and only 30000 employees total where probably only 300-3000 are involved in the hardware problems, then you can't really inspect and fix each machine.
Those who might be interested could be companies in cheaper countries (where labour costs are much lower) who can refurbish the computers or identify and sell parts that seem to be OK, in which case they'd offer to buy faulty racks from Google.
Kaspersky are being completely ridiculous if they think the current cyberweapons are much worse than nukes. With nukes we can knock out computers with EMP, even if they are not connected to any network at all. Don't even have to be close enough to vaporize stuff. We can wipe out most major cities in the world with our existing nukes.
Cyberweapons aren't going to stop all or even most of our computers from working. As for the computers that hold our money, the bankers and their friends have probably lost more money than any malware or hacking will. Most banks have backups of data too, and there's usually some sort of checking to ensure that banks don't create or destroy money without authorization.
I wonder if they managed to see the semi-famous traffic light ladies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pm8-5r0ty4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sYR43hSdYw
That's one way to work around problems with electrical power outages... ;)