Going to have to wait for a non-internet connected device that's open source. Oh? That doesn't mesh with these companies business model? Then YOU are the product, and they're making you pay for the privilege of letting them sell you.
A single scientist in a McCormick labcoat, on the floor, his back against a door. The only light is from a flashlight. He's scared, fumbling with the camera.
I'm sorry. (panting) I'm sorry ok? I didn't know what we dealing with. We were just trying to make some money. It was a good excuse to try out TensorFlow. (slams the floor. A jar of paprika rolls into the scene)...It was supposed to be a good career move.... (SOBS)...But it's too late for that. The world is going to change. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know how to fix it.
. . . They show you the whole histogram. Seriously, look at the bloody chart. TLO peaks at.... 2000 APM!? You can see the curve for the durations that TLOwas simply clicking shit faster than AlphaStar. AND you can see what slice Alpha-star issued commands faster than MaNa, who really didn't get much above 680.
But yeah, poor TLO's fingers. Like... lay off the meth dude.
In its games against TLO and MaNa, AlphaStar had an average APM of around 280, significantly lower than the professional players, although its actions may be more precise. This lower APM is, in part, because AlphaStar starts its training using replays and thus mimics the way humans play the game. Additionally, AlphaStar reacts with a delay between observation and action of 350ms on average.
Check out that chart. AlphaStar is at a mean APM of 277, TLO is at 390, and MaNa is at 678 because apparently he just never stops clickig shit.
I don't understand why some people just hate AI and try to discredit and dismiss all advancements? Is it just natural skepticism? I'm all for that, just.... try to put in a little more effort and stop spouting bullsht.
a machine is driven by a set of mechanical/logical rules strictly,
No, there's actually a large random factor. Your brain, likewise, is driven by a set of interconnected neurons with interactions dictated by electrochemical rules. It is not strict. There's a lot of... squishiness about when a neuron fires and how it fires. Likewise, there's a lot of squishiness with how weights in an artificial neural network get updated. That's thanks to the glory of rand().
However, anything that follows any set of rules will always, in the natural world, come to usurp the intent of those rules.
Haha, ok you little rebel.
But a mind creates its own intents
You should ask yourself why you like sex and if you don't think you've been pre-programmed for that, I don't know what to tell you.
The DoTA bot was certainly very restricted as a swath of the game was simply barred. Namely certain abilities that it couldn't figure out how to deal with. I think the random factor did it in. That was pretty bullshitty, but a good example of the extent of AI capabilities. Rather than gloating about how well it did, the journalists should have sold it more like "This is where AI is currently at". But tech journalists generally suck.
This example, AlphaStar, is effectively cheating by limiting the map selection. That's not normal game-play. But it's a boring thing to learn. Rather than training it for 200 effective years, they'd just have to multiply that by 7, for 1400. And they'd have to retrain whenever they cycle maps. It's just more money and not that interesting in the field of AI.
They still had Fog of War. You can't see what you don't scout. But it effectively cheating by having complete knowledge of all units it can legally see without having to deduce parameters from a screenshot like a human. Here, they explain it pretty well:
During the matches against TLO and MaNa(The human players), AlphaStar interacted with the StarCraft game engine directly via its raw interface, meaning that it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s visible units on the map directly, without having to move the camera - effectively playing with a zoomed out view of the game. In contrast, human players must explicitly manage an "economy of attention" to decide where to focus the camera. However, analysis of AlphaStar’s games suggests that it manages an implicit focus of attention. On average, agents “switched context” about 30 times per minute, similar to MaNa or TLO.
Additionally, and subsequent to the matches, we developed a second version of AlphaStar. Like human players, this version of AlphaStar chooses when and where to move the camera, its perception is restricted to on-screen information, and action locations are restricted to its viewable region.
And that second version failed hard. They throw out some "it only trained 7 days" and "we hope to study this more", but it looks like that's where the line in the sand is being drawn. This is where AI currently is. And it's impressive. There will forever be the knee-jerk reaction types that claim it's just a bunch of if-else gates or it's not real AI or it's just a novelty, but they're also the same ones that claimed this this game was way beyond the abilities of AI.
A little less than the alien theory as wings in space wouldn't help explain it's acceleration, traditionally demi-gods are known to be more "glowy" than shiny, and obviously it would be an ALIEN demi-god as it's current trajectory suggests it might not be from Earth.
