The thing is, automation makes peoples' lives easier. It means that less work has to be performed to get the same results.
A sensible response to the promise of automation is not to be a luddite and ban the practice, but to ensure the benefits of automation are widely-distributed. In short, the answer is to prevent the concentration of wealth (a problem we need to focus on right now whether or not the fears of automation are realized).
Yes, if a scientist seriously tried to claim that the Earth is flat, they would be laughed right out of their profession. If they were tenured, they'd probably be pushed into teaching something considered harmless where their ridiculous notions were unlikely to come up. If they weren't tenured, they'd be highly unlikely to find tenure.
Not because of any taboo, mind you. But because it is an unbelievably idiotic belief that flies in the face of mountains of evidence, and even trivial observations that a reasonably-careful person could do on their own. Believing that the Earth isn't warming requires a similar level of idiocy. Believing that it's warming but humans aren't causing it or the effects aren't going to be bad requires almost as much stupidity, but not quite. Such people usually don't make it very far in science not because of any taboo, but because they're too stupid to make it very far.
By this argument, it's unscientific to state that a person claiming the Earth is flat is off their rocker.
The fact of the matter is that the scientific debate on this subject was largely settled back in the 60's and 70's. Since then, there has been a lot of refinement in our understanding, but the evidence has continued to support the consensus view. Today we have so much evidence that it requires insanity or willful ignorance to remain in denial that the Earth is warming, humans are causing it, and the effects will be nasty. There is no scientific debate because the evidence is as clear as the evidence that the Earth is round, for those that care to pay attention to it.
Deniers is the correct term because this isn't a scientific debate. The scientific debate has been performed, and has been won conclusively. The denial of climate change is now a purely ideological and political enterprise.
This stuff you have written might have an ounce of validity if there was actually research being done by the deniers. Nearly all of the opposition to the consensus that the Earth is warming, humans are causing it, and the impact will be nasty are not related to any research whatsoever. There are a very small number of poorly-done studies that purport to try to overturn the consensus in a significant way, but they are by far in the minority.
It has been well-documented that the vast majority of the literature against the scientific consensus on global warming is directly related to conservative think tanks who get a good fraction of their funding from the fossil fuel industry. See here:
And it's no so much that they really want climate change to occur, but that they profit greatly from doing things that cause climate change (and other forms of environmental destruction).
I've made use of their same-day delivery service in NYC a couple of times now. Problem is, the cutoff time is quite early in the morning, so that usually it ends up being "next day" delivery. That said, at least in my experience, it works well and is reasonably cheap, at least for Prime customers. I just recently bought a gamepad (coincidentally, it arrived this morning, after ordering it yesterday afternoon).
The main difference appears to be that Google isn't using its own warehouses: it's actually sending people to stores to pick up the stuff for people. So it works with retailers, instead of competing with them.
Of course, no matter what system or who is doing it, this sort of thing is only ever going to be feasible in urban locations.
It will be difficult to avoid such requests entirely, but this technology, implemented well, prevents the NSA or others from intercepting the data en route and reading it without a court order.
I'd also point out that Google has, in the past, pushed back against data requests.
Since it's already being done, why not? As long as it's optional, it shouldn't be an issue. You can manage your Google ad preferences here, by the way, including opting out of personalization altogether. Note that you have to be logged in either for editing your preferences or for Google to track you.
The only drawback here is that it will take a lot of engineering effort as well as time to get Firefox's preference estimates to come close to being as good as those of established ad companies.
Sure. Because the allegations are basically impossible.
What this appears to be, in actuality, is just the NSA's internal name for a system of obtaining information which they have a court order to obtain. I'd be willing to bet that the total scale of this operation is a tiny fraction of what the news reports seem to be claiming.
It's not about the energy in the wind so much as it's about the differential in speed between the water and the wind. The boat is exploiting this difference in speed.
If it were, instead, a balloon with only contact with the wind, it would be fundamentally impossible for it to move without using energy from some other source. Same with a submarine.
