Thomas Jefferson would agree with you, but you should be well aware of the costs.
Revolutions rarely improve the government substantially, and usually come accompanied by immense suffering on the part of all sides.
If you are aware of the costs, and seriously intend to start a revolution anyway, you should be sure to carefully study the cell system invented by Russian revolutionaries. And be aware that the government has been studying it too, and looking for weaknesses. So don't plan on using the same system, you'll need to invent an improved variant. Also all successful revolutions need financing. Stalin financed the Russian Communists by bank robbing. You need to figure out how you're going to do it. (Bank robbing in the old fashioned way doesn't work well anymore.) A wealthy patron has been used by some revolutionaries who were successful. But that same patron is likely to insist on a large measure of control over the organization. Hitler was successful in getting corporations to fund his revolution. You could model yourself on him, perhaps, but this requires a strong public presence before the revolution. (Hitler was legally elected before he seized power.) It's a difficult problem. However you work it, you're going to need a charismatic leader (who won't necessarily be the person that wields the power).
I'd wish you good luck, but I think it's a bad idea.
This is not absolutely clear. I've seen reports of a couple of studies that claim that chronic use of marijuana via smoking joints is as bad for the lungs as tobacco. Of course these couldn't be replicated, because of legal problems. But it might be correct.
In the years in which I learned my definitions there was a distinction made between addiction and habituation. Video games are habituating rather than addicting. Alcohol is addictive. Opiates are addictive.
I'm not sure where one would place sex in this scale, as there are definite unpleasant physical changes that occur when it is withheld, I would tend to put it as addictive.
By this definition marijuana is habituating, not addictive. Less addictive even than coffee.
P.S.: Smoking is a complex question, though even simple tobacco is reported by those with the ability to make honest comparisons as more addictive than heroin. But what is present in most cigarettes is a complex of chemicals that has been tuned to be addictive along different time frames. Tobacco is the long term addiction, but there's at least one short term addictive something added. I was unable to quit until I switched to organic cigarettes, which lack that additional mechanism. Shermans, the brand I switched to, were much stronger (at least in taste) than any of the other brands that I had tried, but lacked the secondary addictive mechanism. As a result I was able to extend to period between cigarettes, until over time I worked my way down to half a cigarette a day, at which point I quit. N.B.: This is the second time I quit. The first time was relatively easy [I was never a heavy smoker], and I just quit cold turkey. Then a year or so later I was at a party, and alcohol loosened some inhibitions and...well, within a week I was as hooked as ever. And quitting the second time was extremely difficult.
It is excessive, but not unreasonably so. When someone defends a thug, even passively, that someone is not innocent. Most police refuse to so much as say a word against a comrade who does anything short of murder...and I'm not sure about that.
Calling them thugs is excessive. Accomplices? They are clearly "accessories after the fact", and sometimes appear to be "accessories before the fact". Under law that makes them equally guilty. (Not that law gets applied to the police very often.)
If the laws were enforced strictly and honestly, I believe that most police would be confined in prison.
OK. The last place I worked, the administrators had walnut wastepaper cans, at over $300/each.
If you look around where you work, you will see money being spent on conspicuous consumption that adds no real value, except to show that some people can indulge in conspicuous consumption.
It's not that the majority of the police are "loose cannons". Most of them aren't. But they won't discipline those who are, either. And one person doing harm can do a lot more harm that a dozen people doing good will counterbalance.
They are, often, accessories after the fact. This isn't equally culpable as accessory before the fact, but it sure isn't innocent, either.
The problem isn't that we can't come up with an explanation. The problem is that there are LOTS of potential explanations, and the evidence is too scanty to really eliminate most of them.
E.g., we say that DNA couldn't have been the first replicator, because it isn't stable enough. But it could have evolved in a micro-clime that happened to stabilize it. This is quite improbable, but it can't really be ruled out. (It is so improbable that nobody seriously considers it, which is why I mention it as an example.)
