While you don't need religion for these things, there can be no argument that religion frequently exaggerates these conflicts.
But is it religion per se, or is it the "tribalism" in general (which you later reference). Religion is just one way of defining who's "in my group," and it's a very, very old and common one. But that doesn't mean by getting rid of religion, we'll get rid of tribalism.
Religion is just as often used as an excuse for warfare or conquest that people in power already want to do anyway. It's an ideological way of rallying the people at times, but there are plenty of other possible ideologies one could use for the same purpose.
Look at the biggest killers in the past century -- Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, etc. They didn't need religion to justify their atrocities, and in fact many such figures have eschewed traditional religion (probably because megalomaniacs want a "cult of themselves" rather than implicitly acknowledging a "higher power").
You're right to be afraid of people who are "so fundamentally irrational and tribal and many of whom have a demonstrated propensity for violence," but both religious nuts and atheist nuts can demonstrate those features. Significant numbers of religious people in the world have activity tried to stop wars, to seek peace, to end bigotry, and to seek justice. Many of the civil rights causes that fought against bigotry and led to modern rights were done partly in the name of religion, too. That doesn't mean religion is all good, either -- it just means that it's an ideology, and like all ideologies it can be used for good or for evil, for rational or irrational purposes.
I'm not at all trying to defend religious nuts. But the reality is that there are nuts everywhere. And you, like many people who have bought into their own ideologies and beliefs, have lumped all religious people into one category. Ironic, isn't it? You accuse people of bigotry and irrational tribalism, when your arguments do precisely the same thing.
You missed a rather significant point in the article. Two of those accidents happened when a human WAS in control of the car (which was how they know it wasn't the car's fault)
Yes, but what precisely do they mean by "a human was in control"? Do they mean the human was actually driving at that point normally? Or do they mean that some sort of situation occurred while the AI was driving, the human driver took over rather quickly to resolve the situation (either because the AI alerted the human, the human knew he/she needed to take over in such a situation, or the human overrode the AI because of an impending problem), and the human driver wasn't able to correct things before an accident occurred?
If the latter, the human was technically "in control" at the time of the accident, but it's not clear whether the AI may have had some role in the circumstances leading up to the accident. It still doesn't mean the AI is at fault, but it might mean other important things, like the AI is still not mature enough to deal with certain kinds of scenarios that are likely to cause accidents or something.
Irrelevant to the discussion, but congratulations! Would you like a medal?
Why should I pay for content?
In this particular case, I agree with you that there's no point in linking to a paywalled site when the story is available elsewhere for free.
But to answer your question in general...
Because good quality content often takes resources (including money) to create or assemble. I don't pay for the NYT because I frankly find enough interesting sources online and my interests are broad enough that I can do without. But I have friends who subscribe to them because they care a lot about the kinds of things the NYT covers or they live in New York or care about various aspects of the New York scene or whatever.
I do get paper versions of the New Yorker magazine, not because I care about New York specifically, but because the quality of the writing is significantly above most of the crap that I can find online. And I want writing of that quality to continue to exist SOMEWHERE, rather than only existing because somebody just volunteered to write something expecting nothing in return and got four or five levels of copyeditors to read over that writing and make it better (also, I guess in your world, for free).
Good writing is a skill. Professional writers and copyeditors have serious skills. I have no problem compensating them when I find those skills useful, just as I would pay a plumber or a painter or a doctor or an engineer.
I have my objections to Wiki's policies (primarily editorial), but the fact that they have targeted a self-sustaining endowment, I don't fault them for - Quite the opposite, I give them credit for actually having a viable business plan.
I completely agree with your sentiment here. But the question is not whether that's a good business plan, but rather whether those who have donate that money actually realize they are giving money to support an endowment and a bunch of ancillary services and staff, rather than barely keeping the site "going for another year."
See last year's fundraising message:
DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Yep, that's about the price of buying a programmer a coffee. We're a small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to think and learn. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year. Thank you.
When you include words and phrases like we survive, small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers..., keep it online... another year, etc., it implies that (1) you're barely making it by ("survive"), (2) the majority of your "small non-profit" funds must be going directly into infrastructure when they're not, and (3) if you don't donate now, we may not be able to go on for "another year."
All of that is misleading. At no point do they appeal to an idea that they are trying to build a sustainable long-term endowment or something. I'm sure some people would donate to that too. But right now their rhetoric doesn't match their financial situation or goals... and that's a serious problem when you're trying to convince people to donate.
(And there's also the problem that most people don't realize that the Wikimedia foundation contributes almost nothing toward maintaining, improving, or policing the content that people actually visit the site for -- all the real work for the actual content is generated by volunteers.)
I couldn't be bothered arguing so just let the reverts happen and just washed my hands of ever trying to contribute to wikipedia ever again.
You're lucky you figured this out so quickly. I spent significant amounts of my time back in 2004 to 2006 or so contributing a LOT to Wikipedia before I discovered how broken it was. Then I quit and got out. I'm glad I did because in the years since it's become clear that Wikipedia has no intentions of improving their structure compared to what it was a decade ago.
A year or two ago I went back to some of the articles I authored or contributed significantly to, and while some of them were bigger and better, others had little to no trace of my original contributions, some have been actively "pruned" because of "notability" concerns, only to have new sections created again that were inferior to what was there before, and a couple in fact now propagated misinformation and inaccuracies that I spent so much time getting rid of.
I understand the nature of the web. I don't expect my words and contributions to be "carved into stone tablets" for all time. But I would hope that when I've helped to make something better, it would be part of a chain of events toward continuous improvement. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has no sufficient mechanism to work toward that goal and actually a lot of mechanisms that work against that goal. So, unless you're willing to not only argue against the bureaucracy to make your initial edits but also to police them in perpetuity, there's no point in donating your time to Wikipedia.
However, when you look at the presence of WikiPedia on the internet, it's basically first hit on google in every search on every possible subject. It's probably the number one source for people to find information about a subject. They have a HUGE presence.
Yes -- all the more reason to NOT keep encouraging them. I know most people use Wikipedia on a frequent basis, but if you start poking around the Wikipediocracy posts (not just the one listed in TFS), you start to see a LOT of serious issues there.
(Or, if you prefer a more mainstream media discussion, look here for something recent.)
We should be lamenting your fact that such a screwed up resource has become so dominant as a source of information for so many.
I love the idea of Wikipedia. I was an active contributor back in the early years. But it's never "grown up." It's like a piece of open-source software stuck forever in alpha because active contributors are dwindling, new contributors get mired in a bureaucratic nightmare of argumentation over meaningless "policies" rather than content, and the actual source has remained so open to "Wild-West-style" editing that past hard work is continuously degraded by people deliberately introducing "new bugs into the code."
Meanwhile, they're asking people to donate money -- not to the actual contributors or authors, or even to the admins who police the content to keep the vandalism at bay. But instead to some weird set of people who are only tangentially related to all the supposed "high-value" content that isn't produced or directly managed by them.
Really? If this were a software project, you'd want to contribute to a software project like that? (Well, in all honesty, it IS a software project, not an information source that you're contributing to... but that's another whole discussion....)
And what about honesty in their fundraising? Wikipedia doesn't want people talking about the bureaucratic crap going on behind the scenes or about the rampant vandalism that threatens the apparent value that you point out people place on the site... and they also can't be honest to readers and potential donors that they have plenty of money to keep the servers running ad-free -- they're just choosing to spend it on other things??
Anyone who actually reformed this mess into something even moderately more stable and reliable would definitely make it worth billions, as in your estimation. But it's not there, and until it is reformed significantly, it has a high probability of getting worse and more problematic over time.
This is a rather important distinction since non-profits often depend heavily on interest from investments as their primary stable source of income. So if this is the later case, it sounds like responsible stewardship
While it's possible that this is the case, I believe the objection here may be to the way that Wikipedia is advertising its fundraising drives.
It's one thing to say "Please donate to us so we can have a suitable sustainable endowment to keep this website running forever" and it's a different thing to say "Please donate now, or this site might go down imminently because we can't pay our bills."
According to an older story at Wikipediocracy, the objections seem to be partly that fundraising campaigns are expressed in a dire "We need money now or the lights go off!" kind of tone, when that really isn't the situation.
The first goal of raising an endowment is certainly a laudable one for any sustainable non-profit. The question is whether they're being honest with their donors about what their situation is and what they are going to do with the money.
The question in TFS is another way of asking "How can I spend my whole working life doing the same thing without risk of change?" It's not much of an aspiration.
Your opinion, of course. There are many people in the world who also find plenty of meaning in life outside work, whether in family, hobbies, traveling, other social activities, etc. There are many people who do not feel defined solely by their profession or job who would mostly prefer a stable work situation so they can enjoy their ACTUAL life.
In countries other than the U.S., this "life/work balance" is often better appreciated too -- in parts of Europe, for example, a large portion of the popularion just takes off from work during much of July and August, for example. They tend to actually take "vacations." Working 60-hour weeks is also not the norm in as many professions. Working is a means to enable you to actually do what you want to do in the rest of your life.
And there's another several hundred good questions along those lines. How to avoid your employment being outsourced is not one of them. Your life deserves greater ambitions than planned stagnation.
