A politician advocating mandatory birth control to deal with overpopulation is an idiot, and should not be listened to.
No, really. China did just that, and where did it get them? They've grossly overcorrected, and their population is going to start aging, and then dropping, in the same manner as South Korea and Japan, countries where birth control was merely available, not enforced. And that's true pretty much everywhere. The USA's birth rate has been at or below replacement level since 1971. We've only continued to grow due to immigration. Speaking of immigration, Mexico's birth rate has likewise plummeted from 6.7 children per female in 1970 to just barely above replacement level today. If anything, the problem facing advanced countries is how to deal with plummeting birth rates, not overpopulation.
Every real-world study that's been done states that this is not true. Canada tested it in a single town, and found that people still went to work by and large. The ones who worked significantly less were those who were involved in other useful pursuits, such as students and parents caring for small children.
As for breeding? Well, right now many advanced countries are facing massive shortfalls of population growth. The only difference is how bad it is. The US birth rate has been at or below replacement level since 1971, and the population has only grown largely via immigration. Provide contraceptives and such, and population control will be the least of your problems.
It depends which part of the industry you're talking about.
The corporate IT, comparatively white collar world? Yes, convictions are a kiss of death here, and even moreso in the government realm.
But in the more wild-west style startup world? Maybe not so much.
It used to be much easier, especially for the earlier hackers, because they had expertise no one else did. As time goes on, that's less the case, especially for the more risk-averse sorts in the corporate/government spheres.
All the US Government is going to do with this is force all of these companies to go overseas, or largely go out of business, because eventually the only ones left in the USA will be doing business only in the US.
Not to discount the bad aspects of the TPP (intellectual property BS, etc), but I'll attempt to make a Devil's Advocate pitch for the 'good' side from the US perspective.
The first is that most of the NAFTA comparisons aren't exactly accurate, in that a free trade agreement with a significantly less developed nation has more downsides than one with a similarly advanced nation. For instance, when people complain about NAFTA, they're complaining about Mexico, not Canada. The USA had a free trade agreement with Canada that predated NAFTA, and it's really never been an issue. TPP includes several nations that are similarly advanced, and with whom free trade will likely be entirely beneficial, such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. (Canada is part of the TPP, but the USA already has a free trade agreement with them). Of the less developed nations, we already have a free trade agreement with the most impactful (Mexico).
Probably the biggest upside would be cementing an anti-China (or at least counterweight to China) trade bloc in the Asia Pacific region. A lot of people talk about China or outsourcing to China, but China's not a part of this deal, nor is it presently in consideration to do so, as it's not even on the list of potential second-wave candidates (South Korea, Indonesia, Colombia, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand). It also includes a number of key U.S. allies in the region, and could ideally bolster those economies vis a vis China.
It also opens those countries' markets to more U.products, and reduces a lot of the trade barriers that contribute to the existing trade deficit, such as Japan's agricultural import restrictions, for one.
The guy on Office Space was right, though. Have you ever tried letting the customers give requirements directly to the engineers? You're setting yourself up for a world of hurt. That sort of stuff absolutely needs translation.
Housing in Vegas is dirt cheap from what I understand. They had a huge housing boom before the great recession, but prices cratered badly afterward since a lot of it had been focused on vacation homes and rental properties. Definitely take a look at moving, though. I wound up moving a year ago from a high cost of living metro area, to a much more reasonably priced one, and live in a luxurious place paying half of what I was before (and could probably pay less if I wasn't enjoying the ridiculous convenience so much), with almost no commute. My only complaint is that the new area isn't really cycling friendly, but I barely have to drive at all, so it's not so bad really. Even aside from money, the amount of stress you save yourself from is just incomparable.
You could barely buy a townhouse 1-2 counties out from Washington D.C. for that, let alone inside the city, nevermind someplace as insane as San Francisco. Austin may be getting expensive compared to other cities in Texas, but it's got a long way to go before it hits those levels.
Traffic is definitely a big deal though - commuting sucks, and so many places in the US just are not built for anything other than taking long, painful drives into the city each day.
It's certainly a problem. The easiest answer is requirements to build affordable housing as well, as a condition of the permits.
