The "paradox" they're worrying about simply doesn't exist. If you assume the universe is full of intelligent life, you expect to see exactly what we've seen: nothing. The distances involved are just too huge. Barring some major new revelation about the laws of physics, humans are never going to be traveling throughout the galaxy. At best we might send small, unmanned probes to a few nearby stars. There could be thousands of advanced civilizations scattered through our galaxy right now, and we'd have no way of knowing about them. They'd be invisible in the ocean of 100 billion stars, with no way to talk to each other and not much reason to even try.
As Douglas Adams put it: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
Claims 1 and 2 are implicitly claimed by the proponents of Obamacare. They claim that 15 million more people have health insurance.
"More people with health insurance" is not at all the same thing as "more patients". In fact, there are good reasons to think they'll be inversely correlated. When someone without health insurance gets sick, they tend to go to the emergency room, which is one of the least efficient, most expensive ways to provide health care. People with insurance are more likely to get preventive care, which tends to decrease the amount of health care they need in the long run. Ditto for treating minor ailments before they turn into major problems.
The burden of proof is on them because such an occurrence would be highly unlikely.
I don't understand what you mean by "burden of proof". You seem to view this as a competition, where you're fighting against someone and your goal is to win. I don't see it like that at all. I want to understand the world. I want to know what's really going on, and find the best solutions to real world problems. That means the burden is always on me to get the facts and find out what is really going on. If I make things up, then draw conclusions based on them without bothering to find out whether they're really true, all my conclusions are meaningless. That's living in a fantasy world. I don't want to do that. Do you? If not, then you too have the responsibility to get the facts before you start drawing conclusions.
No. Not if they necessarily follow from a different claim which was already made by the opposing side in the debate.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they often are not. Humans are spectacularly bad at figuring out what "necessarily follows" from anything. I distrust all my own conclusions until I look up the facts to find out whether my predictions match reality. I distrust yours even more, since you haven't even bothered to verify your assumptions, much less test your conclusions.
Claim 4 has been proven by the gp post to follow from claims 1-3. You just refuse to accept the proof. That's on your lack of comprehension -- not on me. Ditto for claim 5.
Then please humor my lack of understanding and point to exactly where those facts were established. I just looked back through the tree of posts, and I don't see anything remotely resembling evidence for those claims. What am I missing?
Ok, let me list the claims you just made (or implied):
1. The number of patients has increased. 2. That was because of Obamacare. 3. The number of doctors has not increased. 4. People in dire need of care are less likely to get it than they were a few years ago. 5. More time is being spent handling people with minor ailments.
Every one of those claims needs to be backed up with evidence. Until you actually do the research and find out whether they're true or not, you're just making things up. Conclusions based on unfounded assumptions are meaningless. Get the facts. Find out whether the above claims are really true or not. Then we'll have something to talk about. Then we can have a discussion that's grounded in reality.
No, we did this to ourselves. Much as I wish you were right, that doesn't fit the facts.
Perhaps on the Democratic side there's a reasonable excuse. Not many people ran, and only two of them were ever serious candidates. But on the Republican side there's no excuse at all. 17(!) people ran for the nomination, including a bunch of obviously qualified governors and senators. So who got chosen? Trump, the absolute bottom of the barrel. And that happened despite the opposition of the party establishment, despite Bush (who the establishment all but declared would be the nominee) spending $150 million dollars on his campaign. It's the people who made this happen, and no one else.
You're rewriting history to make it sound like Palin was a lot more intelligent than she actually was. For example, people didn't laugh at her because she read multiple newspapers. They laughed at her because she couldn't name even a single one that she read, and it was obvious to everyone watching that in fact she didn't read any newspapers at all. Trying to equate that to someone who reads articles through Google News is grossly distorting the facts.
As for your main claim, that Obamacare has destroyed the quality of medical care, citation needed! That's not a claim you can just make without presenting a shred of evidence.