But I get where you're coming from. The typical complaint against an unseeable unknowable all-powerful deity that doesn't want to be seen is that it's not falsifiable, and therefore not science... But the question of "is this lump of matter out in space a winged, horned, demi-god?" IS falsifiable. You at least have a valid hypothesis.
The dude had 6 points. But 1 has been explained, there ARE stars it could have come from. It's size, shape, and shininess are unusual. It's acceleration without a coma appears to be the biggest mystery. Perhaps it's simply out-gassing a substance that we can't observe for whatever reason. Like the dude said, we'll have a telescope online within a year that should see more of these things. If it doesn't, this thing is a lot more interesting.
If we point a camera at it and find it's a perfect cylinder with an exhaust at one end and stenciled symbols on the side, that'd be a pretty good verification test that he was right. If we caught up to it, cracked it open, and it's just a bunch of rock, that'd be a pretty good falsification.
Well sure. I'm talking to another liberal. Supposedly anyway. You should have heard all these things. I mean he should have. It's someone inside the echo chamber seemingly not hearing all these echos. If Riot issuing some PR fluff angers you more than all that... then I'm not sure I really want him in the party anyway.
Even if you're some sort of republican Agent Provocateur, and "waaa waaa talking points" is a standard comeback.... All these things happened right? It's not like Ajit Pai isn't in charge of the FCC. Remember all those kids behind chain-link fences? The pictures aren't faked. Propoganda is REALLY easy when it's true. The guy gives us PLENTY of material to work with.
Also, the low-effort drive-by trolling is really only effecting EARLY in the comment section. It's just lowering the signal to noise ratio for casual readers. Day-late shills don't get paid.
How about in the primary, where you get to choose between the... "professional victims in a state of unending outrage" or a rational candidate?
Even Trump doesn't make me this upset or angry.
Really? I mean, have you looked at like... anything he's done? MacDonalds at a fancy whitehouse dinner? Demanding the US taxpayers pay for a wall? Shutting down the government for it? That whole fiasco with separating children from their families? Threatening to deport kids who were raised here their whole life? Literally working for Russia? Or at least not having the balls to say he wasn't? Killing off the EPA? OH! How about appointing that lovable character Ajit Pai? Going to war against network neutrality? Starting a trade war? (That we aren't winning). Advocating violence at his rally?
I mean, if you were actually liberal, you'd be bombarded with this sort of news all the time. It's honestly pretty tiring.
Roman slaves had rights and could even sue their owners....Eventually. Early Rome, yeah, not so much.
But yeah, overall I'm with you. "Slavery with extra steps" is... basically every economic system. Those extra steps are really important though. The choice to... ditch the easy path and leave the garden of Eden is what defines freedom. How easy it is to do so determines how much your utopia is actually dystopian.
The employer pays the school an annual fee based on the level of education achieved, and the school also behaves as a union for the employee,
hmmm, isn't that a guild? That's how Oxford was founded.
The problem with guilds is that they fall into operating as a cartel of knowledge or skill. You want a building made? The carpenter's guild controlled who was trained in building making and who built said buildings. They can charge you whatever they want and give you whatever quality of work they deem needed. And they treated competition like union-workers treated scab. (Or how college grades look on "for-profit" schools).
This would incentiveze universities and colleges to actually produce workers that are needed, instead of the current status quo where students pick whatever program floats their boat and has no practical use at all.
You want a collection of guilds and corporations to choose people's education? Tempting, but I'd prefer that bit of power, the choice of what field you're going to work in, be left to the individual. Power to the people, and all that. It's their lives after all. But hey, yeah! Letting companies advertise the need for certain skills would be a really good idea. Throwing scholarships for particular degrees means they even mean it.
No, don't be daft. Personal enrichment is GREAT. I highly suggest it. But I wouldn't take out a LOAN to do so. If you can't afford the luxury, don't buy it.
