OH NOES! I hate that Canada has invaded and we're suffering under foreign rule. That Mexican cartels regularly have raids into texas for slaves. That all our water is poisoned and tainted. That the farmers regularly mix water and lye to the milk to save a buck. That every time I drive from one city to another state all the rules of the road completely change and I have to learn to drive on the left side. That when roving gangs kill my children, I have no recourse other than vigilante justice. That there's just no way for me to send a message to another person farther than I can shout. If only we could get away from this terrible bartering system, there MUST be something better. And just the other day the pfizer megacorp injected my kids with experimental drugs as a case study. If they die I really wish I could at least sue them like those classy fellows over in Nigeria. And I need those kids so I can send them down into the coal mine and make some income because I've already been laid low by the black lung. Too bad we only get paid in company script.
Big or small, people with the will to do violence win.
Try me. I'll call the cops. You'll go to jail. YAY rule of law. I'm not even that rich.
Duh, which is why you have an accountant set it up in a way that isn't so obvious and remains perfectly legal. At least as far as your lawyer can convince a judge.
There's just no way that you can make people pay the "True Market Value" for everything and disallow any sort of 2 for 1 deal, or a bundle deal, or teaser rate. Not without a centrally controlled economy that breaks capitalism. And that doesn't work. As long as those sort of deals are viable marketing strategies, then a business is going to be able to give things to people for practically free. If businesses can do that, then the owners of said business will be able to funnel money pretty much wherever they want.
a house from your corporation
Ok, it's a house from my buddy's corporation. And I just happen to employ his nephew. But that's OLD hat sort of collusion. Now it's more like a tax write-off donation to a friends's wife's non-profit which pays it's CEOs whatever it feels like.
and land you in "Federal PMITA Prison".
No, they simply send you a bill. We caught you dodging X amount of taxes, pay X + Y in fines. If they didn't catch you dodging Z, and Z>Y, then you're net positive. They only send people to prison when they can't pay it back.
Don't they also do the college/trade track thing in highschool? If you have the grades or test well, you get put in the college-prep classes. If you don't, you take classes targeting the trades.
Attempts to do that here are shot down as it's pretty brutal to tell a kid he's not cut out for college.....of course, I think Germany has a slightly nicer cultural attitude when it comes to the trades.
No, I actually can't. Their own link to the "forthcoming"? paper just runs a search on google scholar and the link is broken as it returns zero hits. Searching for the paper "Don't pitch like a girl" by Balachandra doesn't get me there either. All I could find was This news blurb.
Oh look, "in fact, she says, 94% of venture capitalists are male".
Act like the venture capitalists and they'll be more approving of you? Gasp.
And it was: "Coders noted whether the presenter was male or female and then measured whether he or she exhibited stereotypically masculine behaviors (such as forcefulness, dominance, aggressiveness, and assertiveness) or stereotypically female ones (warmth, sensitivity, expressiveness, and emotionality)." Go figure, VCs want entrepreneurs to be assertive, but not an emotional mess. They don't want the CEO to make friends, they want them to make money. Business is not a democracy....OK, unless it's a co-opt.
If it's institutional, it's that all the people with money are dudes, or it's hinged on the fundamental basis of capitalism. The first you can change by unfairly supporting women VCs. (And Balachandra worked at an all female VC fund that only gave money to female entrepreneurs... ). The second you can't change.
Started out as a good argument then went down to crazy town.
"The effects of sex were investigated in a study of men and women pitching in three experiments, where the results showed that investors prefer pitches presented by men, even when the content of the pitch is the same (Brooks et al. 2014)"
Alright. That's informative and the sort of sociological work that I'd expect from real scientists.
"More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"
....What? Ok, first off, if THIS study shows that sex doesn't have an influence, that directly contradicts the first paper. Hey, I get that, sociology is a soft and squishy science and studying it is hard. You're going to be able to find papers that come to different conclusions. The solution is a massive amount of reproduction. Boring and banal, but it's sociology, talk is cheap.
Second, how the hell could they separate sex from gender? Did they have 4 presentations:
*Guy in a suit
*Girl in a dress
*Guy in a dress
*Girl in a suit
Because if it's anything like that, they they're turning a pretty serious blind eye to the current sociological realities of the pool of people they're studying. If they're shocked that the guy in a dress raised eyebrows while the girl in a suit did not, then they're just completely out to lunch.
. . . If wealth changes over time, that means I can make or destroy it. Meaning that if I MAKE a bunch of wealth over here, I have more but that doesn't subtract from what you have over there. That's the exact opposite of a "fixed-size pie" which I usually call a zero sum game.
But in opposition to that guy, I'd have to say that no, the rich don't deserve to be THAT wealthy. No one does. Past a certain point it's just excess. And the concept that someone can live lavishly, from birth to death, on dividends alone.... they're just a drain on society unless they really do something with that money. Fuck the idle rich.
