Yeah. How many humans can the world accommodate? In a world without "artificial scarcity" they'll breed like rabbits on viagra and fertility pills (producing real scarcity), and already there is arguably far too many of them.
There is plenty of evidence that isn't necessarily true. Birth rates in many countries have fallen below replacement as they have improved their economic well being. The best birth control appears to be economic opportunity. A Malthusian catastrophe is not a particularly likely scenario. It's just a perfect example of noticing a trend and extrapolating naively.
Automation is already starting to replace engineers and soldiers.
Automation is SUPPLEMENTING engineers and soldiers. It isn't replacing them any more than Quickbooks replaced accountants or CAD replaced engineers. It just acts as a force multiplier. Any engineer that can be replaced by automation isn't worthy of the title. There is no replacement for boots on the ground in combat and there isn't one likely any time soon.
Expert systems are making inroads in medicine and law.
Again as a supplement. They are demonstrably not replacing members of those professions in any meaningful way. Those expert systems make the doctors better at their job but we still need the doctors. There is no automation in development that is going to replace a surgeon any time soon.
There is already a glut of lawyers.
Which is utterly unrelated to automation or the lack thereof.
In a world without labor cost, where robots can produce windmills, solar panels, and geothermal plants, even energy will have near zero cost.
Not according to anyone who has even a basic understanding of accounting. Even if the production of those things could be completely automated (it cannot without invoking science fiction) there still are costs of materials, cost of financing, limited amounts of land, environmental costs, cost of tooling, cost of design, and plenty of other non-trivial costs that you aren't considering. The fact that you take direct labor to approximately zero doesn't make it free. Not even close.
By the way we've heard the "energy too cheap to meter" argument before. It was bogus then and it is bogus now.
If robots do 100% of everything from cutting down the trees to making the carpet, you can have a house for the cost of the energy alone.
Incorrect. You are neglecting the cost of materials, the opportunity cost of the production, time value of money, financing costs, scarcity of the land and several other important costs. The economics are quite a bit more complicated than you are implying.
If power is all drawn from renewable sources, the cost could theoretically be zero or close to it.
In what universe? You think the equipment to get the power will be free? You think we'll magically have unlimited generating capacity with no environmental consequences? Renewable power isn't magic and certainly isn't even close to zero economic cost.
Then, if we are able to have the robots mine asteroids, we would then be in a post-scarcity economy where everything is free and nobody has to work.
You've been watching too much Star Trek. There is no such thing as a post scarcity economy and there never will be. Even if mining asteroids were practical (not clear that it is) and that it provided every kind of valuable and necessary resource (it won't) it still would not make everything free. There would be a non-trivial economic cost to it. An undergraduate accounting student could prove that your assertion is bogus.
In a post-scarcity economy, they could be bought off even more cheaply, and live much better, with no net tax increase on the rich.
"In a post-scarcity economy"? Does that come with a side of unicorn farts and pixie dust? That's like saying that if Hogwarts were real we could use magic to do all the hard work. There is no such thing as a post-scarcity economy and there never will be. Unless you can find some way to literally generate vast (bordering on unlimited) energy with no negative side effects you will never get to anything resembling a "post-scarcity" economy. There is no remotely plausible way that is going to happen.
The janitors generally work harder and longer hours than CEOs.
No as a matter of fact janitors do NOT work harder and longer than the CEOs. The fact that you say that shows that you have no idea what a CEO of a large company actually does or the sort of hours they put in. I'll presume you know what a janitor does but I've yet to meet one who works harder than a CEO. They also provide quite a lot less value to a company and are far more easily replaced.
Are a lot of CEOs overpaid? Certainly. Are a lot of rank and file workers underpaid? Of course. But let's not get absurd about the relative value or typical work ethic of janitors.
As the janitors don't get 6-12 weeks of paid vacation a year.
Neither do most CEOs and even if they did, most couldn't really take it. Being CEO of a large corporation is a pretty all consuming job. You don't get to that job by taking a lot of time off and you certainly don't stay there by taking time off.
it's 2016 and it's about time companies start investing in manufacturing machines that have hands with dexterity equal to humans.