But was RNA first? Some other set of nucleic acids? Clay particles? All have their proponents, and none can be ruled out on the evidence.
For that matter, was there initially only one set of replicators, or were several originally "competing"? We don't know. The evidence isn't sufficient to decide.
I really, really, doubt that chemical compounds expelled by a star would be similar to cellular life. There needs to be a long period of evolution first. The Cambrian explosion only happened after life had been on earth long enough to raise the Oxygen levels considerably. So it could be involved in giving the primitive replicators a running start, it couldn't have much to do with the Cambrian explosion.
N.B.: In large part the "Cambrian Explosion" is caused by telescoping time. Another contributory factor is that the older fossils get, the fewer of them remain to study, because the rocks that hold them are destroyed in one way or another. (Erosion, volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics, etc.) So one small area that holds a number of fossils, and is REALLY old, is going to be a treasure house of unprecedented species. Another reason is that skeletons evolved at around that time. Before skeletons, things almost didn't fossilize at all.
So the "Cambrian Explosion" is largely an "optical illusion" caused by the way that we are doing our observations. It's not something that needs a separate explanation.
I think you need to work on understanding time scales, quantities, and probability.
If life were started by an accident so improbable that in the entire history of experimentation (starting back with flint knapping) it would be unreasonable to expect it to have happened, it could still be nigh unto a certainty given the whole planet's oceans, and a billion years to work in. Now that's NOT the most likely way for complex molecules to have originated. I'm no expert, but I suspect that small volcanic bubbles in stone near underwater volcanoes are the most likely site. But the argument "we haven't seen it" is silly. People can't understand what probability means when you translate into "all the molecules in solution in the oceans over a couple of billion years". The things that we think of as ridiculously improbably tend to become near certainties.
You'd do better to compare it to Kepler. Or even Tycho. Newton handled, with a simple model, nearly everything that was observable with the instruments that he had available. We don't even approach that level of accuracy. (The simplicity may not be possible. But then that might just be because we don't understand the process.)
I'm sorry you had bad luck with Apple products. Back when I was still buying them (before they changed their EULA) my experience was that they were rock solid, and lasted for decades. (Well, not really. But generally I sold them used while they were still working, because they had become obsolete and I had replaced them.)
I would not recommend Apple products today purely because of their EULA. Well, and proprietary lock-in, but most of that isn't Apple's doing, it done by those who wrote the applications. And few of the applications I used were from Apple. (They didn't tend to follow their own user interface guidelines.)
OTOH, while Steve Jobs was a fantastically good AND effective technological visionary, I never liked his "walled garden" preference. I consider him far superior to Gates as a techno-visionary (does Gates even meet the minimum standards?), but neither seems like a decent human. The computer world would be better off if Gates had been still-born, but the same isn't true of Steve Jobs. But the Gates foundation has actually supported many decent causes, and many don't appear to have been PR efforts for MS. (I've heard that this is due to his wife. This could be true, but it does indicate that he's willing to be moved.)
Calling Gates a "brilliant programmer" doesn't appear to me to be backed up by reliable evidence, though I'll admit that I have no evidence that he couldn't be one if he chose to. Just no evidence that he ever chose to. (Stealing a Basic compiler doesn't make one a brilliant programmer...and that's the story that I have heard and believe. Unless you meant something else.) But it's quite possible that he's not as unpleasant a person as Jobs was.
Yes he said that. Yes he's right. You must not have read the part about stability of predictions.
FWIW, there isn't one climate model. There are several that are considered good. The ones that can predict the present from past data tend to agree on the general shape of the climate of the future given the current data. They DON'T agree in detail. But they're in general agreement. (If they can't predict the present from the past, then they obviously need to be fixed.)