Your questions are good ones. But for many people there are higher priorities than having the most interesting or exciting or unrepetitive job possible. I personally have looked for a career where I feel like I can be challenged in my job, but I know many people who do what they do mostly so they can have things OUTSIDE of work. For them, it's stability so they can have what they really want, not "planned stagnation." I don't judge them; nor should you. (You're welcome to your own priorities and opinion, of course, as are they.)
Alternatively, ask yourself if playing a game takes intelligence at all. We could argue that all that the pros are doing is making their best estimation of the statistical likelihood that they'll win a hand, then betting accordingly along an optimal path that they've cultivated through experience.
Perhaps that's true.
It's really no different than what this AI was doing either, it would seem.
Except that human players somehow manage to make their estimates through an advanced "higher-level" intuition, while TFA says: "Claudico [the AI] sets its own strategy, Brown noted, and that strategy occupies about two terabytes of data -- far more than the CMU team could analyze."
And here comes the problem with a single definition of "intelligence." If you believe (as I do) that "intelligence" fundamentally requires a level of adaptability, as well as abiilty to alter one's own behavior on the basis of new data, can this AI do anything like that? It seems it cannot, because TFA later talks about how the next steps will be to spend time analyzing the 80,000 hands of pro poker playing they have on file and "improving the algorithms" which the AI uses to generate its 2 TB strategy. This is a tremendous achievement that should not be underestimated, but ultimately we're still looking at stats from a "black box" and tweaking some of its inputs until its output stats are better.
Meanwhile, you ask whether playing a game takes "any intelligence at all." If it does not, then why are these very, very smart people taking months and years to create a program that can beat humans? The answer, to me, lies in the fundamental nature of true "intelligence," which requires levels of abstraction, concept formation, and higher-level adaptability that doesn't seem to be part of most AI algorithms in any meaningful way.
Everyone's always talking about how the "goalposts" are supposedly moved for AI all the time. I have the same goalposts that AI researchers declared back in the 1950s in terms of concept formation and adaptability.
When they have created an AI that plays poker at this high of a level and can actually TWEAK ITSELF to beat human champions consistently, THEN I'll begin to consider whether it's actually "intelligent." Give any of these human poker champions a perfect memory and the ability to create a 2 TB optimally-derived strategy that he/she could tweak however, and that human player would clearly blow the pants off of any other player in the world, as well as any current "AI." Yet somehow humans manage to do well without all of that perfect access and recall to huge quantities of information... and it's in that higher-level sorting and adaptability that the secret to true "intelligence" lies.
Or, get this AI to the point that it can beat any human poker players in the world, and then let it learn to play another card game on a high level without any human assistance or tweaking of algorithms. Then I'll believe it's closer to "intelligence." Or let this poker-playing AI figure out how to make me a decent sandwich BY ITSELF or with some basic instructions from me. Or whatever. The specific task is irrelevant, but one point of intelligence should be the ability to develop NEW SKILLS independently, rather than requiring human tinkering and tweaking with algorithms. It's great to have 2 TB of optimally-generated perfect strategy to win against humans, and it's a fascinating and awesome experiment -- and I COMPLETELY applaud the efforts of this team. But, to me, it doesn't qualify yet as anything close to "intelligence" just because the generated strategy happens to be too long for humans to spend time parsing.
Another case of something being perfectly legal if done for free (your friends helping you move or giving someone a ride) . . . . but the moment money changes hands, everyone wants a cut.
It doesn't just have to do with "money changing hands" -- it has to do with the difference between "your friends" (i.e., people you know and probably have some sort of trust/relationship with) vs. asking some random 3rd party dude whom you've never met before to take your stuff and trust it with him in his truck.
Obviously you must have never had to deal with a dispute or error involving professional movers, or you've never had a package lost or damaged by a 3rd-party courier or whatever.
These sorts of things can be a mess to sort out, and without proper legal documentation and regulation, this random dude can just say, "Uh, what package?" or "Yeah, I know it's half destroyed, but it looked like that when I picked it up." Or whatever.
When "your friends" are doing it, and they break your stuff or lose something, you hopefully can trust that you'll sort it out. This random dude, though -- how can you even find him, let alone hold him responsible?
That's why we have standard contracts for people who transport valuable items commercially. It may not matter if you just need a guy to move a $50 piece of junk across town, but if it's something worth hundreds or thousands of dollars or has sentimental value, it may matter.
All of that said, TFA implies that the company in question DOES handle some of this:
The company already offers a bill of lading and $1 million insurance, in addition to whatever insurance their laborers already have.
These are the most important things -- a formal bill of lading will ensure that there is legal documentation of items transported, responsibilities of all parties, fees, etc. I've only hired professional movers a couple of times, and I've definitely been happy to have those things spelled out somewhere when things went wrong. And the insurance hopefully will cover various problems.
But apparently what the state is complaining about is the various drivers and their credentials. Again from TFA:
Requiring [the drivers] to register and get a commercial license would be too complicated and could hurt their business model, Ervin said.
I don't know exactly why Texas has these regulations -- it could be a power/money grab as you suggest, or there could be valid legal reasons to protect consumers. I don't know. What I do know is that the Texas legislature apparently enacted such regulations for some reason, and whatever the rules are -- all people who are transporting goods professionally should play by the same ones. Legally, the threshold is often set by whether people are making a profit off of it, but even if some random dude offered to move my stuff FOR FREE, I'd still want most of these legal protections.
Perhaps some of the regulations should be repealed -- I don't know. But just because some of them might be unnecessary doesn't justify your rant: there are often damn good reasons for some regulations to help protect all parties involved.
what a romantic picture you paint. in this world you suceed by being a maximum cynic who has the best ability to screw over people.
What the devil are you talking about? Are you even responding to my post? I'm not encouraging anyone to "screw over" anyone else. I'm just pointing out that our system is broken in a lot of ways, and we currently have a bit of a disconnect between jobs that are offered vs. jobs that people are wiling to do. Some of that is due to "market inefficiencies," i.e., we're actually paying wages that are too low for labor. And in those cases, we should be paying more. Some of that is due to shifts in how long people tend to stay in jobs or learn enough to become "skilled workers." (A lot of low-paying dirty jobs are paid on the basis of how much volume you can do: people who work in these jobs over a few years will learn to be more efficient and can often earn decent wages. But most people who just are "looking for any job" will quit within a week after starting because it's "too hard" for what they earn.)
And there are lots of other things going on, like I said about how we create expectations that educated workers will find better jobs when there often aren't enough such jobs to go around. Etc.
What's your solution? Who is supposed to do the dirty and laborious jobs? Or are you just a "drive-by" AC who likes to lob insults but has nothing of value to offer in response?
They seem to feel "owed" by society a job, and to be treated nicely and fairly.
These are reasonable expectations of a functioning society. That these expectations are considered to be ridiculously entitled is a reflection on society rather than the people who hold them.
It is a "reasonable expectation of a functioning society" to expect that jobs exist for you to do and make money to survive.
It is NOT reasonable to expect that society will simply provide you with the specific job you want, a job you find engaging or interesting, or a job that's fun or enjoyable. Despite huge advances in machines and technology, there still are plenty of jobs that require hard work, often physical labor, or tedious activities. Someone has to do them. Society may "owe" you a job -- but it doesn't owe you a job that will enable you to play video games all day long, or a job as an actor or a musician or whatever.
Yet there seems to be some truth, at least in the U.S., to the idea that many immigrants (including those are not legal) do jobs that are too dirty, too laborious, or too unpleasant to find Americans who are willing to work relatively cheaply.
Why is that? How many people end up staying at their parents for a couple years now in their 20s while "job hunting," rather than taking a hard job as a janitor, or a dishwasher or line cook in a restaurant, or mowing lawns, or doing hard manual labor? In previous generations, there would be no question -- most kids were done with any schooling they had by 4th-6th grade, and then they'd be working on the farm or apprenticing to someone or off to the mines or the factories. They needed money to survive. I'm NOT saying we should go back to that, but the reality is our expectations about THE KIND OF JOBS many younger people are willing to do have changed significantly. Society doesn't owe them a job they like.
This is not a new trend, but if we look at the statistics for the number of people in their 20s (and even 30s) who are still dependent on their parents, we see there's a trend here... and it's not just due to lack of jobs. It's due to lack of jobs that younger people are actually willing to do.
(To be fair, we've also created unreasonable expectations here. We tell kids they need to finish high school, or they need to go to college. And then when they get out, they could easily end up working a blue-collar job that my grandfathers worked at with their 4th or 5th grade educations. There's a disconnect here on multiple levels.)
I didn't always get congratulated JUST for trying
Noticing children's effort rather than results is better for producing successful adults, as it instils perseverance rather than a sense that your skills are innate and immutable.
To a point. You need both. Also, studies have shown that the results are NOT as good if praise is disproportionate to achievement and effort. One should not be congratulated "JUST for trying," but only for trying HARD. When you get a trophy for "just showing up," it dilutes the actual praise for those who really win trophies, as well as for those who didn't quite win but really made their best effort.
I absolutely agree that STRONG effort should be praised and is good reinforcement for kids. So is recognizing actual achievement and succeeding in goals, though. Both are helpful. But praising someone for any minimal effort ("just for trying") is not generally helpful. The expectation should be that we all "try" in life. When you try VERY HARD and/or actually SUCCEED, then a reward is more appropriate.