For specific tasks we have devices that already exceed human dexterity. Sometimes by a lot. The challenge isn't really dexterity as much as programability. We can make devices that hugely exceed human precision for many tasks. Replicating a human hand as an end effector is kind of a pointless and expensive exercise for most tasks. There are much more optimal designs depending on what you are doing. For example having a robotic copy of a human hand holding a welding torch is pointless complication and adds a lot of cost. There are people working on anthro designs but mostly for academic rather than practical purposes. I suspect you'll see it in places but as a general proposition replicating the human body isn't often the best approach to problem solving.
also, robotics companies need to develop better programming interfaces so that the robots can be taught what to do rather than directly programmed.
Already done. I was working with VR programming of robots for assembly line work 15 years ago in my day job and there has been progress since then.
If we can have Robots that make everything for nothing, including themselves, then we will be in a Utopia as no one will have want for anything.
You haven't thought it through my friend. First off, human want is basically infinite, so there is that. Second, we have limits to the amount of energy practically available to us. Energy is the ultimate constraint on production of anything. Third, there are plenty of resources beyond labor that are scarce and provide practical constraints on production of tangible goods. Unless you are going to invoke some Star Trek replicator level of science fiction, even a self replicating hugely flexible robot will not mean the end of scarcity.
The threshold for profitable robotic replacement does keep dropping.
For specific well defined tasks of sufficient volume and economic value. The reason that I'm not worried about robots taking all our jobs is that there are SOOO many economically useful tasks for which will remain economically unviable to automation for the foreseeable future. I know dystopian futures are all the rage but the practical fact is that there are all sorts of technical and economic limits to automation. I run a manufacturing company and I can assure you that we are in no danger of robots pushing all people out of manufacturing any time soon. Similar to what happened in farming you will see a reduction of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the work force but the number will not go to zero. I figure it will stabilize somewhere between 2-6% of the workforce in the coming decades though admittedly that is just a guess and it will take considerable time to get there.
What jobs are safest?
Developers of automation is the obvious one. Politicians for another. Artists. Engineers. Lawyers. Doctors and Nurses. Marketing. Soldiers. The list is pretty extensive. Automation will impact every job in some capacity but relatively few jobs will completely disappear.
Frankly, websites that exist solely because of advertising can die in a fire. Nothing of value will be lost.
You mean like Google? You think Google provides nothing of value to anyone? I think many would disagree with you. Their offerings might not be valuable to you specifically but clearly many others are ok with them as a company that exists solely because of advertising.
In principle some advertising is fine. The problem is that advertising companies can't seem to help themselves in abusing that relationship. Unfortunately the advertising companies have done so much damage that no one with a brain trusts them anymore, including myself.
Ever wondered how many sites would disappear without advertising revenue to fund them (hosting and bandwidth has to be paid for somehow)?
Not really, no. Their bad business model is not my problem.
Or are you prepared to pay a subscription or fee for every website that you use?
I'm prepared to pay a subscription to every website that provides me adequate value to justify a subscription. I already do this for several. Most don't provide much value and I wouldn't mourn their loss. Very few provide enough value that I would willingly sacrifice my privacy and web browsing habits to an advertising company.
I have the opposite view -- I feel there needs to be some sort of consequences for inflammatory speech.
Careful there. You are correct that free speech does not (and should not) equal consequence free speech except where Constitutionally defined. HOWEVER sometimes what is considered inflammatory by some is considered ordinary by others. Just because an opinion is unpopular doesn't mean there should always be consequences. It wasn't that long ago that saying something like "man evolved from apes" or "interracial marriage is ok" could get you into some serious hot water. Heck there are still parts of this country that (technically) you cannot hold public office if you say you don't believe in god. Always having consequences for spoken ideas can result in things like Jim Crow laws if you aren't careful. It can easily become a tyranny of the majority or of the powerful.
PUC doesn't have authority to tell a municipality who can or cannot connect to a pole. Everyone isentitled to use the poles. Poles are, contrary to AT&T's old conception, not owned by AT they are owned by the town, and a town can and does wield eminent domain to possess property for a public good.
I can't speak for this case in particular but in many cases the poles ARE owned by AT&T or some other private entity. They might be owned by a third party like the power company. In fact it's kind of uncommon for the poles to actually be owned by the local municipality. There are laws governing use and access to the poles but they may very well be privately owned. For example the poles outside my house are owned by the local power company. The phone and cable companies pay the power company to utilize them. If the pole gets damaged it is the power company's responsibility to fix the pole. The local government does not and never has owned the poles near me.