Please note that the models are not gospel. Things may be much worse than they are predicting. There are many plausible effects that would make things much worse that aren't included. Partially to keep things simple, and partially because a prediction that was too gloomy would be thrown out without even being looked at. (Many were.) It's also barely plausible that things won't be as bad as they are predicting. In which case, if we take steps to avoid global warming we might have a climate that's reasonably tolerable. (Don't worry. Politicians are making promises, but they have their fingers crossed. They promise to cut carbon emissions at the same time as the contract for new coal burning power plants.)
So we'll get to find out if the worst case scenarios are correct or not. Because we're burning more coal than ever. Aren't you happy!
Not quite. All models are wrong, but some remain close enough to what they are predicting to be right. Sometimes you can quantify which areas the models are likely to diverge sharply from what they're modeling. Etc.
So some models are stable, in that they have a useful maximal amount of error. Others are quite accurate over a large domain. (One example of this is Newtonian Mechanics, which is clearly wrong where there are multiple frames of reference moving at high speed WRT each other, but at low speeds is so close to accurate, that nobody bothers with the fancier model that is a better fit to "reality".)
P.S.: Please be aware that every prediction you make, be it that you can find your socks in the morning, or that chocolate tastes good, is an instance of using a model. But you don't use the "taste of chocolate" model to find your socks.
That's only a part of the answer. I agree with the article that "curve fitting" won't ever produce a good predictor. So what you need is a model that's stable under variations in input, but still fits the data pretty closely. This is difficult, and even so it won't be an exact predictor, merely a much better one.
That, of course, is independent of the way the people in powerful positions say things that favor their remaining in a powerful position. And people set up to rake in a huge profit are reluctant to change the conditions that allow them to make that profit. These people won't agree to the changes, even if they know that they are necessary to avoid a crash. That was going on independent of the problems with the models. But they did reinforce each other. (And the second acted as a selector on which models would even be considered.)
Additionally, we don't know how to prevent crashes. We know ways that, if used properly, would make them less likely. But these decrease the ability of those in power to rake off huge profits.
(Actually, I lie. We know of lots of ways to eliminate crashes totally. Most of them, however, have other effects that make the crashes look like a desirable goal.)
OTOH!!! The current capitalist system is not something hat can be tolerated when automation progresses very much further that it has gone. It has already gone far beyond it's sweet spot. (And, honestly, it was never a really good system. In many ways village level communism was a better choice, but it didn't scale. [N.B.: "communism", not "Communism".]) Socialism might be the best approach for the current period, before full automation becomes practical. I have no idea what would be a good approach when full automation was practical, just that "a living" wouldn't be tied to a job. (One can put boundary conditions around something without knowing what the optimal position is.)
P.S.: During the 1950's we seemed to be headed towards a Social Democracy...but then we got distracted by militarists. Eisenhower was right when he predicted what the upcoming problem was [i.e., the military-industrial complex], and we failed to deal well with it. I don't worship Eisenhower, though. It was on his watch that his Secretary of Defense invented "Brinksmanship", i.e. getting as close to nuclear war as you can and waiting until the other guy blinks. Still, he was better than nearly any president since then. Kennedy was a far better visionary, but he's also the president that took us to within 30 seconds of nuclear war. Johnson took us to the moon, but only as a dead-end program. A PR stunt. And he got us seriously into Viet-Nam. Carter was well meaning, but ineffectual. As for the rest...we'd probably have been better off with "None of the above" in office.
And if the guys at the top don't have the good of the nation in mind, then no economic model is going to save you.
If you are invested in a retirement plan, then you probably own stock in some corporation or other. Probably several of them. You likely don't even know which corporations you do own stock in. So you are asserting that because of this ownership you are culpable for whatever those corporations do?
N.B.: I agree that this isn't true until you're vested. It is, however, true under many retirement plans afterwards. You can even, if you choose, select which stocks to invest in. This, however, is generally an unwise action, as you don't have enough knowledge.
P.S.: Under your theory, if I understand it correctly, if one invests (acquires partial ownership) in a fund that invests in a stock, the responsibility is transitive. If not, how is this different that having a portfolio management company invest in stocks for you? That's where most of the diffuse stock ownership resides. The problem is with the management, not the owners...except in a few exceptional cases.