Newer cars must adhere to stricter emission standards.
And older cars should be held to SOME standard.
I didn't realize how bad it was until I lived for a while in a state without mandatory annual inspection/emissions tests. I bought a car soon after moving, and I discovered that I couldn't really use the normal "vent" to blow air into my car from the outside because it smelled like awful exhaust a large portion of the time. I was stuck almost always using recirculating air, even when it was nice outside and I just wanted some fresh air to move around a bit inside the car.
Anyhow, at first I thought there was something wrong with the car that I just bought -- maybe it was leaking exhaust somewhere? Nope. Then I started looking around at the other cars on the road and realized how many old beat-up cars were driving around with billowing smoke coming out of them. Basically, whenever I was driving around a group of more than a few cars, chances are that one of them is outputting insane amounts of crap.
Never experienced this when I lived in four other states that had inspections and emissions standards. Just my own anecdotal observation, of course.
Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.
It would take a couple more centuries before authors (not printers) tended to be granted copyright and thus had primary control over profit.
(I of course take your point that Twitter making money off of this would be copyright infringement in the modern sense. But your idyllic "back in the mists of time" when no one was guaranteed profit and authors got some of it... well, it wasn't quite like that.)
I agree with you that the analogy with music and programming is not exact. HOWEVER...
I think that the music equivalent of programming would be something like song writing or composing. With playing a song, your are really just following the instructions that somebody else gave you, like following a recipe in a cook book.
I think that's a bit of a misunderstanding of how one gets to the "top tier" of musicians, and for that matter, how one becomes a great chef.
It what you say were true, no violinist would ever bother recording another version of some piece of music. In fact, nobody would ever bother even going to see a concert of a standard piece, since there would be nothing new -- it would just be the same "script" or "recipe," and most well-known pieces already have arguably a number of "perfect" recordings (at least in terms of "playing all the notes in the right rhythm and in tune" or whatever your standard is).
No pop star would ever bother recording a cover of an older song. After all, a great singer already did it.
But of course that isn't true. Composers don't generally write every single detail of interpretation in a score, just like there's a lot of "unwritten knowledge" in most recipes about how to actually produce good results. Beyond that, music is a process that happens in real-time. A skilled performer will be sensitive to everything from how their instrument sounds that day to the quality of acoustics in the playing environment to the fact that today they just happened to play the high note in that first theme a little stronger, and maybe they'll bring that note out again a little later because it creates a cool connection (which listeners may not consciously be aware of, but it suddenly brings out an emotion or creates a feeling of continuity which changes the piece).
Performance is an artform at the highest levels. You may not be interested in such nuances, and that's fine. But people who spend hours and hours every day of their lives practicing instruments aren't just "learning notes." They are developing techniques, learning ways to produce better interpretations of music (beyond the basic blueprint in the score), gaining a facility to make real-time adjustments that will create a better experience for listeners at a live event, etc. Similarly, a skilled chef may follow the same instructions you do from a cookbook, but the result in quality may be vastly different. The execution often makes the difference between mediocre and truly great.
I've had people tell me that a particular piece of music was worthless, even when played by top performers who can do flawless execution of the notes. I've then played them a recording of the exact same piece (with all the same notes, played from the same score) played by another performer -- and I've had people say they suddenly thought the piece was amazing... they heard things they never did before, or it had a kind of "energy" that made it enjoyable or whatever.
Anyhow -- this isn't just about music. It's recognizing the value of performance in all walks of life. It's also about recognizing how great artists, whether they generate a product or whether they perform on a stage, are able to tap into dynamic and creative processes to produce effects that are much better than others. You may have been given the greatest set of Powerpoint slides in the world, and you may basically follow a script for a presentation -- but there can still be a huge difference between a completely engaging live presentation and a crappy one that "just follows the instructions that somebody else gave you."
I know you probably didn't mean to denigrate performers, but I think we often tend to think of what's written down as the "primary stuff," no matter what line of work you're in. But there is a lot of knowledge and skill that's passed down orally and learned verbally or through tactile/kinesthetic engagement which makes the difference between following a rec
But according to some nuts, under the constitution the feds can't do anything except manage wars.
I'm NOT one of the "nuts" you mention -- I don't think we really want to go back to the "original meaning" and forget everything that happened since.
But your post is full of a lot of inaccuracies. For one, most of those "nuts" want to restrict the Constitution to the enumerated powers, which include a lot of things other than wars. They just have a more strict interpretation of certain clauses there, like "regulating commerce."
The constitution as it existed in 1781 is not the same as it is today.
The Constitution didn't exist in 1781. It was drafted in 1787 and enacted in 1789.
People forget all the amendments, all the judicial decisions,
Here's where the "nuts" differ from you. They do NOT forget the amendments, since the amendment process is specifically authorized in the Constitution itself. The various court decisions you refer to have often "reinterpreted" the Constitution to mean very different things than it originally did, though. You may think those "reinterpretations" are important, but it is a somewhat different thing from a formal amendment process.
and the great big massive war we had that overturned the constitution so that slavery could finally be abolished which resulted in a strong centralized federal government no matter what the hell the founding fathers who owned slaves would have wanted.
This is where you go off your rocker completely. Nobody "overturned the Constitution" with the Civil War. The Constitution after the Civil War was in effect after the Civil War the same way it was before the Civil War.
So how was slavery ended? A formal amendment process to the Constitution resulting in the 13th Amendment. The 14th and 15th Amendments provided further clarification about rights after abolition.
Once again, nobody "overturned the Constitution" -- it was amended using the exact process described explicitly in Article V of the original Constitution enacted in 1789.
As for your claim about a "strong centralized federal government," you have to wait until the 20th century really. The Supreme Court kept reining in the federal government according to fairly traditional interpretations of enumerated powers well into the early 20th century.
Now, compare that to the prohibition of other drugs that occurred later, e.g., marijuana, etc. No Constitutional amendment required. Amazing! Why not? The Constitution was fundamentally changed in the late 1930s due to a series of Supreme Court decisions that rapidly and greatly expanded the powers of the federal government (arguably due to pressure from the Executive), allowing things like the Interstate Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause to be used for just about anything... from Social Security and Medicare to workers' rights acts, non-discrimination, etc. All of this could have been (and WAS) ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the early 20th century... but then they just stopped.
Effectively, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Constitution went from a system of "enumerated powers" and limited government to one where "anything goes" for the federal governm
Since when has traveling by car and plane been comparable? For long distances, I suppose. I'm not going to drive between NYC and LA. But on a daily basis it is not.
The issue, I imagine, mostly has to do with environmentalists' concern about the inefficiency of plane travel in general. Environmentalists tend to criticize speakers who jet around the world frequently for example. For another example, I've seen a number of conferences in recent years that have tried to encourage "remote participation" via Skype or some other video conferencing tools to avoid perceived waste for travel.
For many such people, traveling medium-length distances by car has traditionally seemed the more "environmental" choice. They may not drive from NYC to LA, but they might drive between cities in the Northeast rather than fly if driving were "better for the environment." I think the common perception for decades among environmentalists is that "flying is always bad." TFA suggests that is probably an inaccurate generalization, though it's not a new observation.
This is one of those arguments where the units can really change perception. I'm NOT trying to ignite one of those frequent Slashdot wars between those who say liters/100km is the best measure or mpg is stupid or whatever. I think various measures are better for various comparisons or circumstances.
In this case, buses are traveling a fixed route, so the mileage is fixed. Buses are also frequently used for commuting fixed distances. Therefore, what we mostly care about is how much gas is used per unit distance, not how many units distance we could travel per unit fuel.
Converting your stats to their reciprocal measurement gives:
-- A bus fuel efficiency is about 20 gallons per 100 miles.
-- Fuel consumption over number of passengers for buses is 2 gallons per 100 miles.
-- Average mpg of a private vehicle is 5 gallons per 100 miles. With two people in a vehicle, that's 2.5 gallons per 100 miles per traveler.
I draw your attention to the last statistic, since it's the place where things begin to look potentially misleading. If you use mpg, it looks like a bigger difference between bus and car: 40 mpg for two people in a car vs. 50 for a bus. But that's only a 0.5 gallon difference for a fixed route of 100 miles. Whereas if you were talking about a similar "difference of 10 mpg" between, say, your average 20 mpg single-driver vehicle and a 10 mpg SUV, that's 5 gallons extra for the SUV on the 100-mile route.
Bottom line: mpg stats can be misleading when talking about gas consumption for fixed routes and distances (which are what buses are often used for). I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, only expressing numbers in a way that might make comparisons easier to evaluate in terms of fuel use.
I meant that WE should be able to see the actual results. If they want the public to support this, they should make their data available to the public.
I have to disagree with the statement that content doesn't matter. Without considering the content, you cannot judge whether the student is displaying reasoning and making cogent arguments, or merely faking it. it seems to me that the number of people I deal with who cannot tell the difference is increasing - a coincidence? Perhaps not.
I think both the lack of knowledge of mechanics and of the content can be problems for different populations.