Apparently you don't understand medical records exchanges routinely do not include complete records. Even when they do send complete records they are typically required to keep a copy by law of procedures performed so there are multiple non-cohesive copies. Get a clue.
Bernie has a political career that spans decades now, and he's been entirely consistent.
Being consistent in politics has nothing to do with being honest.
And unlike Hillary, he doesn't have a lot of questionable ethical actions in his past.
Maybe, maybe not. He hasn't been anywhere near the public figure that Hillary has either so it's not like he's been under the microscope like she has. Maybe he is the exceptionally rare honest politician but that doesn't mean I trust him any more than I do Hillary or any of the GOP clowns.
To be clear, Sanders is probably the candidate I favor most in this race and I still don't trust him.
but if you think he's less trustworthy than Hillary, you're either an idiot or a shill.
If you think anyone who seeks high office is even remotely trustworthy you are an idiot, period.
Great, now you have multiple copies in random locations with no cohesion AND you need extra staff to manage all the extra paper. Congratulations for taking a bad system and making it worse.
What're you going to do when your medical records system loses power and you can't access patient information?
Every hospital has fallback procedures for this exact scenario. These include robust power backup including generators. Furthermore even if there is a complete power loss for a time paper records are not going to make things better, especially in a large hospital. I don't think you comprehend just how hugely inefficient paper records actually are to use. Ironic given that you are posting to a site like slashdot.
That's why every doctor's office I go to keeps a CARBON COPY BACKUP.
No they don't. My wife is a doctor and I've worked in hospital systems. I'm aware of NO medical office that keeps a carbon copy backup of all their paperwork. In fact I've never even seen a piece of carbon paper in a doctors office in the last 20 years.
Do we really need to enumerate the reasons that being able to transmit data over a network is helpful?
Have nurses do actual work with written data instead of some need with always being online?
Because doing that is expensive, difficult to share, error prone, inefficient and unnecessary. Paper records only really works for a small office where the paper can easily follow the patient and isn't likely to be needed elsewhere. That is rarely the case these days.
I could be talking out of my ass here but everything doesn't need to be online. Really?
You are talking out your ass. We network many (not all) medical devices because there are real, measurable benefits from doing so, both financial and quality of care. Yes there are problems with doing this but there are bigger problems with not doing it.
I have no doubt in my mind that Clinton is a very smart person - that shows through in the debates. I just don't fucking trust her at all,
Why would that be any different for her versus any of the other candidates. If you trust ANY of them you are being a fool. The notion that Clinton is somehow more or less trustworthy than any of the rest is just silly. Saying Clinton is somehow especially untrustworthy just means you haven't looked at the others carefully enough.
So if you're a Democrat you have a dilemma: vote for Sanders as the nominee to effect some real change
That's a nice thought but unless the Democrats control Congress, Bernie is going to have a hard time pushing his agenda through. The Tea Party folks would develop hives at the mere thought of some of his policy goals. Obama is pretty centrist compared to Bernie and he can't get Congress to pass anything. Only reason the Affordable Care Act passed was because the democrats had control of the house and senate. Bernie would try I'm sure but I doubt he'd get much done.
Apple's refusal to cooperate with a legitimate law enforcement investigation to unlock a phone used by terrorists puts Apple on the side of terrorists instead of on the side of public safety
Translation: "Apple isn't letting us run roughshod over civil rights in the efficient manner to which we are accustomed so we're going to throw a juvenile fit instead of having an adult discussion about a complicated problem."
Law enforcement officers with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and a lack of regard for civil rights are a very scary thing.
Trump is openly running a pro-common man, fuck the special interests campaign and he can pull it off because he's so rich he could moon Wall Street in public and not miss a single dollar from them.
No he isn't. Sanders it running a pro-common man campaign. Trump couldn't care less about the "common man". The only thing Trump is for is Trump and you'd have to be an idiot (like his supporters) to not see that. Trump has ALWAYS been 100% about promoting himself. He isn't a policy wonk, he doesn't care about or understand what "common people" need, he speaks in sound bites with no content, and it's not clear how he would go about getting a consensus for anything from Congress. The President isn't a dictator so he'll have to actually play nice with others to get anything done should he get elected. I've seen no evidence he has a clue how to do that. You seriously think he's going to be able to insult his way to getting bills passed?
Clinton, on the other hand, is married into Wall Street. She's pro-amnesty, pro-every Chamber of Commerce fuck the little guy interest out there.
