Don't forget to outlaw any government agency ever knowingly releasing false information to the public and I suggest making it a mandatory life sentence without parole for elected federal politicians; appointed bureaucrats; and military personnel above a certain level of officer rank. You can't have a legitimate democracy if the government is actively lying to the public in order to control public opinion. A democracy can only ever hope to be legitimate if the voters have as close to an unfiltered view of reality as possible. As they say, "Garbage in, garbage out".
Personally, I tend to agree with you on the issue of genetics but I've know plenty of people that have made the "blank slate" argument in the past so I left it open as it wasn't directly related to my point.
As for the sociopaths, I think we're talking about different sociopaths here. You're talking about "kings". I don't think general "kings" are the problem as plenty of "kings" in the past have been shown to be perfectly willing to give the people things to try and make them happy (ex. bread and circus). I was more referring to the specific breed of sociopaths that have been developing over the last century or so know by such names as "conservative", "libertarian", "rand-ian", etc. It's sociopathic idealistic zeolotry I'm concerned about.
Furthermore, while I agree that the "unwashed masses" rising up against their despots has served to overcome these kinds of problems in the past (though, these kinds of "corrections" are often horribly violent and, in my opinion, to be avoided at all cost in their own right), I don't see that as a viable solution in this case. The very automation that is creating this problem in the first place is extremely likely to eliminate popular revolt as it's solution. Eventually, military and police actions will be so automated that an extremely small number of "kings" will be able to quell the entire population of the planet while still having more than enough automated infrastructure left afterwards to live on in luxury and perpetuate the human race as they see fit. Genocide will be as easy as pressing a few buttons or issuing a voice command ("Siri, fire on the rioters with live ammunition"). In fact, at the rate things are going with drone technology, this part of my nightmare scenario will come to effective fruition first before all the other available jobs are eliminated.
Yup, even assuming they don't start rolling other sensors into the hardware, you can learn a lot about someone by recording the status of their thermostat.
* When you set your thermostat to "away" can give them a good idea what your work schedule is; how many people live in the same home; and when you go on vacation (and by extension, what type of job you might work and whether or no you might have kids or whether you might be retired).
* The temperature you leave your thermostat can give them a good idea if you are actively trying to save money (low setting) or if you are likely to have a medical condition that required you to be on blood thinners (high setting).
I'm sure there are plenty of other things they can figure out too by correlating your thermostat info with other info they know about the person through other channels.
The problem isn't that there is a limit to the amount of work that can be done. The problem is that there is a limit to the amount of work that can be done by the average person. Not everyone in capable of attaining the level of education needed to perform the kind of inventive/creative work that would allow them to work at a level meeting or exceeding advanced AI (this is, of course, assuming that AI doesn't end up massively dwarfing the capabilities of even researchers and artists). Even if you were to assume that everyone had the same "potential" from birth (which is debatable) it would take an extremely long time for human society to work out all the social dysfunctions that keep people down psychologically.
Of course, this is only one half of the coin. The other side is that you've got a massive percentage of the world (many of whom dominate the halls of power) that believe in something akin to "Social Darwinism". Getting to the point you are describing would require a massive sea-change in public policy and social structure. Unfortunately, these kinds of sociopaths have shown themselves to be willing to commit horrible violence in order to make sure this kind of social change doesn't happen.
From a practical standpoint, it's about liability. All three of those jobs perform duties that society considers important enough that we need to be able to "reach out and touch" them with the legal system (either civil or criminal) if they screw it up badly enough. Foreign nationals are notoriously hard to punish with US laws. This is, of course, ignoring the legal reality that (at least in the case of politicians) the legal system doesn't seem to apply to them much of the time. Right or wrong, most companies don't consider most engineering/programming jobs to be that important. The ones they do consider important enough (nuclear hardware/software design; civil engineering; etc.) don't get outsourced as they require governmental certification and/or much more advanced/anal design process control and experience than is likely to be found while shopping for bargain-basement outsourced talent.
I don't. The only people that should see this are the creationist nutters (in the hopes that a few of them come to their sense) and that demographic already knows about it. Beyond that, Ham's fantasy-land doesn't deserve any additional publicity. It, certainly, doesn't need the attention a Bill Nye visit will bring. I love Nye's work, but I'm a little disappointed that he fell for Ham's trap and allowed this to happen on Ham's home turf. It's blindingly obvious that Ham just wants the attention for his freak-show.
Normally I'd agree with you about the melamine content being too low (and/or the bribes were too low). However, considering the public example they made of the guy responsible for the milk scandal (execution even though he was a wealthy, influential, individual) I have to say that unless the guys at the Ministry of Agriculture are incredibly stupid this is probably a legit complaint on their part.