Three things are being implied: 1) Without regulations it would be worse. 2) Regulatory capture means that regulations are tilted in favor of the corporations that run the plants, but they're still better than none. 3) Enforcement of the regulations that exist are lax.
So yes, it could happen in the US. There are several equivalent plants in the US with equivalent problems. One of them is up for having it's license renewed to produce more power than it has been producing. This is beyond the initially specified "safe limits". And the plant is already beyond it's designed life. Due to regulatory capture it will probably get the approval it is seeking. This is malfeasance, but that's not likely to stop them. Because just like the company management, the regulators aren't held to task when they don't properly perform their jobs.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because you aren't. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the managers and boards of directors, who are liable under law, are rarely held to their liability. The stockholders generally never have either knowledge or control of what the corporation is doing. They are, officially, the owners, but unless they hold more than 20% of the stock in the corporation it's reasonable that they not be held liable. And if they do hold that much of the stock, then they aren't as invulnerable as you assert...in theory. In practice they are held liable even less often than are the managers.
What's extremely interesting is that many managers who make company killing decisions are then immediately hired at higher rates into a better job. One has to wonder why.
The main problem here (outside of stupid regulations) is regulatory capture. I don't see how to avoid stupid regulations, but regulators should, after they retire, be forbidden to work for, or accept any remuneration from, any entity that they have previously regulated. And if they run for office, they should be forbidden from accepting any campaign contributions from those entities.
That's not perfect. In fact it's nearly minimal. But it would improve things.
The Midas Plague. I believe the author was Fred Pohl.
I had a hard time accepting the ethical structure of that society, but then I have a lot of trouble believing some the ethical structures accepted by our current society. Even seeing how we got them, they appear too weird to take seriously, though I do know that in practice they have teeth.
It's needed reevaluation for at least 20 years. But the people that the reevaluation is needed by don't have much access to the levers of power. And the people with the power would lose if the rules changed. So they don't, except to become more repressive.
It's not like the powerful people would be satisfied with a sane level of power. They became the super-powerful by never being satisfied. The merely rich only want to live in a beautiful house in a safe location. Have plenty of food, water, and luxuries. And a few servants. And two or three nice cars. And enough wealth that they don't need to worry about taxes for the next century. The super-powerful, though, demand and unlimited amount of *something*. It almost doesn't matter what. They can't have it, so they are driven to keep working towards it. And to do this, they not only need unlimited wealth, they need unlimited ability to coerce other people. It essentially doesn't matter what they want to coerce other people to do. Work for universal love would be as destructive as any other thing given the unlimited nature of the demand. And these people aren't going to either surrender power, or even honestly agree to limits on their power.
My estimate for the existence of robots with minds as capable as humans is around 2030. It's been there for around 20 years, so the estimate seems pretty stable. What's not clear is that society will be able to hold together under the increasingly unjust conditions until then. Or what will happen then,
The obvious solution is to make conditions less unjust. Unfortunately, most people want to freeze the world so that it looks the way it did when they were 12...or younger. And the way the world looks to a 12 year old isn't workable. And THAT's if nothing has changed in the interim...which it is doing at an increasing rate.
That doesn't mention how you motivate people to invest a tremendous amount of time and energy in becoming highly skilled in a profession that is likely to disappear before you even begin practicing it. In a way that doesn't seem unbearably unjust to those who don't have the proper capabilities.
Given that you *have* a good answer, how do you get from here to there?
Slashdot Mirror
KDE4.7 is vastly improved, but it's still not as good as Gnome2...and FAR short of KDE3.5.
Yeah. Gnome3's no winner either. Both appear to be designed for tablets, and phones, and ONLY for tablets and phones.
Thomas Jefferson would agree with you, but you should be well aware of the costs.