The main factors limiting population growth have little to do with carrying capacity. The biggest ones are education, access to birth control, and eliminating poverty. Wealthy, well educated countries tend to have the lowest birth rates, even though (being wealthy) they're the ones most capable of supporting a larger population.
You mine the raw materials in space. The moon is a great source, as are asteroids.
But all of this involves one extra assumption: that lots of people will be living in space as well. If everyone is living down on earth and you use space only for industry, that's probably not real practical. Shipping everything back and forth will be less efficient than just keeping everything on earth, like you say. But when you have lots of people living in space, doing your manufacturing in space is the only way to support them.
Yeah, long term I think we'll need to move to some kind of a universal basic income. It's the only system that really makes sense when there's no need for most of the population to work.
Where did this idea come from that humans need to be "useful"? Is it not enough to live a pleasant life, doing things you enjoy? Most people work because they have to, not because they want to. The things we do by choice, like art and sports and socializing, could all be described as "useless". They don't put food on the table, but they're the things most of us really care about.
Statistically speaking, all conservatives realize that CBS, NBC, and ABC are biased against conservatives and Republicans at least 90% of the time.
Did you really just say what I think you said? "Statistically speaking, here's a BS number I just made up without evidence about how many other people also make things up without evidence." It's not just BS. It's meta BS!
The author seems to be making the assumption that we shouldn't build cities in places where earthquakes can occur. Should we also not build them in places that are at risk for hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanoes, wildfires, or any other sort of natural disaster? If so, we've just ruled out a large fraction of land on earth, including most coastlines and just about the entire Pacific rim.
There are risks everywhere. They're different in different places, but nowhere is completely safe. You have to weigh the risks and benefits for any location.
Exactly. I have a 7 year old Mac, and it still works great. Apple has done nothing to force me to buy a new one. I'm sure they would like it if I did, but they're continuing to support it with OS upgrades and the like. Contrast that with my 3 year old Android phone that already has been abandoned for OS upgrades.
It's probably true that on average, their customers buy a new computer every four years and a new phone every three. But that's usually because they want the newest technology, not because their old device has stopped working.
The pedant in me needs to point out that the phrase "in one fell swoop" doesn't mean what the author thinks it does. "Fell" in this context means cruel, malevolent, or destructive. I really hope that's not the case here.
Then again, it's being done by banks, so maybe that description really is right.
Then let me draw an analogy: Paying for a year of Amazon Prime to watch one episode is likely not "at a decent price".
Amazon also lets you pay for individual episodes. In fact, they have a lot more things available as pay-per-view than on Prime. iTunes, Google Play, etc. also use that business model, and they seem to be doing fine with it.
This hasn't worked as well for reading articles, mainly because of the lack of a good standard for micropayments. But that could be solved if the industry decided to get serious about it.
Android does let you write your apps (or at least, the bulk of them) in C or any other language your want. But it's not the recommended approach. A lot of its libraries are written in Java, so you have to jump through a few extra hoops to use them if your code is running outside the VM. And you have to worry about providing binaries for different architectures, whereas with Java it takes care of that for you.
So you presumably could already use Swift when coding for Android. But that's not what this is about. It's about Google turning Swift into a "first class" language and making it easy for you to use it on Android.
In the same way, you can use Java to code for Linux, but it's never really been a first class citizen. You have to jump through hoops to use a lot of libraries and to integrate naturally with the rest of the system. Sun and Oracle have put a lot of effort into trying to work around that, but it's still an issue. Every platform supports some languages better than others. They just differ in which languages those are.
Sure, as long as you only care about the security of devices you personally control, and you can install any software you want on them. For most people, the world is a little broader than that. Practically every week we hear about another website that got hacked, and they were storing user information in plaintext. Or a router that has a hardcoded administrative password. Or a "smart" TV that opens up an unsecured gateway into your home network. Running OpenBSD on your laptop might protect the laptop itself (but probably not once the hackers are into your home network). But tons of other devices and services you interact with every day still have pathetically bad security.