The best way to keep the peace is to insure that the major powers do enough trade that they don't particularly want to piss off their clients/suppliers.
Mutually Assured Destruction has also worked pretty well. Unless either China or the US can stop the other from completely devastating the other if push came to shove, neither dares to take serious military action against the other. We both have militaries just to kick around undeveloped nations.
Uh, yes, that's actually a very strong point of the Geneva convention. Military weapons should have the goal of killing the target rather than maiming the target.
That makes sense because the alternative to is have thousands of troops come back disabled with missing limbs, blinded, lame, ruined lungs, cancerous, poisoned, or diseased. Bluntly, these people are a burden to society, or at least less productive. That might be changing though. Back in the day, if a wounded vet couldn't perform manual labor, they couldn't hold a real job as that was the work required. These days there's more office and mental work. As long as their noggin still works, they're good to go....OH SHIT!
Point being that the Geneva convention bans weapons that purposely try and maim soldiers rather than flat-out kill them. And there's reasons that weapon designers would want to maim rather than kill. The wounded are also a burden on the mission. If a weapon cripples a soldier, someone has to come help drag him back to a hospital. Now you've taken TWO soldiers out of the fight.
So anyway, if your cyber-punk novel needs an excuse for everyone to have cyberlimbs and replacement eyes and external lungs, a no-holds-barred brutal war that takes a piss on the Geneva convention is a good justification.
I don't really get finance. That's... not good for the economy right?
It's money that's "Not being put to work". Just rotting in a bank account. Extrapolate this, and it's essentially a giant black hole in the economy where money goes in but it doesn't come out. Today we've got a money cycle of farmers buying oil to run their combines and oil-well workers buying food to eat. Today there's a trillion dollars moving back and forth (and being pissed away on recreation) but tomorrow Apple hoards half of that and now the cycle is moving just $500B. So... It's essentially deflation? If they ever dump it back into the markets, that'd be a big wave of inflation, ya? Suddenly there's just more cash in the system. Is half a trillion even enough? How much money is needed to have a noticeable impact on the value of the US dollar?
So it's outside of the USA. Couldn't they go invest it in... China or something? Buy all of Foxconn. Do they have problem bringing it elsewhere? Would they have to pay China income tax if they went there? If it's all Irish money... Buy Guinness....I guess that just shifts the fat bank account from the owners of apple to the ex-owners of Guinness... Yeah, to actually make that money work, they'd have to actually launch a new business or expand their business or buy a business that needs expansion.
Inflation is the sort of thing that's supposed to encourage people (or business, in this case) to go DO SOMETHING with their money rather than hoarding it. We should DEFINITELY NOT give them some sort of tax-free day to slip it in. Fuck you, pay me.
If blacks and whites are equally likely to default on a loan,
But... They AREN'T. You weren't paying attention when I explained that if you break out for ANY variable, there will be variance. Of course there will be a difference between those measurements. There'd likewise be a difference if you broke it out between left-handedness and right-handedness. It doesn't mean a damn thing, but statistically there would be a measurable difference.
So YES, the algorithm WILL MOST CERTAINLY come back with a different rate between rightys and leftys on their ability to repay loans. As we would expect it to. Or race, or whatever.
And while you're saying we want a more accurate predictions, which I wholly agree with, it sounds like you're also saying you also want the prediction to be equal when broken out by race and applied to society. And that's just not going to happen. Not just hard, but impossible. And not something we want to chase after. Not desirable. A bad target. A false goal.
You know what they ought to do? Re-run the self-learning algorithm and feed it the race of the person in question. See what it does to the accuracy. This isn't something we have to argue theoretical on, they could simply look at the results. They don't even have to wait since they have a body of data already.
Yeah, data like how likely they are to default on a loan. If you break out that statistic by race, you're going to see different numbers. That's just... how statistics work. break out anything and you'll see variation.
But that's the exact data you're looking for when making a loan. That's the goal. But you're saying that if there's any racial variation in that statistic it's a "invisibly encoded race" field. And therefore approving or denying loans based on how likely they are to default on a loan is racism and illegal. This is what you're saying is desirable, and I'm saying it's not.
suppose that whites living in black-majority neighborhoods are, for some reason, likely to not repay loans (possibly because if they weren't financially distressed they'd move to the lily-white suburbs); but blacks living in black-majority neighborhoods have no problem (because there's nothing exceptional about blacks living in black-majority neighborhoods, that's just how "majority" is defined.) So, an algorithm tags "living in black majority neighborhood" as correlating with defaulting on loans. The net result is that blacks are denied loans even though they do not have a higher probability of default. The results of the loan algorithm are not race neutral-
...hmmmm Just like the other guy, you've given a pretty good argument that the algorithm SHOULD be told the race of the target. Because the way you make the program stop unfairly dinging the black neighborhood is to tell it the races of the people therein, so it'd see that the white trash is bringing down the hood. And spotting those sort of trends would make the AI hella racist. But of course, in your example, the biggest factor IS race.