As automation and AI eradicate the concept of human employment,
Not eradicate; change. Automation has already fundamentally removed MOST jobs. Before the Renaissance, 80% of the human population was performing mostly sustenance farming. All the advances in agriculture like rotating crops, cotton gins, tractors, combines, and Glyphosate lead to a society where only 2% who worked directly with agriculture. YAY! Let the good times roll! That means that 78% of the populace can now lounge about in recreation.... right? No? Oh, there are still jobs. But they're not back-breaking hard labor jobs. Which is how the "concept of human employment" is "being eradicated" (if you squint really hard). My grandkid might bitch and moan about having to punch his time-card when it sits down to his 9-5 jobs of farming Warcraft gold all day or making music or making a webcomic. And I'll reply that "kids have it easy. In MY day, you had to sit in a CUBICLE rather than lounge about at home on your sofa! And it was UPHILL! Both ways!"
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that we've been here before. With the industrial revolution, the initial soul-crushing 50% unemployment for 3 generations in some economic sectors really sucked for those people it impacted. For others, it was a period of great wealth. Because they could put street-urchins to work rather than guilders they had to pay. The world was all the better place for it.... eventually. The transition is a bit of a bitch and the basis of a lot of cyberpunk novels.
And I'm willing to bet he walked back that walk-back. The man constantly talks out of both sides of his head.
He clarified that the cost would be offset by the increase in revenue to businesses in the US, due to his better trade deals.
Hey, that would certainly qualify as "making Mexico pay for it". If he could do that, then I'd say his campaign promise was met. But he can't. Mexico just shifts trade to S. America. Raise the tariffs on mexican goods and they'll go elsewhere. It's not saving us any money if the "better trade deal" just stops trade. That REDUCES revenue.
But at least 50% of the country doesn't care who pays for it in any event, they just want the wall.
You're a fool if you think everyone who voted for Trump (20.4% of the US population) is just fine with spending the $5 Billion+ on it. Or if you think Trump isn't losing credibility with his base over who is paying for it.
It's all politics.
Some of it is politics, for sure. And Trump is really bad at politics. So now everything is shut down.
They want a product that lets users upload information seen by others? And they want it to be immune from people being assholes? Sorry, those two things are mutually exclusive.
The party at fault is the crazy ex. Sue him and get your damages. Possibly lock him up for fraud, maybe personal identity theft. If you think "Well there's no way the courts will do anything to an ex-lover being an asshole", then the problem is with the courts, not the tech.
But of course an engineer wouldn't be stupid enough to commit a crime and then post it online for all to see. In case anyone was wondering, rigging up a bomb you expect to be stolen is illegal and will get you thrown in jail. Who are his poor friends who are now cleaning out glitter from their cars and rooms for the rest of their lives?
Does anyone know how common stealing packages off of door stops actually is?
Yeah, we should of totally just let Saddam gas his own people.
Yeah. As fucked up as it is, that probably would have lead to less death and suffering. Unless you're somehow in favor of death and suffering? Are the Shiites and Sunni "totally not people like us"? Back when the USA had morals, the idea of just assassinating him was atrocious, but maybe that would have been the lesser evil. I think I remember something about that being considered, but the resulting power vacuum was considered too dangerous. (cue eye-roll).
we also provide a great deal of stability and security in the world
Iraq is stable? ISIS is a sign of stability? Do you really think the war helped improve the stability of it's neighbor Iran? Hell even in the above post I mentioned that it likely fueled the fire for the Syrian war. Do you have any idea how many refugees there are from that?
Our bases in Germany and Japan, which were very much made as a military sign of dominance and punishment for losing a war, aren't doing jack shit other than making our allies happy and/or pissed. Let them defend their own turf. We're here if they need us.
If we were to just up and close most of our overseas military bases, the world would definitely become more violent. Russia would love it if we just pulled out of NATO and closed all our bases.
Oh geeze, yeah, they might start unilaterally invading their neighbors and taking territory in a long drawn-out bloody battle. How's Ukraine doing again?
You'll find that infantry tend to be the most important element in COIN Operations.
Oh, man, I'm sorry that got cut off.
BECAUSE THAT'S WORKED OUT SO WELL in Vietnam... Iraq... and Afghanistan. Our troops sat back in the green zone while the Iraqi civilian population tore each other to shreds in pretty much uncontested sectarian violence. But really, what were they supposed to do? How do you stop millions of people from killing each other? The fact that military action, infantry or otherwise, can be COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE is a very important lesson. I'm glad you've realized that. It's a good first step.
It's probably a little of column A, a little of column B. Calling Americans dumb plays well in China, but... yeah, he ain't wrong.