That's the biggest threat to security right now. It isn't the spy agencies planting back doors in hardware. It's companies that don't even bother to lock the front door.
Auto insurance could be priced more accurately because the system could report on a driver's actual miles and routes traveled... Lobenstein said that customer privacy considerations will be paramount.
Anyone notice a contradiction there?
"Your privacy is our top concern! That's why we're going to give your insurance company a complete record of everywhere you drive!"
I think you're missing the point. This is a whole new paradigm for how you'll interact with your computer. Instead of old fashioned mouse or touch based graphical interfaces, you can instead use a keyboard to type your commands into a window! That's the power of AI: it can actually figure out what you want to do based on what you type. For example you might have a conversation like this:
You: cd Documents Bot: Cool dude. You're now in the Documents folder. You: dir Bot: Hey, it looks like there's some files here. Let me list them for you.
And those are just a handful of the top hits that came up when I did a search. Future technology development will certainly bring the cost down further, but we're completely capable of doing it even with current tech.
We absolutely have the battery technology. We haven't yet built and installed the necessary number of batteries, but that's a different matter. All the needed technology is there.
Besides, the wind keeps blowing at night. And hydro, geothermal, biomass, and tidal power are all very stable and predictable. Batteries are just one of many sources that will together provide baseline capacity. Also, there are lots of places where long periods of cloudy days simply don't happen. Take a look at the map I linked to above. Notice how they're putting a huge solar install right in the middle of the Sahara. Guess why? Not only is it near the equator, cloud cover is close to nonexistent all year round.
NVIDIA is in fact working on something like that. It's called NVLink and will, according to that page, enable "data sharing at rates 5 to 12 times faster than the traditional PCIe Gen3 interconnect". There's no commercial hardware yet that supports it, but it should be coming soon.
Why do you think that? Wind and solar are each individually capable of covering roughly 100x the world's total energy needs. Take a look at this map to see just how little land would be needed to go to 100% solar. Of course, we wouldn't do that. We'd certainly also include a lot of wind and hydro power, probably some geothermal and biomass as well (mostly municipal and agricultural waste, since that's effectively free energy). Maybe tidal energy too, but that's a less mature technology. Going to 100% renewable energy isn't just possible, it's actually pretty easy and much cheaper than nuclear.
The only big problem is doing it fast enough. If we leave all the existing coal plants running for the rest of their intended lifespans, they'll keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere for decades. We need to shut them down and replace them as quickly as possible. And there again, renewables are much better placed than nuclear.
Citation needed. Could you please point me to the "failed prediction after failed prediction" you're talking about?
Last I saw, global temperatures were doing an excellent job tracking predictions made over the last 40 years. Ditto for sea level rise, which is actually happening a bit faster than most scientists had predicted.
Let me hazard a guess: you don't really pay much attention to scientists to find out what they're saying. If you did, you'd find that most of their predictions are cautious and very carefully qualified. Instead, you listen pundits who like to rant about the "Doomsday Predictions!!!! of the Scientists!!! who say we're all about to die!!! Who do they think we are???? We know better than to believe that."
Nuclear??? Um... of all the possible things we could switch to, why that?
Solar or wind, sure. Their prices have been plummeting. Wind is already less expensive than coal, and solar is expected to cross that line within the next few years. As a result, use of them is growing exponentially. Together, they accounted for about 2/3 of all new capacity in the U.S. last year, and they're expected to be even higher this year.
But nuclear isn't even close to cost competitive anymore. It's not politics that's keeping it back. If "the far left" actually had the ability to determine what energy sources got used, we would have completely phased out coal years ago. If building nuclear power plants made economic sense, companies would be doing it. But they aren't, because the prices of wind and solar and natural gas have gone down so dramatically that it just can't compete.