I honestly don't think this will be a major issue. The added ability for Google Glass to provide surreptitious surveillance over current tech is essentially nil: there are a number of wearable hidden cameras that people can buy for very little money. Here's one example.
I'm also expecting that there will be a nice light that will show when people take pictures/video that will make it hard to use Google Glass for surreptitious surveillance (I could be wrong, but I doubt it).
Trains and busses are even more critical for city living. Walking is the best for short distances. Bicycles are great for medium distances. But public transportation is ultimately what makes living in a city without a car doable.
Because the process itself involves fracturing the bedrock, it basically guarantees that the resulting methane is spread far and wide. Now, sure, if it so happens that the nearby aquifer is protected by some very thick rock, then maybe it will be protected. But in practice this often doesn't appear to be the case. Your statement on profits assumes they care about how rapidly they deplete the resource.
Regardless, it's a bad thing to do no matter what the local environmental concerns, because it can do nothing but accelerate global warming.
Sure, it's great tech as long as you don't mind a few people having flammable tap water.
The basic mechanism of frakking guarantees that there will be broad contamination of any aquifers near the frakking site.
Oh, and let's not forget that frakking is yet another way to accelerate global warming. There is no possible way to compensate for that aspect of this horrible, horrible practice. We need to be getting off of fossil fuels, not investigating new ways of dredging up every last hydrocarbon stored under the Earth.
Nah, there are a lot of things that Google could have done to monetize Reader. The main problem wasn't lack of monetization, it was a lack of attention. Reader hasn't been actively developed since 2010. Certainly some people at Google could have come up with a good way to make money out of the service, and to expand the user base by integrating the product better with its other services.
The real problem is that nobody at Google who was in charge of money cared enough about the product to continue it forward.
There's basically no competition in the medical industry, because there is no way for people to shop around for (most) medical care.
Worse than that, however, is the fact that the patient has little to no way to know how to evaluate their own doctors. Pretty much the only thing patients are good at is evaluating whether or not their doctor is nice. But the patient basically has no way of knowing if, for example, that medicine they were prescribed actually fixed their problem or if the problem was fixed on its own. The patient can't tell if the surgery they just went through was necessary. Or that MRI scan. And so on and so forth.
Fundamentally, it all comes down to the fact that the patient relies upon the doctor for their expertise. If the doctor profits from giving one answer rather than another, that is a conflict of interest that poisons the entire doctor-patient relationship.
Um, people have been buying cars in general at far, far lower rates than normal since the crisis struck. All car manufacturers have suffered, and no company (besides the banks) deserves to die because a bunch of bankers screwed up the economy. It would also be quite absurd for the US government to sell its stake in GM until the economy recovers, and which point I strongly expect GM stock to have recovered.
And it is also clear to me that you don't know anything about quantitative easing. Quantitative easing is a process by which the Federal Reserve sells short-term treasuries in order to purchase long-term treasuries. The purpose of this is to push down long-term interest rates and push up expectations of inflation. This really isn't even remotely related to any sort of bailout.
Fair enough. I was unaware of this particular detail. But it is very clear that the bankruptcy process would not have been nearly so orderly without the significant government financing that did occur.
Bankruptcy court would have also sent GM's suppliers into bankruptcy, which would have killed other domestic auto manufacturing companies, which would have ended the period where the US had any large domestic auto companies.
This view of yours is extremely peculiar to the US. Doctors in most countries don't sell their services any more than firemen or policemen sell their services in the US. Doctors are, instead, people whose job it is to help people when they are sick, just as a fireman's job is to help people when their homes or businesses are on fire.
In fact, if you think about it for two seconds, you realize that a system where doctors are people who are selling a service is the worst possible way to set up the system: the incentive for doctors is to get people to come to them and get them to perform expensive tests. All of the financial incentives, then, are to inflate the actual cost of medical treatment, to claim medical treatments are necessary when they really aren't, and to provide treatments that don't actually fix the problem so that the people come back again later.