"you could probably pop open the machine yourself and take a look see if you're competent enough to understand them in the first place. I suggest you do this if you're skeptical. Heck, you might do us a favor and post them."
So, now you're assuming I own an x-ray machine? Were they supposed to come free with every apply computer and I just didn't get mine? That would certainly explain the excessive price for the hardware...
Sorry, I don't actually feel that way but just felt like jumping on the snark train for a bit;-) . Actually, the point I was trying to make is that if the camera and/or indicator light are mounted on a multi-layer PCB then there is a good chance you can't visibly see the power traces with the naked eye. You also would have to know which of the camera pins was the power pin.
If they cared even remotely enough to do that, then they would have already hardwired the indicator light to the same power source as the camera so that one couldn't be run without the other regardless of the firmware.
Uh, no. You're taking a half-remembered fact and mangling it. Almost all of the corn raised in this country is usable for food. However, the fact you are mis-remembering is that most of the corn isn't edible by humans straight off the stalk. Just because you can't eat it without processing doesn't mean it isn't still food. Even discounting corn syrup (which is still food) there is hominy, corn meal, etc. Even the stuff used as animal feed is still part of the food chain and increasing it's price still increases the cost of human food.
No vaccine is EVER 100% effective for all people. That is, simply, the nature of vaccines and why many of these articles talk about "herd immunity". The reason we still see diseases effectively disappear when vaccines are implemented correctly is that a truly successful vaccine (like this one) will work for a large enough percentage of the population to ensure that it's statistically unlikely that a person who doesn't have the protection will encounter someone who is carrying the disease. The problem is that, the way the statistics work, it doesn't take the number of anti-vaccine nutters to be very large before the numbers reach a kind of tipping point and the number of outbreaks starts to dramatically increase. Also, as with anything statistic based, one anecdotal event (or even a few) like the one you described is meaningless in this discussion.
Uhm, no. That's stupid. First off, that doesn't protect the children themselves (who aren't to blame for their parents' stupidity). Secondly, that doesn't 100% protect the other people in society who are at risk (babies too young to be vaccinated yet; the percentage of people for whom the vaccine simply doesn't work for that exists for ANY vaccine; etc.) The only way something like this might work would be if we put every one of these fmilies under guarded 24/7/365 house arrest for the rest of their lives to make sure they don't spread the disease while doing things like waiting in line at the supermarket. At that point, again, it's a lot more humane to the blameless child to just forcibly vaccinate them by court order.
I doubt it. If there really was a warrant out for a similar vehicle or similar looking person he wouldn't need any additional justification to hold you there for identification. He was probably just an asshole cop who decided that in "his" town people aren't allowed to make use of the yellow light.
IANAL but as I believe (as others have pointed out) it's not illegal for a police officer to enter a vehicle being used in the commission of a crime (at least in all the US municipalities I'm familiar with). However, that said, the more I think about it the more I believe you've just touched on the REAL reason for the absurd $0.05 theft of service charge. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cop is using that as a way to legalize what would otherwise have been an illegal fishing expedition searching through the guy's car for more serious contraband. If he didn't charge the guy with SOMETHING, he risks becoming the criminal.
$100 Billion may sound like a lot to you but that doesn't mean it's meaningful in regards to the actual damages done. More often than not when massive horrible things are done by Corporations (the crash of the financial/real estate markets, the Gulf oil spill, etc.) large corps get hit with penalties that look massive to an individual but actually only represent a small part of the true cost of restitution and only represent a day or two of operating profits at most for the company.
What happened in the story is so astonishingly unjustly inverted from that scenario because, in contrast, this guy was hit with the entire cost of the damages (even though he was only a tiny contributor to the actual crime, and that penalty probably represents many years worth of profits for him (minus the basic costs of living and taxes). It would be like fining JP Morgan all the Trillions of dollars that were estimated to have been lost throughout the economy because the courts didn't feel that they were likely to be able to clearly identify any of the other big players in the crime. Then, for good measure, make it so that the costs of litigating appeals of that verdict would be so expensive that it was guaranteed to drive the company into complete bankrupts (since even if this guy has a decent job and was able to afford a non-state appointed attorney for this trial it's unlikely he'll be able to hire a highly competent set of lawyers throughout the entire appeals process in the same way major companies to in order to successfully drive down the original, already too small, fines they are hit with).
They won't be reexamining much for very long if they keep standing in the light of a massive gamma-ray burst (by which, of course, I mean that it's hard to take the time to examine anything if you're constantly flipping out and going on green-skinned rampages).
Yes, a work of fiction based extremely closely on the real-life working conditions of the meat-packing industry of the time. The fact that there was a fictitious narrative added to make the story more interesting/readable doesn't invalidate the parts that happen to disagree with your personal political beliefs.