Slashdot Mirror
The "paradox" they're worrying about simply doesn't exist. If you assume the universe is full of intelligent life, you expect to see exactly what we've seen: nothing. The distances involved are just too huge. Barring some major new revelation about the laws of physics, humans are never going to be traveling throughout the galaxy. At best we might send small, unmanned probes to a few nearby stars. There could be thousands of advanced civilizations scattered through our galaxy right now, and we'd have no way of knowing about them. They'd be invisible in the ocean of 100 billion stars, with no way to talk to each other and not much reason to even try.
As Douglas Adams put it: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
That's right, it's all about "being flexible and re-thinking how we define rewards." Scott Adams already figured out this system 20 years ago.
Claims 1 and 2 are implicitly claimed by the proponents of Obamacare. They claim that 15 million more people have health insurance.
"More people with health insurance" is not at all the same thing as "more patients". In fact, there are good reasons to think they'll be inversely correlated. When someone without health insurance gets sick, they tend to go to the emergency room, which is one of the least efficient, most expensive ways to provide health care. People with insurance are more likely to get preventive care, which tends to decrease the amount of health care they need in the long run. Ditto for treating minor ailments before they turn into major problems.
The burden of proof is on them because such an occurrence would be highly unlikely.
I don't understand what you mean by "burden of proof". You seem to view this as a competition, where you're fighting against someone and your goal is to win. I don't see it like that at all. I want to understand the world. I want to know what's really going on, and find the best solutions to real world problems. That means the burden is always on me to get the facts and find out what is really going on. If I make things up, then draw conclusions based on them without bothering to find out whether they're really true, all my conclusions are meaningless. That's living in a fantasy world. I don't want to do that. Do you? If not, then you too have the responsibility to get the facts before you start drawing conclusions.
No. Not if they necessarily follow from a different claim which was already made by the opposing side in the debate.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they often are not. Humans are spectacularly bad at figuring out what "necessarily follows" from anything. I distrust all my own conclusions until I look up the facts to find out whether my predictions match reality. I distrust yours even more, since you haven't even bothered to verify your assumptions, much less test your conclusions.
Claim 4 has been proven by the gp post to follow from claims 1-3. You just refuse to accept the proof. That's on your lack of comprehension -- not on me. Ditto for claim 5.
Then please humor my lack of understanding and point to exactly where those facts were established. I just looked back through the tree of posts, and I don't see anything remotely resembling evidence for those claims. What am I missing?
Ok, let me list the claims you just made (or implied):
1. The number of patients has increased.
2. That was because of Obamacare.
3. The number of doctors has not increased.
4. People in dire need of care are less likely to get it than they were a few years ago.
5. More time is being spent handling people with minor ailments.
Every one of those claims needs to be backed up with evidence. Until you actually do the research and find out whether they're true or not, you're just making things up. Conclusions based on unfounded assumptions are meaningless. Get the facts. Find out whether the above claims are really true or not. Then we'll have something to talk about. Then we can have a discussion that's grounded in reality.
No, we did this to ourselves. Much as I wish you were right, that doesn't fit the facts.
Perhaps on the Democratic side there's a reasonable excuse. Not many people ran, and only two of them were ever serious candidates. But on the Republican side there's no excuse at all. 17(!) people ran for the nomination, including a bunch of obviously qualified governors and senators. So who got chosen? Trump, the absolute bottom of the barrel. And that happened despite the opposition of the party establishment, despite Bush (who the establishment all but declared would be the nominee) spending $150 million dollars on his campaign. It's the people who made this happen, and no one else.
You're rewriting history to make it sound like Palin was a lot more intelligent than she actually was. For example, people didn't laugh at her because she read multiple newspapers. They laughed at her because she couldn't name even a single one that she read, and it was obvious to everyone watching that in fact she didn't read any newspapers at all. Trying to equate that to someone who reads articles through Google News is grossly distorting the facts.
As for your main claim, that Obamacare has destroyed the quality of medical care, citation needed! That's not a claim you can just make without presenting a shred of evidence.