So is every other candidate out there including Trump, except maybe Sanders... maybe. Trump isn't married to Wall Street, he IS Wall Street personified.
Sanders is the only electable candidate they have unless it's a Kasich-Bush ticket.
As much as I would like to agree with you I'm not optimistic about his chances in the general. He appeals strongly to a certain block of voters but it's not clear how much he appeals to moderates. The only way Sanders wins is if he can somehow appeal to moderates and get a lot of young people out to vote. Possible but not easy and I'm not sure he has the sort of mass appeal Obama did. That said, he might have a chance if Trump is the guy on the right. I think even a lot of Republicans are pretty uncomfortable with the idea of Trump in the White House.
I still wonder how it is possible that the republicans can't come up with a single decent candidate. And this is not the first time that happened.
Arguably neither party has a decent candidate this go around but I agree. The GOP candidates in particular all have wigs, red noses and large shoes. That party has kind of painted themselves into this ridiculous ideological corner and they get weird candidates that try to fit that impossible puzzle. They claim to want government out of people's business but then ignore that when it comes to "values" thanks to the religious wing of the party. They also claim to be about fiscal responsibility but they can't ever vote for raising taxes if they want to stay in office even when it is absurd not to. And despite their claims they wan to cut spending their actions show exactly the opposite - they just want to spend money on THEIR causes. So they have to argue the ridiculous idea that somehow we can achieve prosperity by continually cutting taxes, mostly for wealthy people, while not reducing spending (especially on the military) and staying out of people's private lives except when it offends their religious sensibilities. That's the very definition of conflicted messaging.
And then they get a demagogue like Trump and they can't figure out how to deal with him because they have been so busy painting themselves into this ideological corner that any reasonable candidate can't even win a local election thanks to the Tea Party and social conservatives.
For most of recorded history, gold has made a terrific currency - the kind you can power regional empires on.,/quote>
Gold has served as a currency adequately at times (and poorly at others) but I dispute the "terrific" part of your thesis. There are very good reasons why it is no longer the basis of any modern currency.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. How many humans can the world accommodate? In a world without "artificial scarcity" they'll breed like rabbits on viagra and fertility pills (producing real scarcity), and already there is arguably far too many of them.
There is plenty of evidence that isn't necessarily true. Birth rates in many countries have fallen below replacement as they have improved their economic well being. The best birth control appears to be economic opportunity. A Malthusian catastrophe is not a particularly likely scenario. It's just a perfect example of noticing a trend and extrapolating naively.
Automation is already starting to replace engineers and soldiers.
Automation is SUPPLEMENTING engineers and soldiers. It isn't replacing them any more than Quickbooks replaced accountants or CAD replaced engineers. It just acts as a force multiplier. Any engineer that can be replaced by automation isn't worthy of the title. There is no replacement for boots on the ground in combat and there isn't one likely any time soon.
Expert systems are making inroads in medicine and law.
Again as a supplement. They are demonstrably not replacing members of those professions in any meaningful way. Those expert systems make the doctors better at their job but we still need the doctors. There is no automation in development that is going to replace a surgeon any time soon.
There is already a glut of lawyers.
Which is utterly unrelated to automation or the lack thereof.
In a world without labor cost, where robots can produce windmills, solar panels, and geothermal plants, even energy will have near zero cost.
Not according to anyone who has even a basic understanding of accounting. Even if the production of those things could be completely automated (it cannot without invoking science fiction) there still are costs of materials, cost of financing, limited amounts of land, environmental costs, cost of tooling, cost of design, and plenty of other non-trivial costs that you aren't considering. The fact that you take direct labor to approximately zero doesn't make it free. Not even close.
By the way we've heard the "energy too cheap to meter" argument before. It was bogus then and it is bogus now.
If robots do 100% of everything from cutting down the trees to making the carpet, you can have a house for the cost of the energy alone.
Incorrect. You are neglecting the cost of materials, the opportunity cost of the production, time value of money, financing costs, scarcity of the land and several other important costs. The economics are quite a bit more complicated than you are implying.
If power is all drawn from renewable sources, the cost could theoretically be zero or close to it.
In what universe? You think the equipment to get the power will be free? You think we'll magically have unlimited generating capacity with no environmental consequences? Renewable power isn't magic and certainly isn't even close to zero economic cost.
Then, if we are able to have the robots mine asteroids, we would then be in a post-scarcity economy where everything is free and nobody has to work.