I know people who have taught writing at various universities. This is only anecdotal, but I can tell you that at a couple top-tier universities, the writing courses were almost solely graded on CONTENT, not mechanics of writing. (Frankly, as someone not in the writing department, I was shocked to hear this... grammar errors and bad style simply didn't matter that much.) I encountered students at such schools who had "deep thoughts" about various issues, but they often wrote essays that were barely grammatical or had all sorts of weird eccentric writing habits that didn't help their arguments. But they were taught to generate content.
On the other hand, the people I've talked to at lesser universities in English departments say they care very little about content, only things like grammar, spelling, etc. Grading is pretty much an "automated process" already.
Is this a class difference being reinforced between different types of universities and their emphasis on different elements of writing? After all, the smart kids at the top university are likely to pick up enough grammar etc. along the way that they'll be at least as good as the middling university. But they aren't being trained to express themselves clearly or with a good sense of writing style. Meanwhile, the kids at the cheaper college are getting little guidance in formulating any complex thoughts at all, let alone communicating them. All they get is a glorified spell-checker and grammar-checker.
Both basic writing mechanics/style AND attention to content are necessary to train people to communicate. I think different places are failing on both counts in various ways.
It's faster than manually marking 150 papers, but still takes him about 15-20 hours of labor over the course of 2-3 days.
Frankly, if he's going to take such a coarse approach, the question is why he's bothering to read most of them at all. It seems like he doesn't care much about content. It also doesn't sound like he's giving any significant feedback to students. (And for final papers, maybe 10% of students would actually read it anyway.)
So, why not streamline the process further, if you don't care enough to really think about the content? Say the grammar score is accurate to +/-10%, so if it scores the paper as 90%, your husband's detailed assessment would basically always fall in the 80-100% range for the grade. If the final paper is worth 10% of the overall course grade, that's only a 2% difference in the final grade. If a student has a 87%, he's going to get a B+ no matter what the skimming tells you. It would only make a difference for a student with a borderline grade, so if the student is not on a grade borderline, why even bother skimming it? Just glance at it for 10 seconds to make sure it's English and it's long enough.
If I were already willing to let an automated grammar score essentially dictate final paper grades (which I'm not, though I generally haven't read 150 of them at once), I'd probably make up a spreadsheet first and see which students the final paper grade would actually make a difference for. For most students, it may be sufficient to just say, "Yeah, this falls somewhere between an A and a B-minus." What the paper actually is won't make a difference in the final average. If you can make that determination of the rough grade by glancing at the paper, why read further unless you actually are going to care about content?
In fact, assuming the final paper is only worth 10% of a grade, and assuming that a complete paper that passes a minimal grammar check will always receive, say, a grade of at least 70%, chances are that the final paper grade simply doesn't matter for most students. Focus on the borderline kids. If the paper is worth 15% or 20% of the final grade, it might be a higher percentage, but you could still tweak the algorithm and the spreadsheet to help determine which students really need detailed grading.
Using a system like this, unless the final paper is worth a really large percentage of the final grade, he could probably drop the number of papers he actually needs to skim to maybe 1/4 of them or less. The rest could only be flagged if they were too short or had a high plagiarism score.
Please note that I am NOT encouraging such a system, which seems to be devaluing students' effort. But if your husband is already willing to leave most of the paper scoring to computer algorithms, why not narrow things down to focus on papers where his expert opinion is actually going to make a difference in the final grade?? He can then devote his time to students where his evaluation matters, rather than being fatigued from 20 hours of grading to the point that he doesn't even care what he's looking at anymore.
(And by the way -- if they have a high plagiarism score and cut-and-pasted entire paragraphs, why aren't they being reported for academic misconduct, rather than just receiving an incomplete?!? It's one thing to forget one or two citations -- dumping entire paragraphs into a paper without citations is clearly academic dishonesty.)
Anyway, this discussion is silly, since it is happening in a data-free environment. It would be far more meaningful if we could see the human and AI grades given to the same papers, side by side, preferably in a blind test, and then decide with is better.
Umm, I hate to state the obvious, but from TFA:
The results of the trials have been assessed according to two criteria: whether the computer scores correlate to the human scores within the same margin as two different human markers; and whether the scores generated by the computer distribute in the same way as an equivalent number marked by humans.
Rabinowitz said the trials show the artificial intelligence solutions perform as well, or even better, than the teachers involved.
So, TFA mentions they've already done something very much like your proposed test, although there's no mention of whether this review was "blind" (likely not, or they probably would have mentioned it).
My issue isn't so much with whether such AI can evaluate the average exam; I'm sure it can be calibrated to give a score in the right range for 90%+ papers, even knowing very little about English grammar, since there are various metrics that can be used to look for much simpler patterns or characteristics that will be common to good papers.
Some real issues are:
(1) Is the computer scoring methodology completely open and subject to examination? If you're just feeding essays into a "black box," you have no idea whether the scores are being generated by something that really knows grammar well or is using simplified proxies that still might score 90% or 95% or 99% of papers in the right range. Ideally, you want a program that can identify precisely what supposed "errors" it finds and break down the score in detail. I'd hope that the government would be looking for these characteristics.
(2) Can the AI identify when it is likely to fail? Really good writers or really bad writers or really weird writers might create something that's enough out of the norm to confuse the AI -- either generating more or fewer errors than it should. AI like this is usually pretty good at "average" writing which it is trained on. The question is how it handles edge cases. Even if it's bad at evaluating them, it needs to be able to identify when it's likely to make a bad evaluation. For high-stakes testing, it's critical that EVERY such edge case be flagged for human checking, even if there are 10 times as many which are "false positives" and which the computer would still score okay.
Who is this particular "superior"? And he/she/it has more than one posterior? (Or perhaps only the inferior posteriors are plural; maybe this particular superior also has a superior posterior?)
(Sorry... couldn't resist. The question is whether grammar checkers would be good enough to realize the incorrect apostrophe usage here. I have my doubts. Also, I'd be interested in a grammar checker that could spot your superfluous comma. I'd be even more intrigued if such a grammar checker could note the reasons why the comma may be useful in your case, even though it's against the traditional "rules.")
But they are still a damned sight better than pretty much anything the Republicans have to offer, where your choices are between the shit sandwich establishment, and the diarrhea buffet of the tea party.
Okay, let's examine your evidence. (For the record, I am neither Republican nor Democrat.)
Both may be in bed with Wall Street, and prone to expanding the surveillence state and engaging in foreign adventures.
Well, at least we agree on that.
But only one wants to eliminate the entire "welfare state" (sorry joke that it is in this nation), and roll the clock back to the pre-1930s.
This is somewhat true, though arguably the Democrats have also been guilty for not trying for further reform. Wealth disparities have been growing significantly in the past few decades, including under the watch of Democrats -- and the fact that they are "in bed with Wall Street," as you put it, means that Dems are about as likely as Reps to bail out the rich while making only minor advances for the poor.
In sum, there's a big difference in rhetoric, but in terms of actual economic impact or actual policy, the result is nowhere near as big. And let's be frank -- except for a few extremists who don't represent the Republican Party in general, none of the Republicans are really going to try to roll things back to pre-1930s. They're not going to actually try to repeal Social Security for example... it would destroy their reputation with older voters that lean conservative and depend on that. They're not going to get rid of Medicare. They may fight expansions of these programs, but anything more than that is just rhetoric -- just like Democrats' insistence that they are fighting for the poor when they're happy to dole out huge amounts of money to the rich and Wall Street also shows a gap between rhetoric and actual policy.
Only one is standing there in the building building and saying "I don't smell any smoke" as they ignore all the science and data pointing to global warming.
Again, we have to look at effectiveness and actual policy outcomes, not just rhetoric. Obama has great rhetoric on the environment, but has he actually done anywhere near enough? And you can argue that Congress is uncooperative, but the EPA does have some control here, and Obama has chosen not to be more aggressive with his policies. From the link:
There are legitimate roadblocks to progress in Congress, but as White House critics and supporters alike acknowledge, federal agencies set meaningful environmental policy on their own. And when it comes to climate change, their record ranges from the unimpressive to the downright harmful. The Environmental Protection Agency has advanced some modest policies that will result in minor emissions cuts, but at the same time, other agencies have shown an astonishing willingness to expand an industry whose bottom line depends on cooking the planet beyond repair.
Once again -- the "in bed with Wall Street" trumps Democratic rhetoric. So, you're asking people to choose people who are claiming to save the planet when they're barely doing anything over people who are idiots and science denialists but are at least honest that they care about things like jobs and business over the environment.
Yeah, there's a difference I suppose. But it's not a reason to vote for either party.
Only one is trying to tell women what to do with their bodies, and advocates legislating according to their particular sky fairy.
Once again, we need to look at action vs. rhetoric. Of course the Democrats say they are committed to "right to choose," but look at how they have let restrictions on abortions and clinics get worse over the years. Look at how they have resisted more appropriate regula
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While you don't need religion for these things, there can be no argument that religion frequently exaggerates these conflicts.
But is it religion per se, or is it the "tribalism" in general (which you later reference). Religion is just one way of defining who's "in my group," and it's a very, very old and common one. But that doesn't mean by getting rid of religion, we'll get rid of tribalism.
Religion is just as often used as an excuse for warfare or conquest that people in power already want to do anyway. It's an ideological way of rallying the people at times, but there are plenty of other possible ideologies one could use for the same purpose.