Either way, it's certainly not solved by refusing to allow new housing to be built, since that simply increases the demand for the existing units, who will get remodeled and upgraded to better compete for the ridiculous sums of money being thrown around. When only rich people can afford to live there, you're not going to be able to get away with renting/selling them a dump. They'll pay for something nicer.
This is entirely true, up to a point, because there's just so much pent up demand and so much money. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem if they'd started acting long ago, and now they're behind the 8-ball instead.
Also, I should note that it's entirely common to for cities and municipalities to require that developers build a certain amount of affordable housing, as a condition to gaining the permits to build expensive housing. They gladly do it, because it's a small price to pay for the money they'll make, especially in a market as overheated as San Francisco.
The real problem is that San Francisco adamantly refuses to build more housing to meet demand. Sorry, but that's the way the market works. If you don't increase the supply to meet the demand, the price is going to go up as the demand does. Instead, though, they insist that they want to keep it "the way it is", not build new apartment buildings that might relieve some of the excess demand for housing, and the corresponding infrastructure to go with it. That leaves them only with hoping that the demand goes down, which is idiotic.
I hope it does go down though - I hope the tech industry increasingly decides to just say "F**k San Francisco" and moves elsewhere, where there's more land, cheaper cost of living (because at this point almost anywhere is cheaper), and less insane/stubborn neighbors. San Francisco has its upsides, sure, but none that are worth enough to make me want to live there unless you're offering me 4-5 times as much as I make elsewhere. Let San Francisco's economy tank, because that's what they clearly would prefer to actually dealing with the boom that most cities would bend over backwards for half of.
What I want to know is how US law views various other robot-like devices.
For instance, is a giant robot that's piloted by a human considered a robot?
What about a tele-operated robot, or a waldo?
Likewise, is a drone considered a robot? At what degree of autonomy does it become considered one?
Go ask the Vietnamese just how benevolent China was in the past. Here's a tip - despite what happened with the US fighting in Vietnam, and the (brutal) Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War 2, it's not the US or Japan that Vietnam is worried about.
The fact of the matter is that China, for several millenia, conquered everything it thought to be worth conquering, demanded tribute from a few more border areas, and then basically said "There's nothing else here worth bothering with, we are the center of culture and the world, f*ck everything else." It's sort of telling that the Chinese characters for China basically mean "(Center/Middle) (Kingdom/Country)." This is why people mean when they refer to the "Middle Kingdom mentality," meaning a China that thinks it should be the center of everything, and that the past two centuries are an aberration that needs rectifying.
I joined the military in the US, and served honorably for 6 years. It may not have won me a seat on the board at Goldman Sachs, but it has served me pretty damn well in most aspects of life. When I go to job interviews, you're damn right they look on me favorably for my service (and I wouldn't be interested in working for the few that it's not the case for). I can walk into any place in 90%+ of the country, and when they find out I'm a veteran, I get a better reception. It does carry a considerable amount of prestige, even if the richest of the rich don't see it as something they need to do any more (which is a travesty, but that's another matter).
That's entirely true, in that it was the viewpoint of people back then - but they'd be wrong. Japan has always been about high quality work, rather than mass production. Consider traditional Japanese swordsmithing - arguably some of the best in the world. Their limitation in World War 2 was mostly in terms of lack of raw materials, and to some degree being slightly behind technologically, but it wasn't any inherent quality control problems due to lax standards or laziness.
And while I'm not going to say that China can't do quality workmanship (because they absolutely can - see some of the porcelain, or arts, or such), but China has always been able to readily fall back on quantity over quantity in so many things that it's far more culturally acceptable to go with cheap/low-quality mass production, and make things up in volume. High precision quality control has never been something that China values above all else.
Nukes on a fleet is game over for that fleet. The Operation Crossroads test proved that a shallow subsurface detonation from a small (Nagasaki type 23kt bomb) rendered the entire fleet uninhabitable. The radiation was so bad they couldn't even run the third planned test.
On the bright side, you'd never have to worry about finding the ships at night since they'd all glow in the dark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There's a distinct difference between limited warfare, even limited conventional warfare, and total (yet non-nuclear) war. The presence of nuclear weapons significantly changes the equation.