However our taxes go mostly to the Military first
eeeeeh, not really. Nothing gets "most". It really depends on how you group it. The biggest chunk is social security, which is really just forced retirement savings (plus a bit of welfare on the side). That's taxes that we're paying to ourselves later. That's a bit over a trillion this year. Hi baby-boomers. I'm not sure that system is going to survive another 30 years. Then come the military, $586B. Then medicare $852B. We spend about as much on killing people as we do as taking care of the sick. "Other Mandatory" is next at $545 (fed employee retirement, farm-bill, Vet benefits). Then comes "nondefense discretionary" at $540B, ie "actually running the government". We could, by and far, have an arsenal of ICMBs, some coast-guard, state-troopers paroling the mexican border, pay off the debt, take care of the sick and elderly on our own, and shit-can everything else and our collective taxes would be ~1/7th their size. 13%. The other way of looking at that is that every aspect of our government could have 7 times the budget. 7 NASAs, 7 NIHs, 7x the pell grants, 7x the pay for congresscritters (uuuuuhhhh lemme think about that)...
Also, then there's Medicaid at $404B and $315B as interest the US federal government has on all it'd debt. And that fucking suuuuuuuks. Not so much in the sense that debt sucks in general, but the fact that there are people out there getting wealthier and being paid by MY income taxes just because my government needed some dough. Yay, people have bonds and are invested in the USA, but it sucks that I have to pay them for it. The US federal government should swell it's currency, strive for surplus, and reduce deficit spending when times are good. When times are bad it should go into debt and print money to soften the blow to the economy within it. Constant and expected deficit spending sounds like a pretty shitty idea to me. Debts always have to be paid. Either through sheer cash, loss of buying power by devaluing our currency, or loss of trust. Not paying off debt when we've got the coin is stupid.
However a Democratic Republic with a Capitalist economy can have these support services as well too.
Make no mistake, it's a sliding scale between pure capitalism where robber barons can throw orphans into the coal mine and pure communism which has never fucking worked. All these services (along with bailouts and such) make us less capitalistic. And that's not a bad thing. The "best" society is almost certainly a mix of the two ideas.
It sounds like one of the excuses for the conditions people "voluntarily" subject themselves to when they take on a minimum wage job. "They can quit anytime they want to, after all, right?".
. . . If it sounds like that then it's a pretty ok system. Because... yeah, everyone voluntarily (with no quotes) subjects themselves to a job in exchange for cash. And except for some crazy contract, the military, some professionals, you can just choose to quit whenever. The alternatives are: Slavery, or abolishing capitalism. And remember that the minimum is a good thing and some people don't even make that at their job.
Why not both? Stalin was certainly a dictator. The USSR was certainly communism.
Although honestly, after they ditched the centrally planned economy tenet of communism they're like commie-lite. With the poohbear serving emperor for life and putting an end to any party member having a vote.... I'm not sure what aspect is left wearing the color red. I guess their close ties and control over their corporations. Just give that some time though. I mean, technically, nobody owns land over there. They just rent from the state. Which just sounds like property tax with extra steps.
Also, our country is a plutocracy,
Heeeey, one of the (very few) silver linings to the latest election is showing that it DOESN'T matter who spends more money. People still control the vote. Hilary out spent him by far and still ended up losing. It's not JUST money. But it's mostly money.
I'd say we're more of a corporcracy, rule by corporations. Partly because any new legislation essentially has to be bartered through with (or comes directly from) the businesses they're trying to regulate and partly because it meshes with the idea that we're stepping into a bad cyberpunk novel.
Why do we need infantry again? So they can go door to door in dirt-poor countries? Because
The national guard is essentially FEMA labor. Which, hey, yeah, maybe we could use more manpower there. Maybe like a fire-fighting division just for California.
But that whole "being outnumbered" thing has become way WAY less important since the invention of the machine gun. Having ANY troops squaring off against other developed nation became pretty moot after we got enough nukes to end the world. Really, if we ever get to the point we're calling in THE RESERVES due to military action FROM CHINA, then the nukes have already been launched and civilization as we know it is going away.
But sure. They'll win more military parade competitions. Wooop-de-doo.
Slashdot Mirror
Going to have to wait for a non-internet connected device that's open source. Oh? That doesn't mesh with these companies business model? Then YOU are the product, and they're making you pay for the privilege of letting them sell you.