The main factors limiting population growth have little to do with carrying capacity. The biggest ones are education, access to birth control, and eliminating poverty. Wealthy, well educated countries tend to have the lowest birth rates, even though (being wealthy) they're the ones most capable of supporting a larger population.
You mine the raw materials in space. The moon is a great source, as are asteroids.
But all of this involves one extra assumption: that lots of people will be living in space as well. If everyone is living down on earth and you use space only for industry, that's probably not real practical. Shipping everything back and forth will be less efficient than just keeping everything on earth, like you say. But when you have lots of people living in space, doing your manufacturing in space is the only way to support them.
Yeah, long term I think we'll need to move to some kind of a universal basic income. It's the only system that really makes sense when there's no need for most of the population to work.
Where did this idea come from that humans need to be "useful"? Is it not enough to live a pleasant life, doing things you enjoy? Most people work because they have to, not because they want to. The things we do by choice, like art and sports and socializing, could all be described as "useless". They don't put food on the table, but they're the things most of us really care about.
Statistically speaking, all conservatives realize that CBS, NBC, and ABC are biased against conservatives and Republicans at least 90% of the time.
Did you really just say what I think you said? "Statistically speaking, here's a BS number I just made up without evidence about how many other people also make things up without evidence." It's not just BS. It's meta BS!
The author seems to be making the assumption that we shouldn't build cities in places where earthquakes can occur. Should we also not build them in places that are at risk for hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanoes, wildfires, or any other sort of natural disaster? If so, we've just ruled out a large fraction of land on earth, including most coastlines and just about the entire Pacific rim.
There are risks everywhere. They're different in different places, but nowhere is completely safe. You have to weigh the risks and benefits for any location.
Exactly. I have a 7 year old Mac, and it still works great. Apple has done nothing to force me to buy a new one. I'm sure they would like it if I did, but they're continuing to support it with OS upgrades and the like. Contrast that with my 3 year old Android phone that already has been abandoned for OS upgrades.
It's probably true that on average, their customers buy a new computer every four years and a new phone every three. But that's usually because they want the newest technology, not because their old device has stopped working.
The pedant in me needs to point out that the phrase "in one fell swoop" doesn't mean what the author thinks it does. "Fell" in this context means cruel, malevolent, or destructive. I really hope that's not the case here.
Then again, it's being done by banks, so maybe that description really is right.
Then let me draw an analogy: Paying for a year of Amazon Prime to watch one episode is likely not "at a decent price".
Amazon also lets you pay for individual episodes. In fact, they have a lot more things available as pay-per-view than on Prime. iTunes, Google Play, etc. also use that business model, and they seem to be doing fine with it.
This hasn't worked as well for reading articles, mainly because of the lack of a good standard for micropayments. But that could be solved if the industry decided to get serious about it.
Android does let you write your apps (or at least, the bulk of them) in C or any other language your want. But it's not the recommended approach. A lot of its libraries are written in Java, so you have to jump through a few extra hoops to use them if your code is running outside the VM. And you have to worry about providing binaries for different architectures, whereas with Java it takes care of that for you.
So you presumably could already use Swift when coding for Android. But that's not what this is about. It's about Google turning Swift into a "first class" language and making it easy for you to use it on Android.
In the same way, you can use Java to code for Linux, but it's never really been a first class citizen. You have to jump through hoops to use a lot of libraries and to integrate naturally with the rest of the system. Sun and Oracle have put a lot of effort into trying to work around that, but it's still an issue. Every platform supports some languages better than others. They just differ in which languages those are.
Sure, as long as you only care about the security of devices you personally control, and you can install any software you want on them. For most people, the world is a little broader than that. Practically every week we hear about another website that got hacked, and they were storing user information in plaintext. Or a router that has a hardcoded administrative password. Or a "smart" TV that opens up an unsecured gateway into your home network. Running OpenBSD on your laptop might protect the laptop itself (but probably not once the hackers are into your home network). But tons of other devices and services you interact with every day still have pathetically bad security.