Revolutions rarely improve the government substantially, and usually come accompanied by immense suffering on the part of all sides.
If you are aware of the costs, and seriously intend to start a revolution anyway, you should be sure to carefully study the cell system invented by Russian revolutionaries. And be aware that the government has been studying it too, and looking for weaknesses. So don't plan on using the same system, you'll need to invent an improved variant. Also all successful revolutions need financing. Stalin financed the Russian Communists by bank robbing. You need to figure out how you're going to do it. (Bank robbing in the old fashioned way doesn't work well anymore.) A wealthy patron has been used by some revolutionaries who were successful. But that same patron is likely to insist on a large measure of control over the organization. Hitler was successful in getting corporations to fund his revolution. You could model yourself on him, perhaps, but this requires a strong public presence before the revolution. (Hitler was legally elected before he seized power.) It's a difficult problem. However you work it, you're going to need a charismatic leader (who won't necessarily be the person that wields the power).
I'd wish you good luck, but I think it's a bad idea.
This is not absolutely clear. I've seen reports of a couple of studies that claim that chronic use of marijuana via smoking joints is as bad for the lungs as tobacco. Of course these couldn't be replicated, because of legal problems. But it might be correct.
In the years in which I learned my definitions there was a distinction made between addiction and habituation. Video games are habituating rather than addicting. Alcohol is addictive. Opiates are addictive.
I'm not sure where one would place sex in this scale, as there are definite unpleasant physical changes that occur when it is withheld, I would tend to put it as addictive.
By this definition marijuana is habituating, not addictive. Less addictive even than coffee.
P.S.: Smoking is a complex question, though even simple tobacco is reported by those with the ability to make honest comparisons as more addictive than heroin. But what is present in most cigarettes is a complex of chemicals that has been tuned to be addictive along different time frames. Tobacco is the long term addiction, but there's at least one short term addictive something added. I was unable to quit until I switched to organic cigarettes, which lack that additional mechanism. Shermans, the brand I switched to, were much stronger (at least in taste) than any of the other brands that I had tried, but lacked the secondary addictive mechanism. As a result I was able to extend to period between cigarettes, until over time I worked my way down to half a cigarette a day, at which point I quit. N.B.: This is the second time I quit. The first time was relatively easy [I was never a heavy smoker], and I just quit cold turkey. Then a year or so later I was at a party, and alcohol loosened some inhibitions and...well, within a week I was as hooked as ever. And quitting the second time was extremely difficult.
Well, they can always claim that's what happened. You know their word is good. In fact it's nearly the definition of honesty.
Pravda: The truth. Also the official word. (Russian)
Maat: The truth. Also the official word. Also, a vulture headed goddess. (Egyptian. Archaic.)
There's probably lots of equivalent definitions.
It is excessive, but not unreasonably so. When someone defends a thug, even passively, that someone is not innocent. Most police refuse to so much as say a word against a comrade who does anything short of murder...and I'm not sure about that.
Calling them thugs is excessive. Accomplices? They are clearly "accessories after the fact", and sometimes appear to be "accessories before the fact". Under law that makes them equally guilty. (Not that law gets applied to the police very often.)
If the laws were enforced strictly and honestly, I believe that most police would be confined in prison.
OK. The last place I worked, the administrators had walnut wastepaper cans, at over $300/each.
If you look around where you work, you will see money being spent on conspicuous consumption that adds no real value, except to show that some people can indulge in conspicuous consumption.
It's not that the majority of the police are "loose cannons". Most of them aren't. But they won't discipline those who are, either. And one person doing harm can do a lot more harm that a dozen people doing good will counterbalance.
They are, often, accessories after the fact. This isn't equally culpable as accessory before the fact, but it sure isn't innocent, either.
The problem isn't that we can't come up with an explanation. The problem is that there are LOTS of potential explanations, and the evidence is too scanty to really eliminate most of them.