Look at the biggest killers in the past century -- Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, etc. They didn't need religion to justify their atrocities, and in fact many such figures have eschewed traditional religion (probably because megalomaniacs want a "cult of themselves" rather than implicitly acknowledging a "higher power").
You're right to be afraid of people who are "so fundamentally irrational and tribal and many of whom have a demonstrated propensity for violence," but both religious nuts and atheist nuts can demonstrate those features. Significant numbers of religious people in the world have activity tried to stop wars, to seek peace, to end bigotry, and to seek justice. Many of the civil rights causes that fought against bigotry and led to modern rights were done partly in the name of religion, too. That doesn't mean religion is all good, either -- it just means that it's an ideology, and like all ideologies it can be used for good or for evil, for rational or irrational purposes.
I'm not at all trying to defend religious nuts. But the reality is that there are nuts everywhere. And you, like many people who have bought into their own ideologies and beliefs, have lumped all religious people into one category. Ironic, isn't it? You accuse people of bigotry and irrational tribalism, when your arguments do precisely the same thing.
You missed a rather significant point in the article. Two of those accidents happened when a human WAS in control of the car (which was how they know it wasn't the car's fault)
Yes, but what precisely do they mean by "a human was in control"? Do they mean the human was actually driving at that point normally? Or do they mean that some sort of situation occurred while the AI was driving, the human driver took over rather quickly to resolve the situation (either because the AI alerted the human, the human knew he/she needed to take over in such a situation, or the human overrode the AI because of an impending problem), and the human driver wasn't able to correct things before an accident occurred?
If the latter, the human was technically "in control" at the time of the accident, but it's not clear whether the AI may have had some role in the circumstances leading up to the accident. It still doesn't mean the AI is at fault, but it might mean other important things, like the AI is still not mature enough to deal with certain kinds of scenarios that are likely to cause accidents or something.
I give content away for free because I want to.
Irrelevant to the discussion, but congratulations! Would you like a medal?
Why should I pay for content?
In this particular case, I agree with you that there's no point in linking to a paywalled site when the story is available elsewhere for free.
But to answer your question in general...
Because good quality content often takes resources (including money) to create or assemble. I don't pay for the NYT because I frankly find enough interesting sources online and my interests are broad enough that I can do without. But I have friends who subscribe to them because they care a lot about the kinds of things the NYT covers or they live in New York or care about various aspects of the New York scene or whatever.
I do get paper versions of the New Yorker magazine, not because I care about New York specifically, but because the quality of the writing is significantly above most of the crap that I can find online. And I want writing of that quality to continue to exist SOMEWHERE, rather than only existing because somebody just volunteered to write something expecting nothing in return and got four or five levels of copyeditors to read over that writing and make it better (also, I guess in your world, for free).
Good writing is a skill. Professional writers and copyeditors have serious skills. I have no problem compensating them when I find those skills useful, just as I would pay a plumber or a painter or a doctor or an engineer.
I have my objections to Wiki's policies (primarily editorial), but the fact that they have targeted a self-sustaining endowment, I don't fault them for - Quite the opposite, I give them credit for actually having a viable business plan.
I completely agree with your sentiment here. But the question is not whether that's a good business plan, but rather whether those who have donate that money actually realize they are giving money to support an endowment and a bunch of ancillary services and staff, rather than barely keeping the site "going for another year."
See last year's fundraising message:
DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Yep, that's about the price of buying a programmer a coffee. We're a small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to think and learn. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year. Thank you.
When you include words and phrases like we survive, small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers..., keep it online... another year, etc., it implies that (1) you're barely making it by ("survive"), (2) the majority of your "small non-profit" funds must be going directly into infrastructure when they're not, and (3) if you don't donate now, we may not be able to go on for "another year."
All of that is misleading. At no point do they appeal to an idea that they are trying to build a sustainable long-term endowment or something. I'm sure some people would donate to that too. But right now their rhetoric doesn't match their financial situation or goals... and that's a serious problem when you're trying to convince people to donate.
(And there's also the problem that most people don't realize that the Wikimedia foundation contributes almost nothing toward maintaining, improving, or policing the content that people actually visit the site for -- all the real work for the actual content is generated by volunteers.)
I couldn't be bothered arguing so just let the reverts happen and just washed my hands of ever trying to contribute to wikipedia ever again.
You're lucky you figured this out so quickly. I spent significant amounts of my time back in 2004 to 2006 or so contributing a LOT to Wikipedia before I discovered how broken it was. Then I quit and got out. I'm glad I did because in the years since it's become clear that Wikipedia has no intentions of improving their structure compared to what it was a decade ago.
A year or two ago I went back to some of the articles I authored or contributed significantly to, and while some of them were bigger and better, others had little to no trace of my original contributions, some have been actively "pruned" because of "notability" concerns, only to have new sections created again that were inferior to what was there before, and a couple in fact now propagated misinformation and inaccuracies that I spent so much time getting rid of.
I understand the nature of the web. I don't expect my words and contributions to be "carved into stone tablets" for all time. But I would hope that when I've helped to make something better, it would be part of a chain of events toward continuous improvement. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has no sufficient mechanism to work toward that goal and actually a lot of mechanisms that work against that goal. So, unless you're willing to not only argue against the bureaucracy to make your initial edits but also to police them in perpetuity, there's no point in donating your time to Wikipedia.
However, when you look at the presence of WikiPedia on the internet, it's basically first hit on google in every search on every possible subject. It's probably the number one source for people to find information about a subject. They have a HUGE presence.
Yes -- all the more reason to NOT keep encouraging them. I know most people use Wikipedia on a frequent basis, but if you start poking around the Wikipediocracy posts (not just the one listed in TFS), you start to see a LOT of serious issues there.
Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source of information. Let me repeat that: Wikipedia is NOT a reliable source of information.
(Or, if you prefer a more mainstream media discussion, look here for something recent.)
We should be lamenting your fact that such a screwed up resource has become so dominant as a source of information for so many.
I love the idea of Wikipedia. I was an active contributor back in the early years. But it's never "grown up." It's like a piece of open-source software stuck forever in alpha because active contributors are dwindling, new contributors get mired in a bureaucratic nightmare of argumentation over meaningless "policies" rather than content, and the actual source has remained so open to "Wild-West-style" editing that past hard work is continuously degraded by people deliberately introducing "new bugs into the code."
Meanwhile, they're asking people to donate money -- not to the actual contributors or authors, or even to the admins who police the content to keep the vandalism at bay. But instead to some weird set of people who are only tangentially related to all the supposed "high-value" content that isn't produced or directly managed by them.
Really? If this were a software project, you'd want to contribute to a software project like that? (Well, in all honesty, it IS a software project, not an information source that you're contributing to... but that's another whole discussion....)
And what about honesty in their fundraising? Wikipedia doesn't want people talking about the bureaucratic crap going on behind the scenes or about the rampant vandalism that threatens the apparent value that you point out people place on the site... and they also can't be honest to readers and potential donors that they have plenty of money to keep the servers running ad-free -- they're just choosing to spend it on other things??
Anyone who actually reformed this mess into something even moderately more stable and reliable would definitely make it worth billions, as in your estimation. But it's not there, and until it is reformed significantly, it has a high probability of getting worse and more problematic over time.
This is a rather important distinction since non-profits often depend heavily on interest from investments as their primary stable source of income. So if this is the later case, it sounds like responsible stewardship
While it's possible that this is the case, I believe the objection here may be to the way that Wikipedia is advertising its fundraising drives.
It's one thing to say "Please donate to us so we can have a suitable sustainable endowment to keep this website running forever" and it's a different thing to say "Please donate now, or this site might go down imminently because we can't pay our bills."
According to an older story at Wikipediocracy, the objections seem to be partly that fundraising campaigns are expressed in a dire "We need money now or the lights go off!" kind of tone, when that really isn't the situation.
The first goal of raising an endowment is certainly a laudable one for any sustainable non-profit. The question is whether they're being honest with their donors about what their situation is and what they are going to do with the money.
The question in TFS is another way of asking "How can I spend my whole working life doing the same thing without risk of change?" It's not much of an aspiration.
Your opinion, of course. There are many people in the world who also find plenty of meaning in life outside work, whether in family, hobbies, traveling, other social activities, etc. There are many people who do not feel defined solely by their profession or job who would mostly prefer a stable work situation so they can enjoy their ACTUAL life.
In countries other than the U.S., this "life/work balance" is often better appreciated too -- in parts of Europe, for example, a large portion of the popularion just takes off from work during much of July and August, for example. They tend to actually take "vacations." Working 60-hour weeks is also not the norm in as many professions. Working is a means to enable you to actually do what you want to do in the rest of your life.
And there's another several hundred good questions along those lines. How to avoid your employment being outsourced is not one of them. Your life deserves greater ambitions than planned stagnation.
Your questions are good ones. But for many people there are higher priorities than having the most interesting or exciting or unrepetitive job possible. I personally have looked for a career where I feel like I can be challenged in my job, but I know many people who do what they do mostly so they can have things OUTSIDE of work. For them, it's stability so they can have what they really want, not "planned stagnation." I don't judge them; nor should you. (You're welcome to your own priorities and opinion, of course, as are they.)