You've been watching too much Star Trek. There is no such thing as a post scarcity economy and there never will be. Even if mining asteroids were practical (not clear that it is) and that it provided every kind of valuable and necessary resource (it won't) it still would not make everything free. There would be a non-trivial economic cost to it. An undergraduate accounting student could prove that your assertion is bogus.
In a post-scarcity economy, they could be bought off even more cheaply, and live much better, with no net tax increase on the rich.
"In a post-scarcity economy"? Does that come with a side of unicorn farts and pixie dust? That's like saying that if Hogwarts were real we could use magic to do all the hard work. There is no such thing as a post-scarcity economy and there never will be. Unless you can find some way to literally generate vast (bordering on unlimited) energy with no negative side effects you will never get to anything resembling a "post-scarcity" economy. There is no remotely plausible way that is going to happen.
The janitors generally work harder and longer hours than CEOs.
No as a matter of fact janitors do NOT work harder and longer than the CEOs. The fact that you say that shows that you have no idea what a CEO of a large company actually does or the sort of hours they put in. I'll presume you know what a janitor does but I've yet to meet one who works harder than a CEO. They also provide quite a lot less value to a company and are far more easily replaced.
Are a lot of CEOs overpaid? Certainly. Are a lot of rank and file workers underpaid? Of course. But let's not get absurd about the relative value or typical work ethic of janitors.
As the janitors don't get 6-12 weeks of paid vacation a year.
Neither do most CEOs and even if they did, most couldn't really take it. Being CEO of a large corporation is a pretty all consuming job. You don't get to that job by taking a lot of time off and you certainly don't stay there by taking time off.
it's 2016 and it's about time companies start investing in manufacturing machines that have hands with dexterity equal to humans.
For specific tasks we have devices that already exceed human dexterity. Sometimes by a lot. The challenge isn't really dexterity as much as programability. We can make devices that hugely exceed human precision for many tasks. Replicating a human hand as an end effector is kind of a pointless and expensive exercise for most tasks. There are much more optimal designs depending on what you are doing. For example having a robotic copy of a human hand holding a welding torch is pointless complication and adds a lot of cost. There are people working on anthro designs but mostly for academic rather than practical purposes. I suspect you'll see it in places but as a general proposition replicating the human body isn't often the best approach to problem solving.
also, robotics companies need to develop better programming interfaces so that the robots can be taught what to do rather than directly programmed.
Already done. I was working with VR programming of robots for assembly line work 15 years ago in my day job and there has been progress since then.
If we can have Robots that make everything for nothing, including themselves, then we will be in a Utopia as no one will have want for anything.
You haven't thought it through my friend. First off, human want is basically infinite, so there is that. Second, we have limits to the amount of energy practically available to us. Energy is the ultimate constraint on production of anything. Third, there are plenty of resources beyond labor that are scarce and provide practical constraints on production of tangible goods. Unless you are going to invoke some Star Trek replicator level of science fiction, even a self replicating hugely flexible robot will not mean the end of scarcity.
The threshold for profitable robotic replacement does keep dropping.
For specific well defined tasks of sufficient volume and economic value. The reason that I'm not worried about robots taking all our jobs is that there are SOOO many economically useful tasks for which will remain economically unviable to automation for the foreseeable future. I know dystopian futures are all the rage but the practical fact is that there are all sorts of technical and economic limits to automation. I run a manufacturing company and I can assure you that we are in no danger of robots pushing all people out of manufacturing any time soon. Similar to what happened in farming you will see a reduction of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the work force but the number will not go to zero. I figure it will stabilize somewhere between 2-6% of the workforce in the coming decades though admittedly that is just a guess and it will take considerable time to get there.
What jobs are safest?
Developers of automation is the obvious one. Politicians for another. Artists. Engineers. Lawyers. Doctors and Nurses. Marketing. Soldiers. The list is pretty extensive. Automation will impact every job in some capacity but relatively few jobs will completely disappear.
Frankly, websites that exist solely because of advertising can die in a fire. Nothing of value will be lost.
You mean like Google? You think Google provides nothing of value to anyone? I think many would disagree with you. Their offerings might not be valuable to you specifically but clearly many others are ok with them as a company that exists solely because of advertising.
In principle some advertising is fine. The problem is that advertising companies can't seem to help themselves in abusing that relationship. Unfortunately the advertising companies have done so much damage that no one with a brain trusts them anymore, including myself.