E.g., we say that DNA couldn't have been the first replicator, because it isn't stable enough. But it could have evolved in a micro-clime that happened to stabilize it. This is quite improbable, but it can't really be ruled out. (It is so improbable that nobody seriously considers it, which is why I mention it as an example.)
But was RNA first? Some other set of nucleic acids? Clay particles? All have their proponents, and none can be ruled out on the evidence.
For that matter, was there initially only one set of replicators, or were several originally "competing"? We don't know. The evidence isn't sufficient to decide.
I really, really, doubt that chemical compounds expelled by a star would be similar to cellular life. There needs to be a long period of evolution first. The Cambrian explosion only happened after life had been on earth long enough to raise the Oxygen levels considerably. So it could be involved in giving the primitive replicators a running start, it couldn't have much to do with the Cambrian explosion.
N.B.: In large part the "Cambrian Explosion" is caused by telescoping time. Another contributory factor is that the older fossils get, the fewer of them remain to study, because the rocks that hold them are destroyed in one way or another. (Erosion, volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics, etc.) So one small area that holds a number of fossils, and is REALLY old, is going to be a treasure house of unprecedented species. Another reason is that skeletons evolved at around that time. Before skeletons, things almost didn't fossilize at all.
So the "Cambrian Explosion" is largely an "optical illusion" caused by the way that we are doing our observations. It's not something that needs a separate explanation.
I think you need to work on understanding time scales, quantities, and probability.
If life were started by an accident so improbable that in the entire history of experimentation (starting back with flint knapping) it would be unreasonable to expect it to have happened, it could still be nigh unto a certainty given the whole planet's oceans, and a billion years to work in. Now that's NOT the most likely way for complex molecules to have originated. I'm no expert, but I suspect that small volcanic bubbles in stone near underwater volcanoes are the most likely site. But the argument "we haven't seen it" is silly. People can't understand what probability means when you translate into "all the molecules in solution in the oceans over a couple of billion years". The things that we think of as ridiculously improbably tend to become near certainties.
You'd do better to compare it to Kepler. Or even Tycho. Newton handled, with a simple model, nearly everything that was observable with the instruments that he had available. We don't even approach that level of accuracy. (The simplicity may not be possible. But then that might just be because we don't understand the process.)
I'm sorry you had bad luck with Apple products. Back when I was still buying them (before they changed their EULA) my experience was that they were rock solid, and lasted for decades. (Well, not really. But generally I sold them used while they were still working, because they had become obsolete and I had replaced them.)
I would not recommend Apple products today purely because of their EULA. Well, and proprietary lock-in, but most of that isn't Apple's doing, it done by those who wrote the applications. And few of the applications I used were from Apple. (They didn't tend to follow their own user interface guidelines.)
OTOH, while Steve Jobs was a fantastically good AND effective technological visionary, I never liked his "walled garden" preference. I consider him far superior to Gates as a techno-visionary (does Gates even meet the minimum standards?), but neither seems like a decent human. The computer world would be better off if Gates had been still-born, but the same isn't true of Steve Jobs. But the Gates foundation has actually supported many decent causes, and many don't appear to have been PR efforts for MS. (I've heard that this is due to his wife. This could be true, but it does indicate that he's willing to be moved.)
Calling Gates a "brilliant programmer" doesn't appear to me to be backed up by reliable evidence, though I'll admit that I have no evidence that he couldn't be one if he chose to. Just no evidence that he ever chose to. (Stealing a Basic compiler doesn't make one a brilliant programmer...and that's the story that I have heard and believe. Unless you meant something else.) But it's quite possible that he's not as unpleasant a person as Jobs was.
Yes he said that. Yes he's right. You must not have read the part about stability of predictions.
FWIW, there isn't one climate model. There are several that are considered good. The ones that can predict the present from past data tend to agree on the general shape of the climate of the future given the current data. They DON'T agree in detail. But they're in general agreement. (If they can't predict the present from the past, then they obviously need to be fixed.)