Alternatively, ask yourself if playing a game takes intelligence at all. We could argue that all that the pros are doing is making their best estimation of the statistical likelihood that they'll win a hand, then betting accordingly along an optimal path that they've cultivated through experience.
Perhaps that's true.
It's really no different than what this AI was doing either, it would seem.
Except that human players somehow manage to make their estimates through an advanced "higher-level" intuition, while TFA says: "Claudico [the AI] sets its own strategy, Brown noted, and that strategy occupies about two terabytes of data -- far more than the CMU team could analyze."
And here comes the problem with a single definition of "intelligence." If you believe (as I do) that "intelligence" fundamentally requires a level of adaptability, as well as abiilty to alter one's own behavior on the basis of new data, can this AI do anything like that? It seems it cannot, because TFA later talks about how the next steps will be to spend time analyzing the 80,000 hands of pro poker playing they have on file and "improving the algorithms" which the AI uses to generate its 2 TB strategy. This is a tremendous achievement that should not be underestimated, but ultimately we're still looking at stats from a "black box" and tweaking some of its inputs until its output stats are better.
Meanwhile, you ask whether playing a game takes "any intelligence at all." If it does not, then why are these very, very smart people taking months and years to create a program that can beat humans? The answer, to me, lies in the fundamental nature of true "intelligence," which requires levels of abstraction, concept formation, and higher-level adaptability that doesn't seem to be part of most AI algorithms in any meaningful way.
Everyone's always talking about how the "goalposts" are supposedly moved for AI all the time. I have the same goalposts that AI researchers declared back in the 1950s in terms of concept formation and adaptability.
When they have created an AI that plays poker at this high of a level and can actually TWEAK ITSELF to beat human champions consistently, THEN I'll begin to consider whether it's actually "intelligent." Give any of these human poker champions a perfect memory and the ability to create a 2 TB optimally-derived strategy that he/she could tweak however, and that human player would clearly blow the pants off of any other player in the world, as well as any current "AI." Yet somehow humans manage to do well without all of that perfect access and recall to huge quantities of information... and it's in that higher-level sorting and adaptability that the secret to true "intelligence" lies.
Or, get this AI to the point that it can beat any human poker players in the world, and then let it learn to play another card game on a high level without any human assistance or tweaking of algorithms. Then I'll believe it's closer to "intelligence." Or let this poker-playing AI figure out how to make me a decent sandwich BY ITSELF or with some basic instructions from me. Or whatever. The specific task is irrelevant, but one point of intelligence should be the ability to develop NEW SKILLS independently, rather than requiring human tinkering and tweaking with algorithms. It's great to have 2 TB of optimally-generated perfect strategy to win against humans, and it's a fascinating and awesome experiment -- and I COMPLETELY applaud the efforts of this team. But, to me, it doesn't qualify yet as anything close to "intelligence" just because the generated strategy happens to be too long for humans to spend time parsing.
Another case of something being perfectly legal if done for free (your friends helping you move or giving someone a ride) . . . . but the moment money changes hands, everyone wants a cut.
It doesn't just have to do with "money changing hands" -- it has to do with the difference between "your friends" (i.e., people you know and probably have some sort of trust/relationship with) vs. asking some random 3rd party dude whom you've never met before to take your stuff and trust it with him in his truck.
Obviously you must have never had to deal with a dispute or error involving professional movers, or you've never had a package lost or damaged by a 3rd-party courier or whatever.
These sorts of things can be a mess to sort out, and without proper legal documentation and regulation, this random dude can just say, "Uh, what package?" or "Yeah, I know it's half destroyed, but it looked like that when I picked it up." Or whatever.
When "your friends" are doing it, and they break your stuff or lose something, you hopefully can trust that you'll sort it out. This random dude, though -- how can you even find him, let alone hold him responsible?
That's why we have standard contracts for people who transport valuable items commercially. It may not matter if you just need a guy to move a $50 piece of junk across town, but if it's something worth hundreds or thousands of dollars or has sentimental value, it may matter.
All of that said, TFA implies that the company in question DOES handle some of this:
The company already offers a bill of lading and $1 million insurance, in addition to whatever insurance their laborers already have.
These are the most important things -- a formal bill of lading will ensure that there is legal documentation of items transported, responsibilities of all parties, fees, etc. I've only hired professional movers a couple of times, and I've definitely been happy to have those things spelled out somewhere when things went wrong. And the insurance hopefully will cover various problems.
But apparently what the state is complaining about is the various drivers and their credentials. Again from TFA:
Requiring [the drivers] to register and get a commercial license would be too complicated and could hurt their business model, Ervin said.
I don't know exactly why Texas has these regulations -- it could be a power/money grab as you suggest, or there could be valid legal reasons to protect consumers. I don't know. What I do know is that the Texas legislature apparently enacted such regulations for some reason, and whatever the rules are -- all people who are transporting goods professionally should play by the same ones. Legally, the threshold is often set by whether people are making a profit off of it, but even if some random dude offered to move my stuff FOR FREE, I'd still want most of these legal protections.
Perhaps some of the regulations should be repealed -- I don't know. But just because some of them might be unnecessary doesn't justify your rant: there are often damn good reasons for some regulations to help protect all parties involved.
what a romantic picture you paint. in this world you suceed by being a maximum cynic who has the best ability to screw over people.
What the devil are you talking about? Are you even responding to my post? I'm not encouraging anyone to "screw over" anyone else. I'm just pointing out that our system is broken in a lot of ways, and we currently have a bit of a disconnect between jobs that are offered vs. jobs that people are wiling to do. Some of that is due to "market inefficiencies," i.e., we're actually paying wages that are too low for labor. And in those cases, we should be paying more. Some of that is due to shifts in how long people tend to stay in jobs or learn enough to become "skilled workers." (A lot of low-paying dirty jobs are paid on the basis of how much volume you can do: people who work in these jobs over a few years will learn to be more efficient and can often earn decent wages. But most people who just are "looking for any job" will quit within a week after starting because it's "too hard" for what they earn.)
And there are lots of other things going on, like I said about how we create expectations that educated workers will find better jobs when there often aren't enough such jobs to go around. Etc.
What's your solution? Who is supposed to do the dirty and laborious jobs? Or are you just a "drive-by" AC who likes to lob insults but has nothing of value to offer in response?
They seem to feel "owed" by society a job, and to be treated nicely and fairly.
These are reasonable expectations of a functioning society. That these expectations are considered to be ridiculously entitled is a reflection on society rather than the people who hold them.
It is a "reasonable expectation of a functioning society" to expect that jobs exist for you to do and make money to survive.
It is NOT reasonable to expect that society will simply provide you with the specific job you want, a job you find engaging or interesting, or a job that's fun or enjoyable. Despite huge advances in machines and technology, there still are plenty of jobs that require hard work, often physical labor, or tedious activities. Someone has to do them. Society may "owe" you a job -- but it doesn't owe you a job that will enable you to play video games all day long, or a job as an actor or a musician or whatever.
Yet there seems to be some truth, at least in the U.S., to the idea that many immigrants (including those are not legal) do jobs that are too dirty, too laborious, or too unpleasant to find Americans who are willing to work relatively cheaply.
Why is that? How many people end up staying at their parents for a couple years now in their 20s while "job hunting," rather than taking a hard job as a janitor, or a dishwasher or line cook in a restaurant, or mowing lawns, or doing hard manual labor? In previous generations, there would be no question -- most kids were done with any schooling they had by 4th-6th grade, and then they'd be working on the farm or apprenticing to someone or off to the mines or the factories. They needed money to survive. I'm NOT saying we should go back to that, but the reality is our expectations about THE KIND OF JOBS many younger people are willing to do have changed significantly. Society doesn't owe them a job they like.
This is not a new trend, but if we look at the statistics for the number of people in their 20s (and even 30s) who are still dependent on their parents, we see there's a trend here... and it's not just due to lack of jobs. It's due to lack of jobs that younger people are actually willing to do. (To be fair, we've also created unreasonable expectations here. We tell kids they need to finish high school, or they need to go to college. And then when they get out, they could easily end up working a blue-collar job that my grandfathers worked at with their 4th or 5th grade educations. There's a disconnect here on multiple levels.)
I didn't always get congratulated JUST for trying
Noticing children's effort rather than results is better for producing successful adults, as it instils perseverance rather than a sense that your skills are innate and immutable.
To a point. You need both. Also, studies have shown that the results are NOT as good if praise is disproportionate to achievement and effort. One should not be congratulated "JUST for trying," but only for trying HARD. When you get a trophy for "just showing up," it dilutes the actual praise for those who really win trophies, as well as for those who didn't quite win but really made their best effort.
I absolutely agree that STRONG effort should be praised and is good reinforcement for kids. So is recognizing actual achievement and succeeding in goals, though. Both are helpful. But praising someone for any minimal effort ("just for trying") is not generally helpful. The expectation should be that we all "try" in life. When you try VERY HARD and/or actually SUCCEED, then a reward is more appropriate.
Newer cars must adhere to stricter emission standards.
And older cars should be held to SOME standard.