Fortunately, most doctors are neither cruel nor narcissistic enough to engage in this knowingly, but even the most virtuous of doctor is going to be rather disinclined to realize they are wrong when they are profiting from being wrong. The result of this is high medical costs and crappy medical treatment. Nations that do not structure their medical system like a market have much better outcomes and much lower costs.
Personally, I think that was about the best way to handle it. The issue with companies like GM is that they support an entire ecosystem of manufacturing. Kill GM, and you kill millions of manufacturing jobs across the Midwest, leading to a tremendously-widespread destruction of the US's already lacking manufacturing industry. This is especially relevant when you consider that the rate at which people bought cars dropped so precipitously after the recession that there was virtually no way for a company like GM to stay solvent on its own: this is precisely the kind of situation where the government should step in and act as a sort of insurance agency.
And honestly, I have no problem in principle with 401k plans. The problem with them isn't that they're the government investing in private institutions (because 401k plans are controlled by the people to whom they pay out). Instead, the problem is that they're far less cost-effective than defined-benefit plans like Social Security. That is to say, for a given amount of money put into the retirement plan, a 401k plan will, on average, pay out much less than a defined-benefit plan. And on top of all of that, 401k plans are much riskier. Lower expected returns, higher risk. What is there to love?
Whichever way you slice it, though, it's obvious that the original poster to this thread was absolutely right: the answer is to repeal the asinine law that requires the postal service to fund its pensions so far in advance.
Perhaps more to the point, banning all porn makes it more difficult to deal with kidnapping, trafficking, exploitation, rape, etc. As long as porn is legal, it's much easier to monitor and track. Make it illegal, and there will still be porn out there, but now it's more difficult to determine which bits of porn are clearly harmful to the actors/actresses in the film.
This is basically the same argument I'd make for making prostitution and recreational drugs legal. No government has any business legislating personal morality: we should, instead, regulate these things to help moderate the harm to others these practices cause.
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The thing is, automation makes peoples' lives easier. It means that less work has to be performed to get the same results.
A sensible response to the promise of automation is not to be a luddite and ban the practice, but to ensure the benefits of automation are widely-distributed. In short, the answer is to prevent the concentration of wealth (a problem we need to focus on right now whether or not the fears of automation are realized).
Yes, if a scientist seriously tried to claim that the Earth is flat, they would be laughed right out of their profession. If they were tenured, they'd probably be pushed into teaching something considered harmless where their ridiculous notions were unlikely to come up. If they weren't tenured, they'd be highly unlikely to find tenure.
Not because of any taboo, mind you. But because it is an unbelievably idiotic belief that flies in the face of mountains of evidence, and even trivial observations that a reasonably-careful person could do on their own. Believing that the Earth isn't warming requires a similar level of idiocy. Believing that it's warming but humans aren't causing it or the effects aren't going to be bad requires almost as much stupidity, but not quite. Such people usually don't make it very far in science not because of any taboo, but because they're too stupid to make it very far.
By this argument, it's unscientific to state that a person claiming the Earth is flat is off their rocker.
The fact of the matter is that the scientific debate on this subject was largely settled back in the 60's and 70's. Since then, there has been a lot of refinement in our understanding, but the evidence has continued to support the consensus view. Today we have so much evidence that it requires insanity or willful ignorance to remain in denial that the Earth is warming, humans are causing it, and the effects will be nasty. There is no scientific debate because the evidence is as clear as the evidence that the Earth is round, for those that care to pay attention to it.
Deniers is the correct term because this isn't a scientific debate. The scientific debate has been performed, and has been won conclusively. The denial of climate change is now a purely ideological and political enterprise.
This stuff you have written might have an ounce of validity if there was actually research being done by the deniers. Nearly all of the opposition to the consensus that the Earth is warming, humans are causing it, and the impact will be nasty are not related to any research whatsoever. There are a very small number of poorly-done studies that purport to try to overturn the consensus in a significant way, but they are by far in the minority.
...the fossil fuel industry.