I'm not talking about a war fought over some islands in the South China Sea - I'm talking about all-out war for conquest. Do you really think that the USA would sit back and not use nuclear weapons if faced with an adversary that was determined to conquer it and its allies, even if only by conventional means? Yes, it's US policy to not use them first. How long do you think that policy would last if the alternative was to accept complete defeat in a non-nuclear war? Do you think anyone would take the presence of nuclear weapons seriously if we were so afraid to use them that the only thing we'd respond to with them is the use of nukes by someone else?
Put another way - do you think Israel developed nukes because they were afraid that they'd get nuked by the USA or the Russians? Of course not, they developed nukes as a contingency against the possibility of total conventional defeat. They were probably pretty close to using them in the Yom Kippur war, too. Israel was straight up terrified about its chances for survival, and nukes were a hedge against that. Do you think Pakistan or North Korea developed nukes just because they were afraid the Indians or the Americans were going to use nukes on them? No, absolutely not. They did so in part because they were convinced that nothing short of that would be able to deter their enemies from destroying them conventionally.
And the biggest reason that nations like South Korea and Japan do not develop their own nukes (because they easily have the expertise and industry capability to do so) is that they are protected by an American guarantee, the so-called "US Nuclear Umbrella."
If the USA is unable to stop it by conventional means, then absolutely, yes.
That's exactly how deterrence works.
And the moment you show you're unable or unwilling to use it, all bets are off, everywhere, for every US ally. The threat becomes useless if you reach the point where you would use it, and you blink and back down instead. The USA would no longer be able to deter China from anything short of an invasion of the mainland USA - and even then, if you keep drawing lines in the sand and I keep crossing them, at what point do I start thinking you'll suddenly change just because I cross another one?
To clarify, it's not that the Japanese hate the US military and want to replace it with their own. The Japanese that don't want the US military there, generally don't want their own military either. It's not considered a prestigious thing to join the military there the way it is in the US, for instance. And while there are those who mostly don't want the Americans around for NIMBY reasons (which isn't to say some of those aren't legitimate or reasonable grievances, but), they're not exactly motivated by anti-Americanism generally, so much as anti-military/pacifist sentiment.
Japan is also getting into the business of arms exports, as well. For instance, they're one of the finalists (and the favored contender) to win a contract to build submarines for the Australian Navy (other competitors being France and Germany).
Overall, this is nothing bad - even were Japan to fully rearm, Japan today is a far cry from the aggressive expansionist of 80 years ago. China is the real threat to international stability and order in East Asia with its aggressive attempts to seize outlying islands on the flimsiest of justifications. (North Korea is a threat as well, but more to South Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan)
The Japanese public is also incredibly wary of full rearmament, and they're undergoing massive protests to the current government's plan to even relax some of the pacifist restrictions to let them do things like help the USA prior to a direct attack. To put another way, as it currently stands, if North Korea attacks South Korea, and starts firing missiles at US ships, Japan wouldn't be able to do a thing until Japan itself is fired on - not even to shoot down missiles targeting US transports.
We already have capable enough defenses for countering North Korea, both in terms of vs South Korea and Japan, as well as Guam/Hawaii and theoretical attacks on the US west coast. The only thing left to do is to deploy them to cover places (like South Korea) where we don't have them yet, and we're in talks with South Korea on it right now. These include THAAD, Aegis Cruisers/Destroyers armed with the SM-3 missile, both ours and the ones we've sold to Japan. South Korea has Aegis Destroyers, but is still using the SM-2 which isn't as useful against ballistic missiles.
And that's before we get to the stuff the Missile Defense Agency has based in Alaska.
We already HAVE the most cost effective stuff that's leftover from SDI, and it's more than enough to protect against North Korea. Anything else is just more pork being tossed at defense contracting firms, unless you think we should be building it to counter China/Russia, and that's going to be ridiculously expensive, nevermind destabilizing.
The superdelegates can change their vote at any time. Remember, it was much the same in 2008, when she was considered to have a big lead in superdelegates, but that eroded slowly over time as Obama kept winning primaries. By the time it was clear that he was going to win the most regular delegates, the superdelegates weren't an issue.
That said, I don't think Sanders is going to win enough regular delegates to take the nomination, sadly.
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A politician advocating mandatory birth control to deal with overpopulation is an idiot, and should not be listened to.