A single scientist in a McCormick labcoat, on the floor, his back against a door. The only light is from a flashlight. He's scared, fumbling with the camera.
I'm sorry. (panting) I'm sorry ok? I didn't know what we dealing with. We were just trying to make some money. It was a good excuse to try out TensorFlow. (slams the floor. A jar of paprika rolls into the scene) ...It was supposed to be a good career move.... (SOBS) ...But it's too late for that. The world is going to change. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know how to fix it.
All I know now is that the spice must flow!
. . . They show you the whole histogram. Seriously, look at the bloody chart. TLO peaks at.... 2000 APM!? You can see the curve for the durations that TLOwas simply clicking shit faster than AlphaStar. AND you can see what slice Alpha-star issued commands faster than MaNa, who really didn't get much above 680.
But yeah, poor TLO's fingers. Like... lay off the meth dude.
Nope. APM was lower than the human players:
In its games against TLO and MaNa, AlphaStar had an average APM of around 280, significantly lower than the professional players, although its actions may be more precise. This lower APM is, in part, because AlphaStar starts its training using replays and thus mimics the way humans play the game. Additionally, AlphaStar reacts with a delay between observation and action of 350ms on average.
Check out that chart. AlphaStar is at a mean APM of 277, TLO is at 390, and MaNa is at 678 because apparently he just never stops clickig shit.
I don't understand why some people just hate AI and try to discredit and dismiss all advancements? Is it just natural skepticism? I'm all for that, just.... try to put in a little more effort and stop spouting bullsht.
a machine is driven by a set of mechanical/logical rules strictly,
No, there's actually a large random factor.
Your brain, likewise, is driven by a set of interconnected neurons with interactions dictated by electrochemical rules. It is not strict. There's a lot of... squishiness about when a neuron fires and how it fires. Likewise, there's a lot of squishiness with how weights in an artificial neural network get updated. That's thanks to the glory of rand().
However, anything that follows any set of rules will always, in the natural world, come to usurp the intent of those rules.
Haha, ok you little rebel.
But a mind creates its own intents
You should ask yourself why you like sex and if you don't think you've been pre-programmed for that, I don't know what to tell you.
Truths are always relative to the observer.
Heresy.
The DoTA bot was certainly very restricted as a swath of the game was simply barred. Namely certain abilities that it couldn't figure out how to deal with. I think the random factor did it in. That was pretty bullshitty, but a good example of the extent of AI capabilities. Rather than gloating about how well it did, the journalists should have sold it more like "This is where AI is currently at". But tech journalists generally suck.
This example, AlphaStar, is effectively cheating by limiting the map selection. That's not normal game-play. But it's a boring thing to learn. Rather than training it for 200 effective years, they'd just have to multiply that by 7, for 1400. And they'd have to retrain whenever they cycle maps. It's just more money and not that interesting in the field of AI.
They still had Fog of War. You can't see what you don't scout. But it effectively cheating by having complete knowledge of all units it can legally see without having to deduce parameters from a screenshot like a human. Here, they explain it pretty well:
During the matches against TLO and MaNa(The human players), AlphaStar interacted with the StarCraft game engine directly via its raw interface, meaning that it could observe the attributes of its own and its opponent’s visible units on the map directly, without having to move the camera - effectively playing with a zoomed out view of the game. In contrast, human players must explicitly manage an "economy of attention" to decide where to focus the camera. However, analysis of AlphaStar’s games suggests that it manages an implicit focus of attention. On average, agents “switched context” about 30 times per minute, similar to MaNa or TLO.
Additionally, and subsequent to the matches, we developed a second version of AlphaStar. Like human players, this version of AlphaStar chooses when and where to move the camera, its perception is restricted to on-screen information, and action locations are restricted to its viewable region.
And that second version failed hard. They throw out some "it only trained 7 days" and "we hope to study this more", but it looks like that's where the line in the sand is being drawn. This is where AI currently is. And it's impressive. There will forever be the knee-jerk reaction types that claim it's just a bunch of if-else gates or it's not real AI or it's just a novelty, but they're also the same ones that claimed this this game was way beyond the abilities of AI.
A little less than the alien theory as wings in space wouldn't help explain it's acceleration, traditionally demi-gods are known to be more "glowy" than shiny, and obviously it would be an ALIEN demi-god as it's current trajectory suggests it might not be from Earth.