It has been well-documented that the vast majority of the literature against the scientific consensus on global warming is directly related to conservative think tanks who get a good fraction of their funding from the fossil fuel industry. See here:
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/06/manufacturing-uncertainty-conservative-think-tanks-and-climate-change-denial-books/
And it's no so much that they really want climate change to occur, but that they profit greatly from doing things that cause climate change (and other forms of environmental destruction).
I've made use of their same-day delivery service in NYC a couple of times now. Problem is, the cutoff time is quite early in the morning, so that usually it ends up being "next day" delivery. That said, at least in my experience, it works well and is reasonably cheap, at least for Prime customers. I just recently bought a gamepad (coincidentally, it arrived this morning, after ordering it yesterday afternoon).
Anyway, that said, Google is working on a similar service: http://www.google.com/shopping/express/about/
The main difference appears to be that Google isn't using its own warehouses: it's actually sending people to stores to pick up the stuff for people. So it works with retailers, instead of competing with them.
Of course, no matter what system or who is doing it, this sort of thing is only ever going to be feasible in urban locations.
It will be difficult to avoid such requests entirely, but this technology, implemented well, prevents the NSA or others from intercepting the data en route and reading it without a court order.
I'd also point out that Google has, in the past, pushed back against data requests.
Since it's already being done, why not? As long as it's optional, it shouldn't be an issue. You can manage your Google ad preferences here, by the way, including opting out of personalization altogether. Note that you have to be logged in either for editing your preferences or for Google to track you.
The only drawback here is that it will take a lot of engineering effort as well as time to get Firefox's preference estimates to come close to being as good as those of established ad companies.
Sure. Because the allegations are basically impossible.
What this appears to be, in actuality, is just the NSA's internal name for a system of obtaining information which they have a court order to obtain. I'd be willing to bet that the total scale of this operation is a tiny fraction of what the news reports seem to be claiming.
It's not about the energy in the wind so much as it's about the differential in speed between the water and the wind. The boat is exploiting this difference in speed.
If it were, instead, a balloon with only contact with the wind, it would be fundamentally impossible for it to move without using energy from some other source. Same with a submarine.
Precisely. All MS had to do to do this correctly was write a simple app that accesses Google's HTML5 YouTube website. Bam. Problem solved.
I honestly don't think this will be a major issue. The added ability for Google Glass to provide surreptitious surveillance over current tech is essentially nil: there are a number of wearable hidden cameras that people can buy for very little money. Here's one example.
I'm also expecting that there will be a nice light that will show when people take pictures/video that will make it hard to use Google Glass for surreptitious surveillance (I could be wrong, but I doubt it).
Trains and busses are even more critical for city living. Walking is the best for short distances. Bicycles are great for medium distances. But public transportation is ultimately what makes living in a city without a car doable.
Because the process itself involves fracturing the bedrock, it basically guarantees that the resulting methane is spread far and wide. Now, sure, if it so happens that the nearby aquifer is protected by some very thick rock, then maybe it will be protected. But in practice this often doesn't appear to be the case. Your statement on profits assumes they care about how rapidly they deplete the resource.
Regardless, it's a bad thing to do no matter what the local environmental concerns, because it can do nothing but accelerate global warming.
Sure, it's great tech as long as you don't mind a few people having flammable tap water.
The basic mechanism of frakking guarantees that there will be broad contamination of any aquifers near the frakking site.
Oh, and let's not forget that frakking is yet another way to accelerate global warming. There is no possible way to compensate for that aspect of this horrible, horrible practice. We need to be getting off of fossil fuels, not investigating new ways of dredging up every last hydrocarbon stored under the Earth.
Nah, there are a lot of things that Google could have done to monetize Reader. The main problem wasn't lack of monetization, it was a lack of attention. Reader hasn't been actively developed since 2010. Certainly some people at Google could have come up with a good way to make money out of the service, and to expand the user base by integrating the product better with its other services.
The real problem is that nobody at Google who was in charge of money cared enough about the product to continue it forward.
There's basically no competition in the medical industry, because there is no way for people to shop around for (most) medical care.