But the results are all that matters
Correct, anything that more accurately predict loan default (or recidivism per the article) helps make a better tool and save money and lets good people out on parole and keeps bad people in prison.
Huh, half and double? The algorithm didn't do a very good job at prediction. If that's not better than manual predictions, then this thing is junk.
And... as shitty as it would be... that sounds like an argument for letting it know the race of person it's judging. "oh, he's white, then that skews the rest of the data".
Joel is this case is a major telecom company and ISPs are no longer small mom&pop shops.
when in reality, MAJORTELECOM has let his peer links saturate and/or severely imbalance
"Let his peer links saturate" As in, people are using their internet connection and MAJORTELECOM isn't upgrading their network. Their old business model depended on customers only checking email once a week. The world changes and now people found out they can use the service they bought. The bastards should invest in US's infrastructure to make their customers happy rather than throwing money at lobbyists and trying to squeeze more money out of people.
and won't upgrade the peer link and/or tolerate the imbalance without compensation.
Comcast bought back $5 Billion of their own stock this year. They made $20 billion in revenue and $12 billion in profit. Cry me a fucking river. They have a virtual monopoly and could charge whatever they want, except for town where they're actually facing competition from fiber, but they drop prices there to make sure Google and such don't make any money.
And bitching about peering imbalance? The peers they have to pay for traffic going out of their network is going to other ISPs. They have to pay the ISP above them just like I do. If they're bitching about their users using netflix, then charge them more. Trying to make a backroom extortion rather than letting the end-customer decide if it's worth the price is fucking bullshit. Power to the people.
And why is everyone in favor of the ISPs killing network neutrality an anonymous coward? Fucking shills.
You can't have AI that learns on its own and have AI that isn't racially biased unless you artificially code blocks to it reaching certain logical conclusions.
What? No? You don't block their inputs, not their outcome.
You just hide the race of the targets it's looking at. As in, the sql library which has all that data it's digesting? You just exclude the 'race' field. DONE. The algorithm isn't judging based on race.
That won't stop it from looking at... say... the location where someone lives for approving or disapproving a loan. And lo-and-behold that's pretty similar to looking at someone's race. But that's not their race and an unbiased look at something that DOES indicate loan-worthiness. If that's the sort of thing the ACLU disapproves of, they've got a very difficult fight on their hands, because where does that end?
There is no new legislation. The FCC reclassified Telecoms as "common carriers", which was made by old-as-dirt legislation. As common carriers they would be barred from inspecting the contents of the packages they're carrying for you. (And they would not be responsible for what you send).
I mean, that's the current curfluffle. Are you bitching about the FCC's Open Internet Order? Because that's still not legislation.
The FCC doesn't make legislation, that comes out of congress. So... wtf are you smoking and could you send me that link?
Did you mean regulation? I know these things can be confusing. Who could have guessed?
as afraid as I am to post this opinion on slashdot of all places,... already has such strongly held opinions that they get angry at you for even asking in the first place.
Naw, no worries mate. You should never be afraid to ask. Don't let the maniacal group of fanatical, hammer-wielding zealots put you off.
As I understand it, net neutrality is a set of U.S. government regulations that prohibit an ISP like Comcast from charging, say Netflix, more per GB than they charge me per GB.
Network neutrality is how the Internet works. Network neutrality regulation is the governments attempt at keeping it from falling apart. There's been a pretty obvious political campaign to get the two conflated. The thing with extorting extra money out of specific services is one aspect of it.
Network Neutrality: It prevents ISPs from fucking with your packets in transit. It's fundamentally how the Internet works and has always worked since it's inception. The Internet is a bunch of networks interconnected all sharing and carrying each other's packets through a vast web. It's pretty cool. Small ISPs pay those above them for connections, and charge those under them, and "peer" with their neighbors on all their borders. So if JoeISP next door has a million packets last month that needed to cross your lines to get to something on the other side, and you had a million packets that needed to go through his servers, you're both square.
And neither of you fuck with those packets in transit. You don't slow down all of Joe's customers packets. You don't look through them and drop all the stuff related to cats. You don't differentiate if they're going to France or to Kansas. You don't care if they're smut or if they're stock orders. You don't care if it's netflix traffic or hulu traffic. It's all equal and you carry it as neutral as possible. (and, there's some exceptions like VoIP being treated differently than downloads, it's not a perfect system).