I didn't realize how bad it was until I lived for a while in a state without mandatory annual inspection/emissions tests. I bought a car soon after moving, and I discovered that I couldn't really use the normal "vent" to blow air into my car from the outside because it smelled like awful exhaust a large portion of the time. I was stuck almost always using recirculating air, even when it was nice outside and I just wanted some fresh air to move around a bit inside the car.
Anyhow, at first I thought there was something wrong with the car that I just bought -- maybe it was leaking exhaust somewhere? Nope. Then I started looking around at the other cars on the road and realized how many old beat-up cars were driving around with billowing smoke coming out of them. Basically, whenever I was driving around a group of more than a few cars, chances are that one of them is outputting insane amounts of crap.
Never experienced this when I lived in four other states that had inspections and emissions standards. Just my own anecdotal observation, of course.
Back in the mists of time, it was understood that no one was guaranteed any profit from any publicized work. The idea was, that IF there WAS a profit, then the author(s) should get some of it.
Umm, when was that exactly? Wide-scale publication was not possible until the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The first copyright privilege after that was granted in 1486, and others quickly followed in the 1490s and early 1500s. They were almost exclusively granted to PRINTERS, not authors.
It would take a couple more centuries before authors (not printers) tended to be granted copyright and thus had primary control over profit.
(I of course take your point that Twitter making money off of this would be copyright infringement in the modern sense. But your idyllic "back in the mists of time" when no one was guaranteed profit and authors got some of it... well, it wasn't quite like that.)
I think that the music equivalent of programming would be something like song writing or composing. With playing a song, your are really just following the instructions that somebody else gave you, like following a recipe in a cook book.
I think that's a bit of a misunderstanding of how one gets to the "top tier" of musicians, and for that matter, how one becomes a great chef.
It what you say were true, no violinist would ever bother recording another version of some piece of music. In fact, nobody would ever bother even going to see a concert of a standard piece, since there would be nothing new -- it would just be the same "script" or "recipe," and most well-known pieces already have arguably a number of "perfect" recordings (at least in terms of "playing all the notes in the right rhythm and in tune" or whatever your standard is).
No pop star would ever bother recording a cover of an older song. After all, a great singer already did it.
But of course that isn't true. Composers don't generally write every single detail of interpretation in a score, just like there's a lot of "unwritten knowledge" in most recipes about how to actually produce good results. Beyond that, music is a process that happens in real-time. A skilled performer will be sensitive to everything from how their instrument sounds that day to the quality of acoustics in the playing environment to the fact that today they just happened to play the high note in that first theme a little stronger, and maybe they'll bring that note out again a little later because it creates a cool connection (which listeners may not consciously be aware of, but it suddenly brings out an emotion or creates a feeling of continuity which changes the piece).
Performance is an artform at the highest levels. You may not be interested in such nuances, and that's fine. But people who spend hours and hours every day of their lives practicing instruments aren't just "learning notes." They are developing techniques, learning ways to produce better interpretations of music (beyond the basic blueprint in the score), gaining a facility to make real-time adjustments that will create a better experience for listeners at a live event, etc. Similarly, a skilled chef may follow the same instructions you do from a cookbook, but the result in quality may be vastly different. The execution often makes the difference between mediocre and truly great.
I've had people tell me that a particular piece of music was worthless, even when played by top performers who can do flawless execution of the notes. I've then played them a recording of the exact same piece (with all the same notes, played from the same score) played by another performer -- and I've had people say they suddenly thought the piece was amazing... they heard things they never did before, or it had a kind of "energy" that made it enjoyable or whatever.
Anyhow -- this isn't just about music. It's recognizing the value of performance in all walks of life. It's also about recognizing how great artists, whether they generate a product or whether they perform on a stage, are able to tap into dynamic and creative processes to produce effects that are much better than others. You may have been given the greatest set of Powerpoint slides in the world, and you may basically follow a script for a presentation -- but there can still be a huge difference between a completely engaging live presentation and a crappy one that "just follows the instructions that somebody else gave you."
I know you probably didn't mean to denigrate performers, but I think we often tend to think of what's written down as the "primary stuff," no matter what line of work you're in. But there is a lot of knowledge and skill that's passed down orally and learned verbally or through tactile/kinesthetic engagement which makes the difference between following a rec
But according to some nuts, under the constitution the feds can't do anything except manage wars.
I'm NOT one of the "nuts" you mention -- I don't think we really want to go back to the "original meaning" and forget everything that happened since.
But your post is full of a lot of inaccuracies. For one, most of those "nuts" want to restrict the Constitution to the enumerated powers, which include a lot of things other than wars. They just have a more strict interpretation of certain clauses there, like "regulating commerce."
The constitution as it existed in 1781 is not the same as it is today.
The Constitution didn't exist in 1781. It was drafted in 1787 and enacted in 1789.
People forget all the amendments, all the judicial decisions,
Here's where the "nuts" differ from you. They do NOT forget the amendments, since the amendment process is specifically authorized in the Constitution itself. The various court decisions you refer to have often "reinterpreted" the Constitution to mean very different things than it originally did, though. You may think those "reinterpretations" are important, but it is a somewhat different thing from a formal amendment process.
and the great big massive war we had that overturned the constitution so that slavery could finally be abolished which resulted in a strong centralized federal government no matter what the hell the founding fathers who owned slaves would have wanted.
This is where you go off your rocker completely. Nobody "overturned the Constitution" with the Civil War. The Constitution after the Civil War was in effect after the Civil War the same way it was before the Civil War.
So how was slavery ended? A formal amendment process to the Constitution resulting in the 13th Amendment. The 14th and 15th Amendments provided further clarification about rights after abolition.
Once again, nobody "overturned the Constitution" -- it was amended using the exact process described explicitly in Article V of the original Constitution enacted in 1789.
As for your claim about a "strong centralized federal government," you have to wait until the 20th century really. The Supreme Court kept reining in the federal government according to fairly traditional interpretations of enumerated powers well into the early 20th century.
Think about it this way -- you remember Prohibition? It required a Constitutional amendment to enact, and then another to repeal.
Now, compare that to the prohibition of other drugs that occurred later, e.g., marijuana, etc. No Constitutional amendment required. Amazing! Why not? The Constitution was fundamentally changed in the late 1930s due to a series of Supreme Court decisions that rapidly and greatly expanded the powers of the federal government (arguably due to pressure from the Executive), allowing things like the Interstate Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause to be used for just about anything... from Social Security and Medicare to workers' rights acts, non-discrimination, etc. All of this could have been (and WAS) ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the early 20th century... but then they just stopped.
Effectively, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Constitution went from a system of "enumerated powers" and limited government to one where "anything goes" for the federal governm
You exemplified this closeness by showing that on fixed-length trips they are even closer than I claimed.
Yes, precisely. That's why I said I wasn't disagreeing with your argument. I was just trying to clarify things a little.
Since when has traveling by car and plane been comparable? For long distances, I suppose. I'm not going to drive between NYC and LA. But on a daily basis it is not.
The issue, I imagine, mostly has to do with environmentalists' concern about the inefficiency of plane travel in general. Environmentalists tend to criticize speakers who jet around the world frequently for example. For another example, I've seen a number of conferences in recent years that have tried to encourage "remote participation" via Skype or some other video conferencing tools to avoid perceived waste for travel.
For many such people, traveling medium-length distances by car has traditionally seemed the more "environmental" choice. They may not drive from NYC to LA, but they might drive between cities in the Northeast rather than fly if driving were "better for the environment." I think the common perception for decades among environmentalists is that "flying is always bad." TFA suggests that is probably an inaccurate generalization, though it's not a new observation.
I found the following. A bus fuel efficiency...
This is one of those arguments where the units can really change perception. I'm NOT trying to ignite one of those frequent Slashdot wars between those who say liters/100km is the best measure or mpg is stupid or whatever. I think various measures are better for various comparisons or circumstances.
In this case, buses are traveling a fixed route, so the mileage is fixed. Buses are also frequently used for commuting fixed distances. Therefore, what we mostly care about is how much gas is used per unit distance, not how many units distance we could travel per unit fuel.
Converting your stats to their reciprocal measurement gives:
-- A bus fuel efficiency is about 20 gallons per 100 miles.
-- Fuel consumption over number of passengers for buses is 2 gallons per 100 miles.
-- Average mpg of a private vehicle is 5 gallons per 100 miles. With two people in a vehicle, that's 2.5 gallons per 100 miles per traveler.
I draw your attention to the last statistic, since it's the place where things begin to look potentially misleading. If you use mpg, it looks like a bigger difference between bus and car: 40 mpg for two people in a car vs. 50 for a bus. But that's only a 0.5 gallon difference for a fixed route of 100 miles. Whereas if you were talking about a similar "difference of 10 mpg" between, say, your average 20 mpg single-driver vehicle and a 10 mpg SUV, that's 5 gallons extra for the SUV on the 100-mile route.
Bottom line: mpg stats can be misleading when talking about gas consumption for fixed routes and distances (which are what buses are often used for). I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, only expressing numbers in a way that might make comparisons easier to evaluate in terms of fuel use.
I meant that WE should be able to see the actual results. If they want the public to support this, they should make their data available to the public.
Ah, I understand. And I completely agree.