Worse than that, however, is the fact that the patient has little to no way to know how to evaluate their own doctors. Pretty much the only thing patients are good at is evaluating whether or not their doctor is nice. But the patient basically has no way of knowing if, for example, that medicine they were prescribed actually fixed their problem or if the problem was fixed on its own. The patient can't tell if the surgery they just went through was necessary. Or that MRI scan. And so on and so forth.
Fundamentally, it all comes down to the fact that the patient relies upon the doctor for their expertise. If the doctor profits from giving one answer rather than another, that is a conflict of interest that poisons the entire doctor-patient relationship.
Um, people have been buying cars in general at far, far lower rates than normal since the crisis struck. All car manufacturers have suffered, and no company (besides the banks) deserves to die because a bunch of bankers screwed up the economy. It would also be quite absurd for the US government to sell its stake in GM until the economy recovers, and which point I strongly expect GM stock to have recovered.
And it is also clear to me that you don't know anything about quantitative easing. Quantitative easing is a process by which the Federal Reserve sells short-term treasuries in order to purchase long-term treasuries. The purpose of this is to push down long-term interest rates and push up expectations of inflation. This really isn't even remotely related to any sort of bailout.
The public isn't out any money. The money has all been repaid, with interest.
Fair enough. I was unaware of this particular detail. But it is very clear that the bankruptcy process would not have been nearly so orderly without the significant government financing that did occur.
Bankruptcy court would have also sent GM's suppliers into bankruptcy, which would have killed other domestic auto manufacturing companies, which would have ended the period where the US had any large domestic auto companies.
This view of yours is extremely peculiar to the US. Doctors in most countries don't sell their services any more than firemen or policemen sell their services in the US. Doctors are, instead, people whose job it is to help people when they are sick, just as a fireman's job is to help people when their homes or businesses are on fire.
In fact, if you think about it for two seconds, you realize that a system where doctors are people who are selling a service is the worst possible way to set up the system: the incentive for doctors is to get people to come to them and get them to perform expensive tests. All of the financial incentives, then, are to inflate the actual cost of medical treatment, to claim medical treatments are necessary when they really aren't, and to provide treatments that don't actually fix the problem so that the people come back again later.
Fortunately, most doctors are neither cruel nor narcissistic enough to engage in this knowingly, but even the most virtuous of doctor is going to be rather disinclined to realize they are wrong when they are profiting from being wrong. The result of this is high medical costs and crappy medical treatment. Nations that do not structure their medical system like a market have much better outcomes and much lower costs.
Personally, I think that was about the best way to handle it. The issue with companies like GM is that they support an entire ecosystem of manufacturing. Kill GM, and you kill millions of manufacturing jobs across the Midwest, leading to a tremendously-widespread destruction of the US's already lacking manufacturing industry. This is especially relevant when you consider that the rate at which people bought cars dropped so precipitously after the recession that there was virtually no way for a company like GM to stay solvent on its own: this is precisely the kind of situation where the government should step in and act as a sort of insurance agency.
And honestly, I have no problem in principle with 401k plans. The problem with them isn't that they're the government investing in private institutions (because 401k plans are controlled by the people to whom they pay out). Instead, the problem is that they're far less cost-effective than defined-benefit plans like Social Security. That is to say, for a given amount of money put into the retirement plan, a 401k plan will, on average, pay out much less than a defined-benefit plan. And on top of all of that, 401k plans are much riskier. Lower expected returns, higher risk. What is there to love?
Whichever way you slice it, though, it's obvious that the original poster to this thread was absolutely right: the answer is to repeal the asinine law that requires the postal service to fund its pensions so far in advance.
Perhaps more to the point, banning all porn makes it more difficult to deal with kidnapping, trafficking, exploitation, rape, etc. As long as porn is legal, it's much easier to monitor and track. Make it illegal, and there will still be porn out there, but now it's more difficult to determine which bits of porn are clearly harmful to the actors/actresses in the film.
This is basically the same argument I'd make for making prostitution and recreational drugs legal. No government has any business legislating personal morality: we should, instead, regulate these things to help moderate the harm to others these practices cause.