Now, if Joe was a real dick, he could go to Netflix and demand an extra $50 or he'd drop all their packets. Or make Google queries 10s slower than Bing searches. Or block anything going to or from China. Or block all porn. Or refuse web connections to a subset of the Internet unless the customer pays extra. All of that breaks network neutrality, and is a way for ISPs to make an extra buck on top of actually providing Internet service.
Netflix officially don't care anymore as they're too big to bully around. Could you imagine buying Comcast and simply not having that include Netflix? PFt, no. Customers would flock to alternatives. Netflix can play that game of chicken and double-dog-dare Comcast to shit all over their customers and give degraded service. Hell, they're international, they can weather the storm. 10 years ago when they started competing with cableTV, they really REALLY cared.
The FCC was trying to enforce network neutrality by classifying the Telecom giants as common carriers like Fedex. Which means they can't fuck with the goods in transit (and that they're not responsible for what people send). If business REALLY wanted to bitch-slap the telecoms for changing that, Disney could sue them all for all the piracy their services are aiding. But that's a legal nuclear option. Prior to the FCC pulling that trigger with classifying ISPs as common carriers is that the market consolidated and competition died off. Before, asshats like JoeISP didn't try to break network neutrality as the network would simply route around it, and everyone depended on everyone else playing nice. Now that there's only a handful of major ISPs that refuse to compete with each others territory, there's no free market, and capitalism is fucked.
but we're still talking about the government prohibiting a specific type of contractual agreement between two corporate entities - that almost never goes well for anybody except the incumbents.
Nothing is going on that is preventing an open internet.
What? The Internet will never be perfectly open and free. It's more of a ideal we want to strive for. The closer we get to it the better. There legit real-world limitations though. VoIP is different then torrents, Omaha is closer than Kzhackistan. You could even argue that locking sites behind paywalls violates network neutrality, but hey, it's a purchase choice left to the end-users so no-one cares and it lets people sell services online. Power to the people and all that.
And actually, ESPN3.com (formorly ESPN360.com) is bundled into your Internet service. You don't get a choice about if you want to buy it or no. Your ISP is paying money directly to Disney and Hearst to give their users access to the content. An example of telecoms trying to bundle websites into ISP services and transforming the Internet into something more like cable TV where the networks get to decide what's available to watch. A clear example of a violation of network neutrality.
The worst thing to do is establish regulations where none are needed.
Right. But regulations are needed here. Because capitalism only works when there's competition. When there's no free market, shit sucks. Markets become less free in all sorts of ways. Markets with a high barrier to entry are just naturally less free. When an oligarchy of businesses refuse to compete and carve up the map into territories, the market is not free. And yeah, regulation makes markets less free. But if they refuse to compete, and start abusing the users, the proper response is to either bust up the companies into smaller chunks that will start competing again or to regulate what is and is not acceptable behavior. Like fucking over network neutrality.
Because of course we want a neutral network. That's how it's operated since it's inception. Everyone passes along everyone else's packets without fucking with them. When the telecoms start to try actively BREAKING network neutrality, then obviously something has to change.
Now the only reason that their first timid advances at breaking network neutrality were thwarted in the past is due to public backlash and the fear that the FCC would clamp down with regulation. And then they continued and the FCC did indeed clamp down. With the current head of the FCC blatently trying to kill off network neutrality (god, it'd be so much better if he just pointed out he wanted to remove regulation enforcing network neutrality, but no, I don't think he even knows the different), the threat of reprecusion is all but gone. But... 3 more years and we'll have another head of the FCC. Or sooner.
You aren't being blocked or prevented from engaging in legal activities.
BWAHAHAHHAaaa, oh. Ok, nevermind. I thought you had a serious complaint for a moment.
No, nothing is preventing you from subscribing to HBO and watching Game of Thrones....As long as you're willing to sign up for the premier cable package and shell out extra for HBO on top of that. If that's how you want the rest of the Internet to be made available to the masses, fuck off.
Slashdot Mirror
Got it.
"and remains perfectly legal. At least as far as your lawyer can convince a judge."
So what exactly are you doing to dodge taxes that gets you audited yearly?
if they didn't catch you dodging Z, and Z>Y, then you're net positive.
You'll never be rich enough to afford those type of accountants if you don't read the memos all the way to the bottom kiddo.
How what?
None of [government] is working.
OH NOES! I hate that Canada has invaded and we're suffering under foreign rule. That Mexican cartels regularly have raids into texas for slaves. That all our water is poisoned and tainted. That the farmers regularly mix water and lye to the milk to save a buck. That every time I drive from one city to another state all the rules of the road completely change and I have to learn to drive on the left side. That when roving gangs kill my children, I have no recourse other than vigilante justice. That there's just no way for me to send a message to another person farther than I can shout. If only we could get away from this terrible bartering system, there MUST be something better. And just the other day the pfizer megacorp injected my kids with experimental drugs as a case study. If they die I really wish I could at least sue them like those classy fellows over in Nigeria. And I need those kids so I can send them down into the coal mine and make some income because I've already been laid low by the black lung. Too bad we only get paid in company script.