Ever wondered how many sites would disappear without advertising revenue to fund them (hosting and bandwidth has to be paid for somehow)?
Not really, no. Their bad business model is not my problem.
Or are you prepared to pay a subscription or fee for every website that you use?
I'm prepared to pay a subscription to every website that provides me adequate value to justify a subscription. I already do this for several. Most don't provide much value and I wouldn't mourn their loss. Very few provide enough value that I would willingly sacrifice my privacy and web browsing habits to an advertising company.
I have the opposite view -- I feel there needs to be some sort of consequences for inflammatory speech.
Careful there. You are correct that free speech does not (and should not) equal consequence free speech except where Constitutionally defined. HOWEVER sometimes what is considered inflammatory by some is considered ordinary by others. Just because an opinion is unpopular doesn't mean there should always be consequences. It wasn't that long ago that saying something like "man evolved from apes" or "interracial marriage is ok" could get you into some serious hot water. Heck there are still parts of this country that (technically) you cannot hold public office if you say you don't believe in god. Always having consequences for spoken ideas can result in things like Jim Crow laws if you aren't careful. It can easily become a tyranny of the majority or of the powerful.
PUC doesn't have authority to tell a municipality who can or cannot connect to a pole. Everyone isentitled to use the poles. Poles are, contrary to AT&T's old conception, not owned by AT they are owned by the town, and a town can and does wield eminent domain to possess property for a public good.
I can't speak for this case in particular but in many cases the poles ARE owned by AT&T or some other private entity. They might be owned by a third party like the power company. In fact it's kind of uncommon for the poles to actually be owned by the local municipality. There are laws governing use and access to the poles but they may very well be privately owned. For example the poles outside my house are owned by the local power company. The phone and cable companies pay the power company to utilize them. If the pole gets damaged it is the power company's responsibility to fix the pole. The local government does not and never has owned the poles near me.
Apparently you don't understand medical records exchanges routinely do not include complete records. Even when they do send complete records they are typically required to keep a copy by law of procedures performed so there are multiple non-cohesive copies. Get a clue.
Bernie has a political career that spans decades now, and he's been entirely consistent.
Being consistent in politics has nothing to do with being honest.
And unlike Hillary, he doesn't have a lot of questionable ethical actions in his past.
Maybe, maybe not. He hasn't been anywhere near the public figure that Hillary has either so it's not like he's been under the microscope like she has. Maybe he is the exceptionally rare honest politician but that doesn't mean I trust him any more than I do Hillary or any of the GOP clowns.
To be clear, Sanders is probably the candidate I favor most in this race and I still don't trust him.
but if you think he's less trustworthy than Hillary, you're either an idiot or a shill.
If you think anyone who seeks high office is even remotely trustworthy you are an idiot, period.
What, too lazy to use a fucking fax machine?
Great, now you have multiple copies in random locations with no cohesion AND you need extra staff to manage all the extra paper. Congratulations for taking a bad system and making it worse.
What're you going to do when your medical records system loses power and you can't access patient information?
Every hospital has fallback procedures for this exact scenario. These include robust power backup including generators. Furthermore even if there is a complete power loss for a time paper records are not going to make things better, especially in a large hospital. I don't think you comprehend just how hugely inefficient paper records actually are to use. Ironic given that you are posting to a site like slashdot.
That's why every doctor's office I go to keeps a CARBON COPY BACKUP.
No they don't. My wife is a doctor and I've worked in hospital systems. I'm aware of NO medical office that keeps a carbon copy backup of all their paperwork. In fact I've never even seen a piece of carbon paper in a doctors office in the last 20 years.
Um, don't hook them up to the network?
Do we really need to enumerate the reasons that being able to transmit data over a network is helpful?
Have nurses do actual work with written data instead of some need with always being online?
Because doing that is expensive, difficult to share, error prone, inefficient and unnecessary. Paper records only really works for a small office where the paper can easily follow the patient and isn't likely to be needed elsewhere. That is rarely the case these days.
I could be talking out of my ass here but everything doesn't need to be online. Really?
You are talking out your ass. We network many (not all) medical devices because there are real, measurable benefits from doing so, both financial and quality of care. Yes there are problems with doing this but there are bigger problems with not doing it.