I have to disagree with the statement that content doesn't matter. Without considering the content, you cannot judge whether the student is displaying reasoning and making cogent arguments, or merely faking it. it seems to me that the number of people I deal with who cannot tell the difference is increasing - a coincidence? Perhaps not.
I think both the lack of knowledge of mechanics and of the content can be problems for different populations.
I know people who have taught writing at various universities. This is only anecdotal, but I can tell you that at a couple top-tier universities, the writing courses were almost solely graded on CONTENT, not mechanics of writing. (Frankly, as someone not in the writing department, I was shocked to hear this... grammar errors and bad style simply didn't matter that much.) I encountered students at such schools who had "deep thoughts" about various issues, but they often wrote essays that were barely grammatical or had all sorts of weird eccentric writing habits that didn't help their arguments. But they were taught to generate content.
On the other hand, the people I've talked to at lesser universities in English departments say they care very little about content, only things like grammar, spelling, etc. Grading is pretty much an "automated process" already.
Is this a class difference being reinforced between different types of universities and their emphasis on different elements of writing? After all, the smart kids at the top university are likely to pick up enough grammar etc. along the way that they'll be at least as good as the middling university. But they aren't being trained to express themselves clearly or with a good sense of writing style. Meanwhile, the kids at the cheaper college are getting little guidance in formulating any complex thoughts at all, let alone communicating them. All they get is a glorified spell-checker and grammar-checker.
Both basic writing mechanics/style AND attention to content are necessary to train people to communicate. I think different places are failing on both counts in various ways.
It's faster than manually marking 150 papers, but still takes him about 15-20 hours of labor over the course of 2-3 days.
Frankly, if he's going to take such a coarse approach, the question is why he's bothering to read most of them at all. It seems like he doesn't care much about content. It also doesn't sound like he's giving any significant feedback to students. (And for final papers, maybe 10% of students would actually read it anyway.)
So, why not streamline the process further, if you don't care enough to really think about the content? Say the grammar score is accurate to +/-10%, so if it scores the paper as 90%, your husband's detailed assessment would basically always fall in the 80-100% range for the grade. If the final paper is worth 10% of the overall course grade, that's only a 2% difference in the final grade. If a student has a 87%, he's going to get a B+ no matter what the skimming tells you. It would only make a difference for a student with a borderline grade, so if the student is not on a grade borderline, why even bother skimming it? Just glance at it for 10 seconds to make sure it's English and it's long enough.
If I were already willing to let an automated grammar score essentially dictate final paper grades (which I'm not, though I generally haven't read 150 of them at once), I'd probably make up a spreadsheet first and see which students the final paper grade would actually make a difference for. For most students, it may be sufficient to just say, "Yeah, this falls somewhere between an A and a B-minus." What the paper actually is won't make a difference in the final average. If you can make that determination of the rough grade by glancing at the paper, why read further unless you actually are going to care about content?
In fact, assuming the final paper is only worth 10% of a grade, and assuming that a complete paper that passes a minimal grammar check will always receive, say, a grade of at least 70%, chances are that the final paper grade simply doesn't matter for most students. Focus on the borderline kids. If the paper is worth 15% or 20% of the final grade, it might be a higher percentage, but you could still tweak the algorithm and the spreadsheet to help determine which students really need detailed grading.
Using a system like this, unless the final paper is worth a really large percentage of the final grade, he could probably drop the number of papers he actually needs to skim to maybe 1/4 of them or less. The rest could only be flagged if they were too short or had a high plagiarism score.
Please note that I am NOT encouraging such a system, which seems to be devaluing students' effort. But if your husband is already willing to leave most of the paper scoring to computer algorithms, why not narrow things down to focus on papers where his expert opinion is actually going to make a difference in the final grade?? He can then devote his time to students where his evaluation matters, rather than being fatigued from 20 hours of grading to the point that he doesn't even care what he's looking at anymore.
(And by the way -- if they have a high plagiarism score and cut-and-pasted entire paragraphs, why aren't they being reported for academic misconduct, rather than just receiving an incomplete?!? It's one thing to forget one or two citations -- dumping entire paragraphs into a paper without citations is clearly academic dishonesty.)
Anyway, this discussion is silly, since it is happening in a data-free environment. It would be far more meaningful if we could see the human and AI grades given to the same papers, side by side, preferably in a blind test, and then decide with is better.
Umm, I hate to state the obvious, but from TFA:
The results of the trials have been assessed according to two criteria: whether the computer scores correlate to the human scores within the same margin as two different human markers; and whether the scores generated by the computer distribute in the same way as an equivalent number marked by humans.
Rabinowitz said the trials show the artificial intelligence solutions perform as well, or even better, than the teachers involved.
So, TFA mentions they've already done something very much like your proposed test, although there's no mention of whether this review was "blind" (likely not, or they probably would have mentioned it).
My issue isn't so much with whether such AI can evaluate the average exam; I'm sure it can be calibrated to give a score in the right range for 90%+ papers, even knowing very little about English grammar, since there are various metrics that can be used to look for much simpler patterns or characteristics that will be common to good papers.
Some real issues are:
(1) Is the computer scoring methodology completely open and subject to examination? If you're just feeding essays into a "black box," you have no idea whether the scores are being generated by something that really knows grammar well or is using simplified proxies that still might score 90% or 95% or 99% of papers in the right range. Ideally, you want a program that can identify precisely what supposed "errors" it finds and break down the score in detail. I'd hope that the government would be looking for these characteristics.
(2) Can the AI identify when it is likely to fail? Really good writers or really bad writers or really weird writers might create something that's enough out of the norm to confuse the AI -- either generating more or fewer errors than it should. AI like this is usually pretty good at "average" writing which it is trained on. The question is how it handles edge cases. Even if it's bad at evaluating them, it needs to be able to identify when it's likely to make a bad evaluation. For high-stakes testing, it's critical that EVERY such edge case be flagged for human checking, even if there are 10 times as many which are "false positives" and which the computer would still score okay.
...superior's inferior posteriors...
Who is this particular "superior"? And he/she/it has more than one posterior? (Or perhaps only the inferior posteriors are plural; maybe this particular superior also has a superior posterior?)
(Sorry... couldn't resist. The question is whether grammar checkers would be good enough to realize the incorrect apostrophe usage here. I have my doubts. Also, I'd be interested in a grammar checker that could spot your superfluous comma. I'd be even more intrigued if such a grammar checker could note the reasons why the comma may be useful in your case, even though it's against the traditional "rules.")
But they are still a damned sight better than pretty much anything the Republicans have to offer, where your choices are between the shit sandwich establishment, and the diarrhea buffet of the tea party.
Okay, let's examine your evidence. (For the record, I am neither Republican nor Democrat.)
Both may be in bed with Wall Street, and prone to expanding the surveillence state and engaging in foreign adventures.
Well, at least we agree on that.
But only one wants to eliminate the entire "welfare state" (sorry joke that it is in this nation), and roll the clock back to the pre-1930s.
This is somewhat true, though arguably the Democrats have also been guilty for not trying for further reform. Wealth disparities have been growing significantly in the past few decades, including under the watch of Democrats -- and the fact that they are "in bed with Wall Street," as you put it, means that Dems are about as likely as Reps to bail out the rich while making only minor advances for the poor.
In sum, there's a big difference in rhetoric, but in terms of actual economic impact or actual policy, the result is nowhere near as big. And let's be frank -- except for a few extremists who don't represent the Republican Party in general, none of the Republicans are really going to try to roll things back to pre-1930s. They're not going to actually try to repeal Social Security for example... it would destroy their reputation with older voters that lean conservative and depend on that. They're not going to get rid of Medicare. They may fight expansions of these programs, but anything more than that is just rhetoric -- just like Democrats' insistence that they are fighting for the poor when they're happy to dole out huge amounts of money to the rich and Wall Street also shows a gap between rhetoric and actual policy.
Only one is standing there in the building building and saying "I don't smell any smoke" as they ignore all the science and data pointing to global warming.
Again, we have to look at effectiveness and actual policy outcomes, not just rhetoric. Obama has great rhetoric on the environment, but has he actually done anywhere near enough? And you can argue that Congress is uncooperative, but the EPA does have some control here, and Obama has chosen not to be more aggressive with his policies. From the link:
There are legitimate roadblocks to progress in Congress, but as White House critics and supporters alike acknowledge, federal agencies set meaningful environmental policy on their own. And when it comes to climate change, their record ranges from the unimpressive to the downright harmful. The Environmental Protection Agency has advanced some modest policies that will result in minor emissions cuts, but at the same time, other agencies have shown an astonishing willingness to expand an industry whose bottom line depends on cooking the planet beyond repair.
Once again -- the "in bed with Wall Street" trumps Democratic rhetoric. So, you're asking people to choose people who are claiming to save the planet when they're barely doing anything over people who are idiots and science denialists but are at least honest that they care about things like jobs and business over the environment.
Yeah, there's a difference I suppose. But it's not a reason to vote for either party.
Only one is trying to tell women what to do with their bodies, and advocates legislating according to their particular sky fairy.
Once again, we need to look at action vs. rhetoric. Of course the Democrats say they are committed to "right to choose," but look at how they have let restrictions on abortions and clinics get worse over the years. Look at how they have resisted more appropriate regula