That's the biggest threat to security right now. It isn't the spy agencies planting back doors in hardware. It's companies that don't even bother to lock the front door.
Auto insurance could be priced more accurately because the system could report on a driver's actual miles and routes traveled ... Lobenstein said that customer privacy considerations will be paramount.
Anyone notice a contradiction there?
"Your privacy is our top concern! That's why we're going to give your insurance company a complete record of everywhere you drive!"
I think you're missing the point. This is a whole new paradigm for how you'll interact with your computer. Instead of old fashioned mouse or touch based graphical interfaces, you can instead use a keyboard to type your commands into a window! That's the power of AI: it can actually figure out what you want to do based on what you type. For example you might have a conversation like this:
You: cd Documents
Bot: Cool dude. You're now in the Documents folder.
You: dir
Bot: Hey, it looks like there's some files here. Let me list them for you.
Just imagine the possibilities...
http://www.pv-magazine.com/new...
http://www.aquionenergy.com/pr...
http://www.eosenergystorage.co...
http://www.treehugger.com/clea...
And those are just a handful of the top hits that came up when I did a search. Future technology development will certainly bring the cost down further, but we're completely capable of doing it even with current tech.
We absolutely have the battery technology. We haven't yet built and installed the necessary number of batteries, but that's a different matter. All the needed technology is there.
Besides, the wind keeps blowing at night. And hydro, geothermal, biomass, and tidal power are all very stable and predictable. Batteries are just one of many sources that will together provide baseline capacity. Also, there are lots of places where long periods of cloudy days simply don't happen. Take a look at the map I linked to above. Notice how they're putting a huge solar install right in the middle of the Sahara. Guess why? Not only is it near the equator, cloud cover is close to nonexistent all year round.
NVIDIA is in fact working on something like that. It's called NVLink and will, according to that page, enable "data sharing at rates 5 to 12 times faster than the traditional PCIe Gen3 interconnect". There's no commercial hardware yet that supports it, but it should be coming soon.
Why do you think that? Wind and solar are each individually capable of covering roughly 100x the world's total energy needs. Take a look at this map to see just how little land would be needed to go to 100% solar. Of course, we wouldn't do that. We'd certainly also include a lot of wind and hydro power, probably some geothermal and biomass as well (mostly municipal and agricultural waste, since that's effectively free energy). Maybe tidal energy too, but that's a less mature technology. Going to 100% renewable energy isn't just possible, it's actually pretty easy and much cheaper than nuclear.
The only big problem is doing it fast enough. If we leave all the existing coal plants running for the rest of their intended lifespans, they'll keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere for decades. We need to shut them down and replace them as quickly as possible. And there again, renewables are much better placed than nuclear.
Citation needed. Could you please point me to the "failed prediction after failed prediction" you're talking about?
Last I saw, global temperatures were doing an excellent job tracking predictions made over the last 40 years. Ditto for sea level rise, which is actually happening a bit faster than most scientists had predicted.
Let me hazard a guess: you don't really pay much attention to scientists to find out what they're saying. If you did, you'd find that most of their predictions are cautious and very carefully qualified. Instead, you listen pundits who like to rant about the "Doomsday Predictions!!!! of the Scientists!!! who say we're all about to die!!! Who do they think we are???? We know better than to believe that."
Am I right?
Nuclear??? Um... of all the possible things we could switch to, why that?
Solar or wind, sure. Their prices have been plummeting. Wind is already less expensive than coal, and solar is expected to cross that line within the next few years. As a result, use of them is growing exponentially. Together, they accounted for about 2/3 of all new capacity in the U.S. last year, and they're expected to be even higher this year.
But nuclear isn't even close to cost competitive anymore. It's not politics that's keeping it back. If "the far left" actually had the ability to determine what energy sources got used, we would have completely phased out coal years ago. If building nuclear power plants made economic sense, companies would be doing it. But they aren't, because the prices of wind and solar and natural gas have gone down so dramatically that it just can't compete.