Big or small, people with the will to do violence win.
Try me. I'll call the cops. You'll go to jail. YAY rule of law. I'm not even that rich.
Duh, which is why you have an accountant set it up in a way that isn't so obvious and remains perfectly legal. At least as far as your lawyer can convince a judge.
There's just no way that you can make people pay the "True Market Value" for everything and disallow any sort of 2 for 1 deal, or a bundle deal, or teaser rate. Not without a centrally controlled economy that breaks capitalism. And that doesn't work. As long as those sort of deals are viable marketing strategies, then a business is going to be able to give things to people for practically free. If businesses can do that, then the owners of said business will be able to funnel money pretty much wherever they want.
a house from your corporation
Ok, it's a house from my buddy's corporation. And I just happen to employ his nephew. But that's OLD hat sort of collusion. Now it's more like a tax write-off donation to a friends's wife's non-profit which pays it's CEOs whatever it feels like.
and land you in "Federal PMITA Prison".
No, they simply send you a bill. We caught you dodging X amount of taxes, pay X + Y in fines. If they didn't catch you dodging Z, and Z>Y, then you're net positive. They only send people to prison when they can't pay it back.
Don't they also do the college/trade track thing in highschool? If you have the grades or test well, you get put in the college-prep classes. If you don't, you take classes targeting the trades.
Attempts to do that here are shot down as it's pretty brutal to tell a kid he's not cut out for college. ....of course, I think Germany has a slightly nicer cultural attitude when it comes to the trades.
No, I actually can't. Their own link to the "forthcoming"? paper just runs a search on google scholar and the link is broken as it returns zero hits. Searching for the paper "Don't pitch like a girl" by Balachandra doesn't get me there either. All I could find was This news blurb.
Oh look, "in fact, she says, 94% of venture capitalists are male".
Act like the venture capitalists and they'll be more approving of you? Gasp.
And it was: "Coders noted whether the presenter was male or female and then measured whether he or she exhibited stereotypically masculine behaviors (such as forcefulness, dominance, aggressiveness, and assertiveness) or stereotypically female ones (warmth, sensitivity, expressiveness, and emotionality)." Go figure, VCs want entrepreneurs to be assertive, but not an emotional mess. They don't want the CEO to make friends, they want them to make money. Business is not a democracy. ...OK, unless it's a co-opt.
If it's institutional, it's that all the people with money are dudes, or it's hinged on the fundamental basis of capitalism. The first you can change by unfairly supporting women VCs. (And Balachandra worked at an all female VC fund that only gave money to female entrepreneurs... ). The second you can't change.
Started out as a good argument then went down to crazy town.
"The effects of sex were investigated in a study of men and women pitching in three experiments, where the results showed that investors prefer pitches presented by men, even when the content of the pitch is the same (Brooks et al. 2014)"
Alright. That's informative and the sort of sociological work that I'd expect from real scientists.
"More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"
....What? Ok, first off, if THIS study shows that sex doesn't have an influence, that directly contradicts the first paper. Hey, I get that, sociology is a soft and squishy science and studying it is hard. You're going to be able to find papers that come to different conclusions. The solution is a massive amount of reproduction. Boring and banal, but it's sociology, talk is cheap.
Second, how the hell could they separate sex from gender? Did they have 4 presentations:
Because if it's anything like that, they they're turning a pretty serious blind eye to the current sociological realities of the pool of people they're studying. If they're shocked that the guy in a dress raised eyebrows while the girl in a suit did not, then they're just completely out to lunch.
. . . If wealth changes over time, that means I can make or destroy it. Meaning that if I MAKE a bunch of wealth over here, I have more but that doesn't subtract from what you have over there. That's the exact opposite of a "fixed-size pie" which I usually call a zero sum game.
But in opposition to that guy, I'd have to say that no, the rich don't deserve to be THAT wealthy. No one does. Past a certain point it's just excess. And the concept that someone can live lavishly, from birth to death, on dividends alone.... they're just a drain on society unless they really do something with that money. Fuck the idle rich.
In the case of Apple, that vast majority of the "cash" is actually short term corporate and government bonds... not bank deposits. Aka investments!
Heeeeey, that sounds a lot better.
So... Apple has a banking gig on the side? Loaning out money. Which is essentially what buying a bond is... sorta.
Because finding an investment for that cash that returns 30%/year is insanely difficult compared to buying back shares of Apple with a 30-40% ROE.
So why don't they do that? Unless they're getting 30%/year on.... bonds.
The best way to keep the peace is to insure that the major powers do enough trade that they don't particularly want to piss off their clients/suppliers.