But I get where you're coming from. The typical complaint against an unseeable unknowable all-powerful deity that doesn't want to be seen is that it's not falsifiable, and therefore not science... But the question of "is this lump of matter out in space a winged, horned, demi-god?" IS falsifiable. You at least have a valid hypothesis.
The dude had 6 points. But 1 has been explained, there ARE stars it could have come from. It's size, shape, and shininess are unusual. It's acceleration without a coma appears to be the biggest mystery. Perhaps it's simply out-gassing a substance that we can't observe for whatever reason. Like the dude said, we'll have a telescope online within a year that should see more of these things. If it doesn't, this thing is a lot more interesting.
If we point a camera at it and find it's a perfect cylinder with an exhaust at one end and stenciled symbols on the side, that'd be a pretty good verification test that he was right. If we caught up to it, cracked it open, and it's just a bunch of rock, that'd be a pretty good falsification.
Well sure. I'm talking to another liberal. Supposedly anyway. You should have heard all these things. I mean he should have. It's someone inside the echo chamber seemingly not hearing all these echos. If Riot issuing some PR fluff angers you more than all that... then I'm not sure I really want him in the party anyway.
Even if you're some sort of republican Agent Provocateur, and "waaa waaa talking points" is a standard comeback.... All these things happened right? It's not like Ajit Pai isn't in charge of the FCC. Remember all those kids behind chain-link fences? The pictures aren't faked. Propoganda is REALLY easy when it's true. The guy gives us PLENTY of material to work with.
Also, the low-effort drive-by trolling is really only effecting EARLY in the comment section. It's just lowering the signal to noise ratio for casual readers. Day-late shills don't get paid.
I won't vote the left until they are purged.
How about in the primary, where you get to choose between the ... "professional victims in a state of unending outrage" or a rational candidate?
Even Trump doesn't make me this upset or angry.
Really? I mean, have you looked at like... anything he's done? MacDonalds at a fancy whitehouse dinner? Demanding the US taxpayers pay for a wall? Shutting down the government for it? That whole fiasco with separating children from their families? Threatening to deport kids who were raised here their whole life? Literally working for Russia? Or at least not having the balls to say he wasn't? Killing off the EPA? OH! How about appointing that lovable character Ajit Pai? Going to war against network neutrality? Starting a trade war? (That we aren't winning). Advocating violence at his rally?
I mean, if you were actually liberal, you'd be bombarded with this sort of news all the time. It's honestly pretty tiring.
Really? "So what you're saying is..." Did you really just do that?
Procter and Gamble Unveils New Device That.... applies makeup.
Roman slaves had rights and could even sue their owners. ...Eventually. Early Rome, yeah, not so much.
But yeah, overall I'm with you. "Slavery with extra steps" is... basically every economic system. Those extra steps are really important though. The choice to... ditch the easy path and leave the garden of Eden is what defines freedom. How easy it is to do so determines how much your utopia is actually dystopian.
The employer pays the school an annual fee based on the level of education achieved, and the school also behaves as a union for the employee,
hmmm, isn't that a guild? That's how Oxford was founded.
The problem with guilds is that they fall into operating as a cartel of knowledge or skill. You want a building made? The carpenter's guild controlled who was trained in building making and who built said buildings. They can charge you whatever they want and give you whatever quality of work they deem needed. And they treated competition like union-workers treated scab. (Or how college grades look on "for-profit" schools).
This would incentiveze universities and colleges to actually produce workers that are needed, instead of the current status quo where students pick whatever program floats their boat and has no practical use at all.
You want a collection of guilds and corporations to choose people's education? Tempting, but I'd prefer that bit of power, the choice of what field you're going to work in, be left to the individual. Power to the people, and all that. It's their lives after all. But hey, yeah! Letting companies advertise the need for certain skills would be a really good idea. Throwing scholarships for particular degrees means they even mean it.
No personal enrichment?
No, don't be daft. Personal enrichment is GREAT. I highly suggest it. But I wouldn't take out a LOAN to do so. If you can't afford the luxury, don't buy it.