Please note that the models are not gospel. Things may be much worse than they are predicting. There are many plausible effects that would make things much worse that aren't included. Partially to keep things simple, and partially because a prediction that was too gloomy would be thrown out without even being looked at. (Many were.) It's also barely plausible that things won't be as bad as they are predicting. In which case, if we take steps to avoid global warming we might have a climate that's reasonably tolerable. (Don't worry. Politicians are making promises, but they have their fingers crossed. They promise to cut carbon emissions at the same time as the contract for new coal burning power plants.)
So we'll get to find out if the worst case scenarios are correct or not. Because we're burning more coal than ever. Aren't you happy!
Not quite. All models are wrong, but some remain close enough to what they are predicting to be right. Sometimes you can quantify which areas the models are likely to diverge sharply from what they're modeling. Etc.
So some models are stable, in that they have a useful maximal amount of error. Others are quite accurate over a large domain. (One example of this is Newtonian Mechanics, which is clearly wrong where there are multiple frames of reference moving at high speed WRT each other, but at low speeds is so close to accurate, that nobody bothers with the fancier model that is a better fit to "reality".)
P.S.: Please be aware that every prediction you make, be it that you can find your socks in the morning, or that chocolate tastes good, is an instance of using a model. But you don't use the "taste of chocolate" model to find your socks.
That's only a part of the answer. I agree with the article that "curve fitting" won't ever produce a good predictor. So what you need is a model that's stable under variations in input, but still fits the data pretty closely. This is difficult, and even so it won't be an exact predictor, merely a much better one.
That, of course, is independent of the way the people in powerful positions say things that favor their remaining in a powerful position. And people set up to rake in a huge profit are reluctant to change the conditions that allow them to make that profit. These people won't agree to the changes, even if they know that they are necessary to avoid a crash. That was going on independent of the problems with the models. But they did reinforce each other. (And the second acted as a selector on which models would even be considered.)
Additionally, we don't know how to prevent crashes. We know ways that, if used properly, would make them less likely. But these decrease the ability of those in power to rake off huge profits.
(Actually, I lie. We know of lots of ways to eliminate crashes totally. Most of them, however, have other effects that make the crashes look like a desirable goal.)
OTOH!!! The current capitalist system is not something hat can be tolerated when automation progresses very much further that it has gone. It has already gone far beyond it's sweet spot. (And, honestly, it was never a really good system. In many ways village level communism was a better choice, but it didn't scale. [N.B.: "communism", not "Communism".]) Socialism might be the best approach for the current period, before full automation becomes practical. I have no idea what would be a good approach when full automation was practical, just that "a living" wouldn't be tied to a job. (One can put boundary conditions around something without knowing what the optimal position is.)
P.S.: During the 1950's we seemed to be headed towards a Social Democracy...but then we got distracted by militarists. Eisenhower was right when he predicted what the upcoming problem was [i.e., the military-industrial complex], and we failed to deal well with it. I don't worship Eisenhower, though. It was on his watch that his Secretary of Defense invented "Brinksmanship", i.e. getting as close to nuclear war as you can and waiting until the other guy blinks. Still, he was better than nearly any president since then. Kennedy was a far better visionary, but he's also the president that took us to within 30 seconds of nuclear war. Johnson took us to the moon, but only as a dead-end program. A PR stunt. And he got us seriously into Viet-Nam. Carter was well meaning, but ineffectual. As for the rest...we'd probably have been better off with "None of the above" in office.
And if the guys at the top don't have the good of the nation in mind, then no economic model is going to save you.
The bailouts are presented as "The Only Way"... but nobody actually knows.
And very few believe. Almost only the ones that obviously benefit from it.
If you are invested in a retirement plan, then you probably own stock in some corporation or other. Probably several of them. You likely don't even know which corporations you do own stock in. So you are asserting that because of this ownership you are culpable for whatever those corporations do?