Mutually Assured Destruction has also worked pretty well. Unless either China or the US can stop the other from completely devastating the other if push came to shove, neither dares to take serious military action against the other. We both have militaries just to kick around undeveloped nations.
Uh, yes, that's actually a very strong point of the Geneva convention. Military weapons should have the goal of killing the target rather than maiming the target.
That makes sense because the alternative to is have thousands of troops come back disabled with missing limbs, blinded, lame, ruined lungs, cancerous, poisoned, or diseased. Bluntly, these people are a burden to society, or at least less productive. That might be changing though. Back in the day, if a wounded vet couldn't perform manual labor, they couldn't hold a real job as that was the work required. These days there's more office and mental work. As long as their noggin still works, they're good to go. ...OH SHIT!
Point being that the Geneva convention bans weapons that purposely try and maim soldiers rather than flat-out kill them. And there's reasons that weapon designers would want to maim rather than kill. The wounded are also a burden on the mission. If a weapon cripples a soldier, someone has to come help drag him back to a hospital. Now you've taken TWO soldiers out of the fight.
So anyway, if your cyber-punk novel needs an excuse for everyone to have cyberlimbs and replacement eyes and external lungs, a no-holds-barred brutal war that takes a piss on the Geneva convention is a good justification.
You need line of sight to a nuclear powered navy ship. Unless your wedding is literally ON the dock or on a beach, I think you'll be ok.
This is a defense weapon.
This is gross movement, like spinning the rocket booster of an ICBM or turning your boat back and forth across the path to the target.
So... do a barrel roll?
At long last, my starfox training has paid off!
I don't really get finance. That's... not good for the economy right?
It's money that's "Not being put to work". Just rotting in a bank account. Extrapolate this, and it's essentially a giant black hole in the economy where money goes in but it doesn't come out. Today we've got a money cycle of farmers buying oil to run their combines and oil-well workers buying food to eat. Today there's a trillion dollars moving back and forth (and being pissed away on recreation) but tomorrow Apple hoards half of that and now the cycle is moving just $500B. So... It's essentially deflation? If they ever dump it back into the markets, that'd be a big wave of inflation, ya? Suddenly there's just more cash in the system. Is half a trillion even enough? How much money is needed to have a noticeable impact on the value of the US dollar?
So it's outside of the USA. Couldn't they go invest it in... China or something? Buy all of Foxconn. Do they have problem bringing it elsewhere? Would they have to pay China income tax if they went there? If it's all Irish money... Buy Guinness. ...I guess that just shifts the fat bank account from the owners of apple to the ex-owners of Guinness... Yeah, to actually make that money work, they'd have to actually launch a new business or expand their business or buy a business that needs expansion.
Inflation is the sort of thing that's supposed to encourage people (or business, in this case) to go DO SOMETHING with their money rather than hoarding it. We should DEFINITELY NOT give them some sort of tax-free day to slip it in. Fuck you, pay me.
Calling them "Libertardians" is flamebait at best.
You have some good points, but they're wrapped in a shit-blanket and served by pure anger. Ease up Francis.
and how far we're falling behind the rest of the developed world in just about every metric
And GDP.
If blacks and whites are equally likely to default on a loan,
But... They AREN'T. You weren't paying attention when I explained that if you break out for ANY variable, there will be variance. Of course there will be a difference between those measurements. There'd likewise be a difference if you broke it out between left-handedness and right-handedness. It doesn't mean a damn thing, but statistically there would be a measurable difference.
So YES, the algorithm WILL MOST CERTAINLY come back with a different rate between rightys and leftys on their ability to repay loans. As we would expect it to. Or race, or whatever.
And while you're saying we want a more accurate predictions, which I wholly agree with, it sounds like you're also saying you also want the prediction to be equal when broken out by race and applied to society. And that's just not going to happen. Not just hard, but impossible. And not something we want to chase after. Not desirable. A bad target. A false goal.
You know what they ought to do? Re-run the self-learning algorithm and feed it the race of the person in question. See what it does to the accuracy. This isn't something we have to argue theoretical on, they could simply look at the results. They don't even have to wait since they have a body of data already.
Eh, I already have this.
Everywhere has it's own sub and I'm subscribed to my town's sub. So I get local news. But it's labeled as such.
In general I'd say leave this sort of homepage tweaking up to the user. Power to the people and all that.
Race can be coded into other data.
Yeah, data like how likely they are to default on a loan. If you break out that statistic by race, you're going to see different numbers. That's just... how statistics work. break out anything and you'll see variation.