No, really. China did just that, and where did it get them? They've grossly overcorrected, and their population is going to start aging, and then dropping, in the same manner as South Korea and Japan, countries where birth control was merely available, not enforced. And that's true pretty much everywhere. The USA's birth rate has been at or below replacement level since 1971. We've only continued to grow due to immigration. Speaking of immigration, Mexico's birth rate has likewise plummeted from 6.7 children per female in 1970 to just barely above replacement level today. If anything, the problem facing advanced countries is how to deal with plummeting birth rates, not overpopulation.
Every real-world study that's been done states that this is not true. Canada tested it in a single town, and found that people still went to work by and large. The ones who worked significantly less were those who were involved in other useful pursuits, such as students and parents caring for small children.
As for breeding? Well, right now many advanced countries are facing massive shortfalls of population growth. The only difference is how bad it is. The US birth rate has been at or below replacement level since 1971, and the population has only grown largely via immigration. Provide contraceptives and such, and population control will be the least of your problems.
At least until Half Life 3 comes out, yes.
It depends which part of the industry you're talking about.
The corporate IT, comparatively white collar world? Yes, convictions are a kiss of death here, and even moreso in the government realm. But in the more wild-west style startup world? Maybe not so much.
It used to be much easier, especially for the earlier hackers, because they had expertise no one else did. As time goes on, that's less the case, especially for the more risk-averse sorts in the corporate/government spheres.
All the US Government is going to do with this is force all of these companies to go overseas, or largely go out of business, because eventually the only ones left in the USA will be doing business only in the US.
Not to discount the bad aspects of the TPP (intellectual property BS, etc), but I'll attempt to make a Devil's Advocate pitch for the 'good' side from the US perspective.
The first is that most of the NAFTA comparisons aren't exactly accurate, in that a free trade agreement with a significantly less developed nation has more downsides than one with a similarly advanced nation. For instance, when people complain about NAFTA, they're complaining about Mexico, not Canada. The USA had a free trade agreement with Canada that predated NAFTA, and it's really never been an issue. TPP includes several nations that are similarly advanced, and with whom free trade will likely be entirely beneficial, such as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. (Canada is part of the TPP, but the USA already has a free trade agreement with them). Of the less developed nations, we already have a free trade agreement with the most impactful (Mexico).
Probably the biggest upside would be cementing an anti-China (or at least counterweight to China) trade bloc in the Asia Pacific region. A lot of people talk about China or outsourcing to China, but China's not a part of this deal, nor is it presently in consideration to do so, as it's not even on the list of potential second-wave candidates (South Korea, Indonesia, Colombia, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand). It also includes a number of key U.S. allies in the region, and could ideally bolster those economies vis a vis China.
It also opens those countries' markets to more U.products, and reduces a lot of the trade barriers that contribute to the existing trade deficit, such as Japan's agricultural import restrictions, for one.
The guy on Office Space was right, though. Have you ever tried letting the customers give requirements directly to the engineers? You're setting yourself up for a world of hurt. That sort of stuff absolutely needs translation.
Housing in Vegas is dirt cheap from what I understand. They had a huge housing boom before the great recession, but prices cratered badly afterward since a lot of it had been focused on vacation homes and rental properties. Definitely take a look at moving, though. I wound up moving a year ago from a high cost of living metro area, to a much more reasonably priced one, and live in a luxurious place paying half of what I was before (and could probably pay less if I wasn't enjoying the ridiculous convenience so much), with almost no commute. My only complaint is that the new area isn't really cycling friendly, but I barely have to drive at all, so it's not so bad really. Even aside from money, the amount of stress you save yourself from is just incomparable.
You could barely buy a townhouse 1-2 counties out from Washington D.C. for that, let alone inside the city, nevermind someplace as insane as San Francisco. Austin may be getting expensive compared to other cities in Texas, but it's got a long way to go before it hits those levels.
Traffic is definitely a big deal though - commuting sucks, and so many places in the US just are not built for anything other than taking long, painful drives into the city each day.
It's certainly a problem. The easiest answer is requirements to build affordable housing as well, as a condition of the permits.
Either way, it's certainly not solved by refusing to allow new housing to be built, since that simply increases the demand for the existing units, who will get remodeled and upgraded to better compete for the ridiculous sums of money being thrown around. When only rich people can afford to live there, you're not going to be able to get away with renting/selling them a dump. They'll pay for something nicer.