N.B.: I agree that this isn't true until you're vested. It is, however, true under many retirement plans afterwards. You can even, if you choose, select which stocks to invest in. This, however, is generally an unwise action, as you don't have enough knowledge.
P.S.: Under your theory, if I understand it correctly, if one invests (acquires partial ownership) in a fund that invests in a stock, the responsibility is transitive. If not, how is this different that having a portfolio management company invest in stocks for you? That's where most of the diffuse stock ownership resides. The problem is with the management, not the owners...except in a few exceptional cases.
Three things are being implied:
1) Without regulations it would be worse.
2) Regulatory capture means that regulations are tilted in favor of the corporations that run the plants, but they're still better than none.
3) Enforcement of the regulations that exist are lax.
So yes, it could happen in the US. There are several equivalent plants in the US with equivalent problems. One of them is up for having it's license renewed to produce more power than it has been producing. This is beyond the initially specified "safe limits". And the plant is already beyond it's designed life. Due to regulatory capture it will probably get the approval it is seeking. This is malfeasance, but that's not likely to stop them. Because just like the company management, the regulators aren't held to task when they don't properly perform their jobs.
I'm not saying you're wrong, because you aren't. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the managers and boards of directors, who are liable under law, are rarely held to their liability. The stockholders generally never have either knowledge or control of what the corporation is doing. They are, officially, the owners, but unless they hold more than 20% of the stock in the corporation it's reasonable that they not be held liable. And if they do hold that much of the stock, then they aren't as invulnerable as you assert...in theory. In practice they are held liable even less often than are the managers.
What's extremely interesting is that many managers who make company killing decisions are then immediately hired at higher rates into a better job. One has to wonder why.
The main problem here (outside of stupid regulations) is regulatory capture. I don't see how to avoid stupid regulations, but regulators should, after they retire, be forbidden to work for, or accept any remuneration from, any entity that they have previously regulated. And if they run for office, they should be forbidden from accepting any campaign contributions from those entities.
That's not perfect. In fact it's nearly minimal. But it would improve things.
The Midas Plague. I believe the author was Fred Pohl.
I had a hard time accepting the ethical structure of that society, but then I have a lot of trouble believing some the ethical structures accepted by our current society. Even seeing how we got them, they appear too weird to take seriously, though I do know that in practice they have teeth.
It's needed reevaluation for at least 20 years. But the people that the reevaluation is needed by don't have much access to the levers of power. And the people with the power would lose if the rules changed. So they don't, except to become more repressive.
It's not like the powerful people would be satisfied with a sane level of power. They became the super-powerful by never being satisfied. The merely rich only want to live in a beautiful house in a safe location. Have plenty of food, water, and luxuries. And a few servants. And two or three nice cars. And enough wealth that they don't need to worry about taxes for the next century. The super-powerful, though, demand and unlimited amount of *something*. It almost doesn't matter what. They can't have it, so they are driven to keep working towards it. And to do this, they not only need unlimited wealth, they need unlimited ability to coerce other people. It essentially doesn't matter what they want to coerce other people to do. Work for universal love would be as destructive as any other thing given the unlimited nature of the demand. And these people aren't going to either surrender power, or even honestly agree to limits on their power.
My estimate for the existence of robots with minds as capable as humans is around 2030. It's been there for around 20 years, so the estimate seems pretty stable. What's not clear is that society will be able to hold together under the increasingly unjust conditions until then. Or what will happen then,
The obvious solution is to make conditions less unjust. Unfortunately, most people want to freeze the world so that it looks the way it did when they were 12...or younger. And the way the world looks to a 12 year old isn't workable. And THAT's if nothing has changed in the interim...which it is doing at an increasing rate.
That doesn't mention how you motivate people to invest a tremendous amount of time and energy in becoming highly skilled in a profession that is likely to disappear before you even begin practicing it. In a way that doesn't seem unbearably unjust to those who don't have the proper capabilities.
Given that you *have* a good answer, how do you get from here to there?