But that's the exact data you're looking for when making a loan. That's the goal. But you're saying that if there's any racial variation in that statistic it's a "invisibly encoded race" field. And therefore approving or denying loans based on how likely they are to default on a loan is racism and illegal. This is what you're saying is desirable, and I'm saying it's not.
suppose that whites living in black-majority neighborhoods are, for some reason, likely to not repay loans (possibly because if they weren't financially distressed they'd move to the lily-white suburbs); but blacks living in black-majority neighborhoods have no problem (because there's nothing exceptional about blacks living in black-majority neighborhoods, that's just how "majority" is defined.) So, an algorithm tags "living in black majority neighborhood" as correlating with defaulting on loans. The net result is that blacks are denied loans even though they do not have a higher probability of default. The results of the loan algorithm are not race neutral-
...hmmmm Just like the other guy, you've given a pretty good argument that the algorithm SHOULD be told the race of the target. Because the way you make the program stop unfairly dinging the black neighborhood is to tell it the races of the people therein, so it'd see that the white trash is bringing down the hood. And spotting those sort of trends would make the AI hella racist. But of course, in your example, the biggest factor IS race.
But the results are all that matters
Correct, anything that more accurately predict loan default (or recidivism per the article) helps make a better tool and save money and lets good people out on parole and keeps bad people in prison.
Huh, half and double? The algorithm didn't do a very good job at prediction. If that's not better than manual predictions, then this thing is junk.
And... as shitty as it would be... that sounds like an argument for letting it know the race of person it's judging. "oh, he's white, then that skews the rest of the data".
Joel is this case is a major telecom company and ISPs are no longer small mom&pop shops.
when in reality, MAJORTELECOM has let his peer links saturate and/or severely imbalance
"Let his peer links saturate" As in, people are using their internet connection and MAJORTELECOM isn't upgrading their network. Their old business model depended on customers only checking email once a week. The world changes and now people found out they can use the service they bought. The bastards should invest in US's infrastructure to make their customers happy rather than throwing money at lobbyists and trying to squeeze more money out of people.
and won't upgrade the peer link and/or tolerate the imbalance without compensation.
Comcast bought back $5 Billion of their own stock this year. They made $20 billion in revenue and $12 billion in profit. Cry me a fucking river. They have a virtual monopoly and could charge whatever they want, except for town where they're actually facing competition from fiber, but they drop prices there to make sure Google and such don't make any money.
And bitching about peering imbalance? The peers they have to pay for traffic going out of their network is going to other ISPs. They have to pay the ISP above them just like I do. If they're bitching about their users using netflix, then charge them more. Trying to make a backroom extortion rather than letting the end-customer decide if it's worth the price is fucking bullshit. Power to the people.
And why is everyone in favor of the ISPs killing network neutrality an anonymous coward? Fucking shills.
Would you rather let telecoms turn the Internet into Cable TV bundles or would you rather have the US adopt Sharia Law?
Take a survey of 10,000 people.
BEHOLD! The data shows most people prefer we let the Telecoms abolish network neutrality.
Come on, this is like... science 101. Skepticism.
You can't have AI that learns on its own and have AI that isn't racially biased unless you artificially code blocks to it reaching certain logical conclusions.
What? No? You don't block their inputs, not their outcome.
You just hide the race of the targets it's looking at. As in, the sql library which has all that data it's digesting? You just exclude the 'race' field. DONE. The algorithm isn't judging based on race.
That won't stop it from looking at... say... the location where someone lives for approving or disapproving a loan. And lo-and-behold that's pretty similar to looking at someone's race. But that's not their race and an unbiased look at something that DOES indicate loan-worthiness. If that's the sort of thing the ACLU disapproves of, they've got a very difficult fight on their hands, because where does that end?
There is no new legislation. The FCC reclassified Telecoms as "common carriers", which was made by old-as-dirt legislation. As common carriers they would be barred from inspecting the contents of the packages they're carrying for you. (And they would not be responsible for what you send).
I mean, that's the current curfluffle. Are you bitching about the FCC's Open Internet Order? Because that's still not legislation.
The FCC doesn't make legislation, that comes out of congress. So... wtf are you smoking and could you send me that link?
Did you mean regulation? I know these things can be confusing. Who could have guessed?
as afraid as I am to post this opinion on slashdot of all places, ... already has such strongly held opinions that they get angry at you for even asking in the first place.
Naw, no worries mate. You should never be afraid to ask. Don't let the maniacal group of fanatical, hammer-wielding zealots put you off.
As I understand it, net neutrality is a set of U.S. government regulations that prohibit an ISP like Comcast from charging, say Netflix, more per GB than they charge me per GB.
Network neutrality is how the Internet works. Network neutrality regulation is the governments attempt at keeping it from falling apart. There's been a pretty obvious political campaign to get the two conflated. The thing with extorting extra money out of specific services is one aspect of it.