This is entirely true, up to a point, because there's just so much pent up demand and so much money. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem if they'd started acting long ago, and now they're behind the 8-ball instead.
Also, I should note that it's entirely common to for cities and municipalities to require that developers build a certain amount of affordable housing, as a condition to gaining the permits to build expensive housing. They gladly do it, because it's a small price to pay for the money they'll make, especially in a market as overheated as San Francisco.
The real problem is that San Francisco adamantly refuses to build more housing to meet demand. Sorry, but that's the way the market works. If you don't increase the supply to meet the demand, the price is going to go up as the demand does. Instead, though, they insist that they want to keep it "the way it is", not build new apartment buildings that might relieve some of the excess demand for housing, and the corresponding infrastructure to go with it. That leaves them only with hoping that the demand goes down, which is idiotic.
I hope it does go down though - I hope the tech industry increasingly decides to just say "F**k San Francisco" and moves elsewhere, where there's more land, cheaper cost of living (because at this point almost anywhere is cheaper), and less insane/stubborn neighbors. San Francisco has its upsides, sure, but none that are worth enough to make me want to live there unless you're offering me 4-5 times as much as I make elsewhere. Let San Francisco's economy tank, because that's what they clearly would prefer to actually dealing with the boom that most cities would bend over backwards for half of.
What I want to know is how US law views various other robot-like devices. For instance, is a giant robot that's piloted by a human considered a robot?
What about a tele-operated robot, or a waldo?
Likewise, is a drone considered a robot? At what degree of autonomy does it become considered one?
Go ask the Vietnamese just how benevolent China was in the past. Here's a tip - despite what happened with the US fighting in Vietnam, and the (brutal) Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War 2, it's not the US or Japan that Vietnam is worried about.
The fact of the matter is that China, for several millenia, conquered everything it thought to be worth conquering, demanded tribute from a few more border areas, and then basically said "There's nothing else here worth bothering with, we are the center of culture and the world, f*ck everything else." It's sort of telling that the Chinese characters for China basically mean "(Center/Middle) (Kingdom/Country)." This is why people mean when they refer to the "Middle Kingdom mentality," meaning a China that thinks it should be the center of everything, and that the past two centuries are an aberration that needs rectifying.
I joined the military in the US, and served honorably for 6 years. It may not have won me a seat on the board at Goldman Sachs, but it has served me pretty damn well in most aspects of life. When I go to job interviews, you're damn right they look on me favorably for my service (and I wouldn't be interested in working for the few that it's not the case for). I can walk into any place in 90%+ of the country, and when they find out I'm a veteran, I get a better reception. It does carry a considerable amount of prestige, even if the richest of the rich don't see it as something they need to do any more (which is a travesty, but that's another matter).
That's entirely true, in that it was the viewpoint of people back then - but they'd be wrong. Japan has always been about high quality work, rather than mass production. Consider traditional Japanese swordsmithing - arguably some of the best in the world. Their limitation in World War 2 was mostly in terms of lack of raw materials, and to some degree being slightly behind technologically, but it wasn't any inherent quality control problems due to lax standards or laziness.
And while I'm not going to say that China can't do quality workmanship (because they absolutely can - see some of the porcelain, or arts, or such), but China has always been able to readily fall back on quantity over quantity in so many things that it's far more culturally acceptable to go with cheap/low-quality mass production, and make things up in volume. High precision quality control has never been something that China values above all else.
Nukes on a fleet is game over for that fleet. The Operation Crossroads test proved that a shallow subsurface detonation from a small (Nagasaki type 23kt bomb) rendered the entire fleet uninhabitable. The radiation was so bad they couldn't even run the third planned test.
On the bright side, you'd never have to worry about finding the ships at night since they'd all glow in the dark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There's a distinct difference between limited warfare, even limited conventional warfare, and total (yet non-nuclear) war. The presence of nuclear weapons significantly changes the equation.