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Don't forget to outlaw any government agency ever knowingly releasing false information to the public and I suggest making it a mandatory life sentence without parole for elected federal politicians; appointed bureaucrats; and military personnel above a certain level of officer rank. You can't have a legitimate democracy if the government is actively lying to the public in order to control public opinion. A democracy can only ever hope to be legitimate if the voters have as close to an unfiltered view of reality as possible. As they say, "Garbage in, garbage out".
Personally, I tend to agree with you on the issue of genetics but I've know plenty of people that have made the "blank slate" argument in the past so I left it open as it wasn't directly related to my point.
As for the sociopaths, I think we're talking about different sociopaths here. You're talking about "kings". I don't think general "kings" are the problem as plenty of "kings" in the past have been shown to be perfectly willing to give the people things to try and make them happy (ex. bread and circus). I was more referring to the specific breed of sociopaths that have been developing over the last century or so know by such names as "conservative", "libertarian", "rand-ian", etc. It's sociopathic idealistic zeolotry I'm concerned about.
Furthermore, while I agree that the "unwashed masses" rising up against their despots has served to overcome these kinds of problems in the past (though, these kinds of "corrections" are often horribly violent and, in my opinion, to be avoided at all cost in their own right), I don't see that as a viable solution in this case. The very automation that is creating this problem in the first place is extremely likely to eliminate popular revolt as it's solution. Eventually, military and police actions will be so automated that an extremely small number of "kings" will be able to quell the entire population of the planet while still having more than enough automated infrastructure left afterwards to live on in luxury and perpetuate the human race as they see fit. Genocide will be as easy as pressing a few buttons or issuing a voice command ("Siri, fire on the rioters with live ammunition"). In fact, at the rate things are going with drone technology, this part of my nightmare scenario will come to effective fruition first before all the other available jobs are eliminated.
Yup, even assuming they don't start rolling other sensors into the hardware, you can learn a lot about someone by recording the status of their thermostat.
I'm sure there are plenty of other things they can figure out too by correlating your thermostat info with other info they know about the person through other channels.
The problem isn't that there is a limit to the amount of work that can be done. The problem is that there is a limit to the amount of work that can be done by the average person. Not everyone in capable of attaining the level of education needed to perform the kind of inventive/creative work that would allow them to work at a level meeting or exceeding advanced AI (this is, of course, assuming that AI doesn't end up massively dwarfing the capabilities of even researchers and artists). Even if you were to assume that everyone had the same "potential" from birth (which is debatable) it would take an extremely long time for human society to work out all the social dysfunctions that keep people down psychologically.
Of course, this is only one half of the coin. The other side is that you've got a massive percentage of the world (many of whom dominate the halls of power) that believe in something akin to "Social Darwinism". Getting to the point you are describing would require a massive sea-change in public policy and social structure. Unfortunately, these kinds of sociopaths have shown themselves to be willing to commit horrible violence in order to make sure this kind of social change doesn't happen.
A pimp's love is different from a square's...or so I've heard.
From a practical standpoint, it's about liability. All three of those jobs perform duties that society considers important enough that we need to be able to "reach out and touch" them with the legal system (either civil or criminal) if they screw it up badly enough. Foreign nationals are notoriously hard to punish with US laws. This is, of course, ignoring the legal reality that (at least in the case of politicians) the legal system doesn't seem to apply to them much of the time. Right or wrong, most companies don't consider most engineering/programming jobs to be that important. The ones they do consider important enough (nuclear hardware/software design; civil engineering; etc.) don't get outsourced as they require governmental certification and/or much more advanced/anal design process control and experience than is likely to be found while shopping for bargain-basement outsourced talent.
Russian and Chinese so far, so I guess you'd say Eurasian...
I don't. The only people that should see this are the creationist nutters (in the hopes that a few of them come to their sense) and that demographic already knows about it. Beyond that, Ham's fantasy-land doesn't deserve any additional publicity. It, certainly, doesn't need the attention a Bill Nye visit will bring. I love Nye's work, but I'm a little disappointed that he fell for Ham's trap and allowed this to happen on Ham's home turf. It's blindingly obvious that Ham just wants the attention for his freak-show.
So, how many icebreakers would it take to form a continuous bridge back to Australia?
Normally I'd agree with you about the melamine content being too low (and/or the bribes were too low). However, considering the public example they made of the guy responsible for the milk scandal (execution even though he was a wealthy, influential, individual) I have to say that unless the guys at the Ministry of Agriculture are incredibly stupid this is probably a legit complaint on their part.
"you could probably pop open the machine yourself and take a look see if you're competent enough to understand them in the first place. I suggest you do this if you're skeptical. Heck, you might do us a favor and post them."
So, now you're assuming I own an x-ray machine? Were they supposed to come free with every apply computer and I just didn't get mine? That would certainly explain the excessive price for the hardware...