Network Neutrality: It prevents ISPs from fucking with your packets in transit. It's fundamentally how the Internet works and has always worked since it's inception. The Internet is a bunch of networks interconnected all sharing and carrying each other's packets through a vast web. It's pretty cool. Small ISPs pay those above them for connections, and charge those under them, and "peer" with their neighbors on all their borders. So if JoeISP next door has a million packets last month that needed to cross your lines to get to something on the other side, and you had a million packets that needed to go through his servers, you're both square.
And neither of you fuck with those packets in transit. You don't slow down all of Joe's customers packets. You don't look through them and drop all the stuff related to cats. You don't differentiate if they're going to France or to Kansas. You don't care if they're smut or if they're stock orders. You don't care if it's netflix traffic or hulu traffic. It's all equal and you carry it as neutral as possible. (and, there's some exceptions like VoIP being treated differently than downloads, it's not a perfect system).
Now, if Joe was a real dick, he could go to Netflix and demand an extra $50 or he'd drop all their packets. Or make Google queries 10s slower than Bing searches. Or block anything going to or from China. Or block all porn. Or refuse web connections to a subset of the Internet unless the customer pays extra. All of that breaks network neutrality, and is a way for ISPs to make an extra buck on top of actually providing Internet service.
Netflix officially don't care anymore as they're too big to bully around. Could you imagine buying Comcast and simply not having that include Netflix? PFt, no. Customers would flock to alternatives. Netflix can play that game of chicken and double-dog-dare Comcast to shit all over their customers and give degraded service. Hell, they're international, they can weather the storm. 10 years ago when they started competing with cableTV, they really REALLY cared.
The FCC was trying to enforce network neutrality by classifying the Telecom giants as common carriers like Fedex. Which means they can't fuck with the goods in transit (and that they're not responsible for what people send). If business REALLY wanted to bitch-slap the telecoms for changing that, Disney could sue them all for all the piracy their services are aiding. But that's a legal nuclear option. Prior to the FCC pulling that trigger with classifying ISPs as common carriers is that the market consolidated and competition died off. Before, asshats like JoeISP didn't try to break network neutrality as the network would simply route around it, and everyone depended on everyone else playing nice. Now that there's only a handful of major ISPs that refuse to compete with each others territory, there's no free market, and capitalism is fucked.
but we're still talking about the government prohibiting a specific type of contractual agreement between two corporate entities - that almost never goes well for anybody except the incumbents.
Hmm
Nothing is going on that is preventing an open internet.
What? The Internet will never be perfectly open and free. It's more of a ideal we want to strive for. The closer we get to it the better. There legit real-world limitations though. VoIP is different then torrents, Omaha is closer than Kzhackistan. You could even argue that locking sites behind paywalls violates network neutrality, but hey, it's a purchase choice left to the end-users so no-one cares and it lets people sell services online. Power to the people and all that.
And actually, ESPN3.com (formorly ESPN360.com) is bundled into your Internet service. You don't get a choice about if you want to buy it or no. Your ISP is paying money directly to Disney and Hearst to give their users access to the content. An example of telecoms trying to bundle websites into ISP services and transforming the Internet into something more like cable TV where the networks get to decide what's available to watch. A clear example of a violation of network neutrality.
The worst thing to do is establish regulations where none are needed.
Right. But regulations are needed here. Because capitalism only works when there's competition. When there's no free market, shit sucks. Markets become less free in all sorts of ways. Markets with a high barrier to entry are just naturally less free. When an oligarchy of businesses refuse to compete and carve up the map into territories, the market is not free. And yeah, regulation makes markets less free. But if they refuse to compete, and start abusing the users, the proper response is to either bust up the companies into smaller chunks that will start competing again or to regulate what is and is not acceptable behavior. Like fucking over network neutrality.
Because of course we want a neutral network. That's how it's operated since it's inception. Everyone passes along everyone else's packets without fucking with them. When the telecoms start to try actively BREAKING network neutrality, then obviously something has to change.
Now the only reason that their first timid advances at breaking network neutrality were thwarted in the past is due to public backlash and the fear that the FCC would clamp down with regulation. And then they continued and the FCC did indeed clamp down. With the current head of the FCC blatently trying to kill off network neutrality (god, it'd be so much better if he just pointed out he wanted to remove regulation enforcing network neutrality, but no, I don't think he even knows the different), the threat of reprecusion is all but gone. But... 3 more years and we'll have another head of the FCC. Or sooner.
You aren't being blocked or prevented from engaging in legal activities.
BWAHAHAHHAaaa, oh. Ok, nevermind. I thought you had a serious complaint for a moment.
No, nothing is preventing you from subscribing to HBO and watching Game of Thrones. ...As long as you're willing to sign up for the premier cable package and shell out extra for HBO on top of that. If that's how you want the rest of the Internet to be made available to the masses, fuck off.