As automation and AI eradicate the concept of human employment,
Not eradicate; change. Automation has already fundamentally removed MOST jobs. Before the Renaissance, 80% of the human population was performing mostly sustenance farming. All the advances in agriculture like rotating crops, cotton gins, tractors, combines, and Glyphosate lead to a society where only 2% who worked directly with agriculture. YAY! Let the good times roll! That means that 78% of the populace can now lounge about in recreation.... right? No? Oh, there are still jobs. But they're not back-breaking hard labor jobs. Which is how the "concept of human employment" is "being eradicated" (if you squint really hard). My grandkid might bitch and moan about having to punch his time-card when it sits down to his 9-5 jobs of farming Warcraft gold all day or making music or making a webcomic. And I'll reply that "kids have it easy. In MY day, you had to sit in a CUBICLE rather than lounge about at home on your sofa! And it was UPHILL! Both ways!"
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that we've been here before. With the industrial revolution, the initial soul-crushing 50% unemployment for 3 generations in some economic sectors really sucked for those people it impacted. For others, it was a period of great wealth. Because they could put street-urchins to work rather than guilders they had to pay. The world was all the better place for it.... eventually. The transition is a bit of a bitch and the basis of a lot of cyberpunk novels.
Trump walked back the "Mexico will pay for it",
And I'm willing to bet he walked back that walk-back. The man constantly talks out of both sides of his head.
He clarified that the cost would be offset by the increase in revenue to businesses in the US, due to his better trade deals.
Hey, that would certainly qualify as "making Mexico pay for it". If he could do that, then I'd say his campaign promise was met. But he can't. Mexico just shifts trade to S. America. Raise the tariffs on mexican goods and they'll go elsewhere. It's not saving us any money if the "better trade deal" just stops trade. That REDUCES revenue.
But at least 50% of the country doesn't care who pays for it in any event, they just want the wall.
You're a fool if you think everyone who voted for Trump (20.4% of the US population) is just fine with spending the $5 Billion+ on it. Or if you think Trump isn't losing credibility with his base over who is paying for it.
It's all politics.
Some of it is politics, for sure. And Trump is really bad at politics. So now everything is shut down.
They want a product that lets users upload information seen by others? And they want it to be immune from people being assholes? Sorry, those two things are mutually exclusive.
The party at fault is the crazy ex. Sue him and get your damages. Possibly lock him up for fraud, maybe personal identity theft. If you think "Well there's no way the courts will do anything to an ex-lover being an asshole", then the problem is with the courts, not the tech.
But of course an engineer wouldn't be stupid enough to commit a crime and then post it online for all to see. In case anyone was wondering, rigging up a bomb you expect to be stolen is illegal and will get you thrown in jail. Who are his poor friends who are now cleaning out glitter from their cars and rooms for the rest of their lives?
Does anyone know how common stealing packages off of door stops actually is?
Yeah, we should of totally just let Saddam gas his own people.
Yeah. As fucked up as it is, that probably would have lead to less death and suffering. Unless you're somehow in favor of death and suffering? Are the Shiites and Sunni "totally not people like us"? Back when the USA had morals, the idea of just assassinating him was atrocious, but maybe that would have been the lesser evil. I think I remember something about that being considered, but the resulting power vacuum was considered too dangerous. (cue eye-roll).
we also provide a great deal of stability and security in the world
Iraq is stable? ISIS is a sign of stability? Do you really think the war helped improve the stability of it's neighbor Iran? Hell even in the above post I mentioned that it likely fueled the fire for the Syrian war. Do you have any idea how many refugees there are from that?
Our bases in Germany and Japan, which were very much made as a military sign of dominance and punishment for losing a war, aren't doing jack shit other than making our allies happy and/or pissed. Let them defend their own turf. We're here if they need us.
If we were to just up and close most of our overseas military bases, the world would definitely become more violent. Russia would love it if we just pulled out of NATO and closed all our bases.
Oh geeze, yeah, they might start unilaterally invading their neighbors and taking territory in a long drawn-out bloody battle. How's Ukraine doing again?
You'll find that infantry tend to be the most important element in COIN Operations.
Oh, man, I'm sorry that got cut off.
BECAUSE THAT'S WORKED OUT SO WELL in Vietnam... Iraq... and Afghanistan. Our troops sat back in the green zone while the Iraqi civilian population tore each other to shreds in pretty much uncontested sectarian violence. But really, what were they supposed to do? How do you stop millions of people from killing each other? The fact that military action, infantry or otherwise, can be COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE is a very important lesson. I'm glad you've realized that. It's a good first step.