I'm not talking about a war fought over some islands in the South China Sea - I'm talking about all-out war for conquest. Do you really think that the USA would sit back and not use nuclear weapons if faced with an adversary that was determined to conquer it and its allies, even if only by conventional means? Yes, it's US policy to not use them first. How long do you think that policy would last if the alternative was to accept complete defeat in a non-nuclear war? Do you think anyone would take the presence of nuclear weapons seriously if we were so afraid to use them that the only thing we'd respond to with them is the use of nukes by someone else?
Put another way - do you think Israel developed nukes because they were afraid that they'd get nuked by the USA or the Russians? Of course not, they developed nukes as a contingency against the possibility of total conventional defeat. They were probably pretty close to using them in the Yom Kippur war, too. Israel was straight up terrified about its chances for survival, and nukes were a hedge against that. Do you think Pakistan or North Korea developed nukes just because they were afraid the Indians or the Americans were going to use nukes on them? No, absolutely not. They did so in part because they were convinced that nothing short of that would be able to deter their enemies from destroying them conventionally.
And the biggest reason that nations like South Korea and Japan do not develop their own nukes (because they easily have the expertise and industry capability to do so) is that they are protected by an American guarantee, the so-called "US Nuclear Umbrella."
If the USA is unable to stop it by conventional means, then absolutely, yes.
That's exactly how deterrence works.
And the moment you show you're unable or unwilling to use it, all bets are off, everywhere, for every US ally. The threat becomes useless if you reach the point where you would use it, and you blink and back down instead. The USA would no longer be able to deter China from anything short of an invasion of the mainland USA - and even then, if you keep drawing lines in the sand and I keep crossing them, at what point do I start thinking you'll suddenly change just because I cross another one?
To clarify, it's not that the Japanese hate the US military and want to replace it with their own. The Japanese that don't want the US military there, generally don't want their own military either. It's not considered a prestigious thing to join the military there the way it is in the US, for instance. And while there are those who mostly don't want the Americans around for NIMBY reasons (which isn't to say some of those aren't legitimate or reasonable grievances, but), they're not exactly motivated by anti-Americanism generally, so much as anti-military/pacifist sentiment.
Japan is also getting into the business of arms exports, as well. For instance, they're one of the finalists (and the favored contender) to win a contract to build submarines for the Australian Navy (other competitors being France and Germany).
Overall, this is nothing bad - even were Japan to fully rearm, Japan today is a far cry from the aggressive expansionist of 80 years ago. China is the real threat to international stability and order in East Asia with its aggressive attempts to seize outlying islands on the flimsiest of justifications. (North Korea is a threat as well, but more to South Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan)
The Japanese public is also incredibly wary of full rearmament, and they're undergoing massive protests to the current government's plan to even relax some of the pacifist restrictions to let them do things like help the USA prior to a direct attack. To put another way, as it currently stands, if North Korea attacks South Korea, and starts firing missiles at US ships, Japan wouldn't be able to do a thing until Japan itself is fired on - not even to shoot down missiles targeting US transports.
Relevant XKCD for comparisons of radiation levels:
https://xkcd.com/radiation/
We already have capable enough defenses for countering North Korea, both in terms of vs South Korea and Japan, as well as Guam/Hawaii and theoretical attacks on the US west coast. The only thing left to do is to deploy them to cover places (like South Korea) where we don't have them yet, and we're in talks with South Korea on it right now. These include THAAD, Aegis Cruisers/Destroyers armed with the SM-3 missile, both ours and the ones we've sold to Japan. South Korea has Aegis Destroyers, but is still using the SM-2 which isn't as useful against ballistic missiles.
And that's before we get to the stuff the Missile Defense Agency has based in Alaska.
We already HAVE the most cost effective stuff that's leftover from SDI, and it's more than enough to protect against North Korea. Anything else is just more pork being tossed at defense contracting firms, unless you think we should be building it to counter China/Russia, and that's going to be ridiculously expensive, nevermind destabilizing.
Outsourcing and contracting companies should be banned from using H-1Bs, period. There are just too many abuses that can be introduced with that.
The superdelegates can change their vote at any time. Remember, it was much the same in 2008, when she was considered to have a big lead in superdelegates, but that eroded slowly over time as Obama kept winning primaries. By the time it was clear that he was going to win the most regular delegates, the superdelegates weren't an issue.
That said, I don't think Sanders is going to win enough regular delegates to take the nomination, sadly.