I have no doubt in my mind that Clinton is a very smart person - that shows through in the debates. I just don't fucking trust her at all,
Why would that be any different for her versus any of the other candidates. If you trust ANY of them you are being a fool. The notion that Clinton is somehow more or less trustworthy than any of the rest is just silly. Saying Clinton is somehow especially untrustworthy just means you haven't looked at the others carefully enough.
So if you're a Democrat you have a dilemma: vote for Sanders as the nominee to effect some real change
That's a nice thought but unless the Democrats control Congress, Bernie is going to have a hard time pushing his agenda through. The Tea Party folks would develop hives at the mere thought of some of his policy goals. Obama is pretty centrist compared to Bernie and he can't get Congress to pass anything. Only reason the Affordable Care Act passed was because the democrats had control of the house and senate. Bernie would try I'm sure but I doubt he'd get much done.
It would be a simple matter for Apple to write the patched OS so that it only works on one particular phone.
If they do it once they will be asked to do it again. There is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
What they are being asked to do is write a custom OS for free. To fix a mistake the FBI made.
Which will be used repeatedly in the future on other phones in other cases regardless of the legality of doing so.
Apple's refusal to cooperate with a legitimate law enforcement investigation to unlock a phone used by terrorists puts Apple on the side of terrorists instead of on the side of public safety
Translation: "Apple isn't letting us run roughshod over civil rights in the efficient manner to which we are accustomed so we're going to throw a juvenile fit instead of having an adult discussion about a complicated problem."
Law enforcement officers with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and a lack of regard for civil rights are a very scary thing.
Trump is openly running a pro-common man, fuck the special interests campaign and he can pull it off because he's so rich he could moon Wall Street in public and not miss a single dollar from them.
No he isn't. Sanders it running a pro-common man campaign. Trump couldn't care less about the "common man". The only thing Trump is for is Trump and you'd have to be an idiot (like his supporters) to not see that. Trump has ALWAYS been 100% about promoting himself. He isn't a policy wonk, he doesn't care about or understand what "common people" need, he speaks in sound bites with no content, and it's not clear how he would go about getting a consensus for anything from Congress. The President isn't a dictator so he'll have to actually play nice with others to get anything done should he get elected. I've seen no evidence he has a clue how to do that. You seriously think he's going to be able to insult his way to getting bills passed?
Clinton, on the other hand, is married into Wall Street. She's pro-amnesty, pro-every Chamber of Commerce fuck the little guy interest out there.
So is every other candidate out there including Trump, except maybe Sanders... maybe. Trump isn't married to Wall Street, he IS Wall Street personified.
Sanders is the only electable candidate they have unless it's a Kasich-Bush ticket.
As much as I would like to agree with you I'm not optimistic about his chances in the general. He appeals strongly to a certain block of voters but it's not clear how much he appeals to moderates. The only way Sanders wins is if he can somehow appeal to moderates and get a lot of young people out to vote. Possible but not easy and I'm not sure he has the sort of mass appeal Obama did. That said, he might have a chance if Trump is the guy on the right. I think even a lot of Republicans are pretty uncomfortable with the idea of Trump in the White House.
I still wonder how it is possible that the republicans can't come up with a single decent candidate. And this is not the first time that happened.
Arguably neither party has a decent candidate this go around but I agree. The GOP candidates in particular all have wigs, red noses and large shoes. That party has kind of painted themselves into this ridiculous ideological corner and they get weird candidates that try to fit that impossible puzzle. They claim to want government out of people's business but then ignore that when it comes to "values" thanks to the religious wing of the party. They also claim to be about fiscal responsibility but they can't ever vote for raising taxes if they want to stay in office even when it is absurd not to. And despite their claims they wan to cut spending their actions show exactly the opposite - they just want to spend money on THEIR causes. So they have to argue the ridiculous idea that somehow we can achieve prosperity by continually cutting taxes, mostly for wealthy people, while not reducing spending (especially on the military) and staying out of people's private lives except when it offends their religious sensibilities. That's the very definition of conflicted messaging.
And then they get a demagogue like Trump and they can't figure out how to deal with him because they have been so busy painting themselves into this ideological corner that any reasonable candidate can't even win a local election thanks to the Tea Party and social conservatives.
For most of recorded history, gold has made a terrific currency - the kind you can power regional empires on.,/quote>
Gold has served as a currency adequately at times (and poorly at others) but I dispute the "terrific" part of your thesis. There are very good reasons why it is no longer the basis of any modern currency.