Sorry, I don't actually feel that way but just felt like jumping on the snark train for a bit ;-) . Actually, the point I was trying to make is that if the camera and/or indicator light are mounted on a multi-layer PCB then there is a good chance you can't visibly see the power traces with the naked eye. You also would have to know which of the camera pins was the power pin.
If they cared even remotely enough to do that, then they would have already hardwired the indicator light to the same power source as the camera so that one couldn't be run without the other regardless of the firmware.
Well, first you attach them to the tip of a pointy stick...
Uh, no. You're taking a half-remembered fact and mangling it. Almost all of the corn raised in this country is usable for food. However, the fact you are mis-remembering is that most of the corn isn't edible by humans straight off the stalk. Just because you can't eat it without processing doesn't mean it isn't still food. Even discounting corn syrup (which is still food) there is hominy, corn meal, etc. Even the stuff used as animal feed is still part of the food chain and increasing it's price still increases the cost of human food.
No vaccine is EVER 100% effective for all people. That is, simply, the nature of vaccines and why many of these articles talk about "herd immunity". The reason we still see diseases effectively disappear when vaccines are implemented correctly is that a truly successful vaccine (like this one) will work for a large enough percentage of the population to ensure that it's statistically unlikely that a person who doesn't have the protection will encounter someone who is carrying the disease. The problem is that, the way the statistics work, it doesn't take the number of anti-vaccine nutters to be very large before the numbers reach a kind of tipping point and the number of outbreaks starts to dramatically increase. Also, as with anything statistic based, one anecdotal event (or even a few) like the one you described is meaningless in this discussion.
Uhm, no. That's stupid. First off, that doesn't protect the children themselves (who aren't to blame for their parents' stupidity). Secondly, that doesn't 100% protect the other people in society who are at risk (babies too young to be vaccinated yet; the percentage of people for whom the vaccine simply doesn't work for that exists for ANY vaccine; etc.) The only way something like this might work would be if we put every one of these fmilies under guarded 24/7/365 house arrest for the rest of their lives to make sure they don't spread the disease while doing things like waiting in line at the supermarket. At that point, again, it's a lot more humane to the blameless child to just forcibly vaccinate them by court order.
I doubt it. If there really was a warrant out for a similar vehicle or similar looking person he wouldn't need any additional justification to hold you there for identification. He was probably just an asshole cop who decided that in "his" town people aren't allowed to make use of the yellow light.
IANAL but as I believe (as others have pointed out) it's not illegal for a police officer to enter a vehicle being used in the commission of a crime (at least in all the US municipalities I'm familiar with). However, that said, the more I think about it the more I believe you've just touched on the REAL reason for the absurd $0.05 theft of service charge. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cop is using that as a way to legalize what would otherwise have been an illegal fishing expedition searching through the guy's car for more serious contraband. If he didn't charge the guy with SOMETHING, he risks becoming the criminal.
$100 Billion may sound like a lot to you but that doesn't mean it's meaningful in regards to the actual damages done. More often than not when massive horrible things are done by Corporations (the crash of the financial/real estate markets, the Gulf oil spill, etc.) large corps get hit with penalties that look massive to an individual but actually only represent a small part of the true cost of restitution and only represent a day or two of operating profits at most for the company.
What happened in the story is so astonishingly unjustly inverted from that scenario because, in contrast, this guy was hit with the entire cost of the damages (even though he was only a tiny contributor to the actual crime, and that penalty probably represents many years worth of profits for him (minus the basic costs of living and taxes). It would be like fining JP Morgan all the Trillions of dollars that were estimated to have been lost throughout the economy because the courts didn't feel that they were likely to be able to clearly identify any of the other big players in the crime. Then, for good measure, make it so that the costs of litigating appeals of that verdict would be so expensive that it was guaranteed to drive the company into complete bankrupts (since even if this guy has a decent job and was able to afford a non-state appointed attorney for this trial it's unlikely he'll be able to hire a highly competent set of lawyers throughout the entire appeals process in the same way major companies to in order to successfully drive down the original, already too small, fines they are hit with).
They won't be reexamining much for very long if they keep standing in the light of a massive gamma-ray burst (by which, of course, I mean that it's hard to take the time to examine anything if you're constantly flipping out and going on green-skinned rampages).
Good idea, don't ever admit to it. There's no statute of limitations on that kind of thing.
Yes, a work of fiction based extremely closely on the real-life working conditions of the meat-packing industry of the time. The fact that there was a fictitious narrative added to make the story more interesting/readable doesn't invalidate the parts that happen to disagree with your personal political beliefs.
Wow, I'd imagine that'd make Cheney-style hunting accidents kind of awkward...
For the people who are still alive.
Bates, Bates, it rhymes with Gates...