It's probably a little of column A, a little of column B. Calling Americans dumb plays well in China, but... yeah, he ain't wrong.
However our taxes go mostly to the Military first
eeeeeh, not really. Nothing gets "most". It really depends on how you group it. The biggest chunk is social security, which is really just forced retirement savings (plus a bit of welfare on the side). That's taxes that we're paying to ourselves later. That's a bit over a trillion this year. Hi baby-boomers. I'm not sure that system is going to survive another 30 years. Then come the military, $586B. Then medicare $852B. We spend about as much on killing people as we do as taking care of the sick. "Other Mandatory" is next at $545 (fed employee retirement, farm-bill, Vet benefits). Then comes "nondefense discretionary" at $540B, ie "actually running the government". We could, by and far, have an arsenal of ICMBs, some coast-guard, state-troopers paroling the mexican border, pay off the debt, take care of the sick and elderly on our own, and shit-can everything else and our collective taxes would be ~1/7th their size. 13%. The other way of looking at that is that every aspect of our government could have 7 times the budget. 7 NASAs, 7 NIHs, 7x the pell grants, 7x the pay for congresscritters (uuuuuhhhh lemme think about that)...
Also, then there's Medicaid at $404B and $315B as interest the US federal government has on all it'd debt. And that fucking suuuuuuuks. Not so much in the sense that debt sucks in general, but the fact that there are people out there getting wealthier and being paid by MY income taxes just because my government needed some dough. Yay, people have bonds and are invested in the USA, but it sucks that I have to pay them for it. The US federal government should swell it's currency, strive for surplus, and reduce deficit spending when times are good. When times are bad it should go into debt and print money to soften the blow to the economy within it. Constant and expected deficit spending sounds like a pretty shitty idea to me. Debts always have to be paid. Either through sheer cash, loss of buying power by devaluing our currency, or loss of trust. Not paying off debt when we've got the coin is stupid.
However a Democratic Republic with a Capitalist economy can have these support services as well too.
Make no mistake, it's a sliding scale between pure capitalism where robber barons can throw orphans into the coal mine and pure communism which has never fucking worked. All these services (along with bailouts and such) make us less capitalistic. And that's not a bad thing. The "best" society is almost certainly a mix of the two ideas.
It sounds like one of the excuses for the conditions people "voluntarily" subject themselves to when they take on a minimum wage job. "They can quit anytime they want to, after all, right?".
. . . If it sounds like that then it's a pretty ok system. Because... yeah, everyone voluntarily (with no quotes) subjects themselves to a job in exchange for cash. And except for some crazy contract, the military, some professionals, you can just choose to quit whenever. The alternatives are: Slavery, or abolishing capitalism. And remember that the minimum is a good thing and some people don't even make that at their job.
Also, not communism. It is a Dictatorship.
Why not both? Stalin was certainly a dictator. The USSR was certainly communism.
Although honestly, after they ditched the centrally planned economy tenet of communism they're like commie-lite. With the poohbear serving emperor for life and putting an end to any party member having a vote.... I'm not sure what aspect is left wearing the color red. I guess their close ties and control over their corporations. Just give that some time though. I mean, technically, nobody owns land over there. They just rent from the state. Which just sounds like property tax with extra steps.
Also, our country is a plutocracy,
Heeeey, one of the (very few) silver linings to the latest election is showing that it DOESN'T matter who spends more money. People still control the vote. Hilary out spent him by far and still ended up losing. It's not JUST money. But it's mostly money.
I'd say we're more of a corporcracy, rule by corporations. Partly because any new legislation essentially has to be bartered through with (or comes directly from) the businesses they're trying to regulate and partly because it meshes with the idea that we're stepping into a bad cyberpunk novel.
So socialism is now defined as helping the people who need it most?
Yes.
Why do we need infantry again? So they can go door to door in dirt-poor countries? Because
The national guard is essentially FEMA labor. Which, hey, yeah, maybe we could use more manpower there. Maybe like a fire-fighting division just for California.
But that whole "being outnumbered" thing has become way WAY less important since the invention of the machine gun. Having ANY troops squaring off against other developed nation became pretty moot after we got enough nukes to end the world. Really, if we ever get to the point we're calling in THE RESERVES due to military action FROM CHINA, then the nukes have already been launched and civilization as we know it is going away.
But sure. They'll win more military parade competitions. Wooop-de-doo.