What about all the externalized costs of many corporations and their pollutants. They get to dump pollution into the air, land and sea and don't have to pay the costs. In the end the taxpayers have to pay the costs to deal with the damage.
Many businesses could not exist without taxpayer handouts. Those systems are also a drain on our economy. Any business that is costing us more to clean up their mess then they create in value for our economy are a loss for us.
Do you think that coal power is really cheaper when you consider the total cost to run the business and the cost to clean up the damage? So long as we make future generations pay for the damage we do we can have the illusion that many things are cheap.
I also think this has a massively slowing effect on technology. We are at our best as a species when faced with a challenge we need to work together to overcome and having the true cost of things charged would provide large incentives and funding for better systems.
The only problem is doing that is very expensive. It sounds great when you first think of it but in the end the math does not work out.
Without health care coverage you have lower worker productivity and higher costs. You also have higher costs from crime related to people trying to get the money to cover their healthcare. You also have higher costs at the emergency room and if the person dies or is permanently damaged you lose a large investment society has already made in the person.
It is cheaper overall to cover everyone and continue to invest in technology to cure diseases over treatment. It is not socialist, capitalist, liberal, conservative etc it is just a pure cost vs expense argument that makes good financial sense.
I have a llano laptop and it has been working great for me. I have gone back to school to become an engineer and I run various engineering programs that are GPU accelerated. On battery power this thing stomps on the intel chips since it can do GPU acceleration on battery power. In some operations it is hundreds of times faster while still having good battery power.
Also with web browsers and other office types apps getting gpu accelerated a decent igp is good for performance and battery life. Sure you can turn on a dedicated gpu while on battery power but your battery won't last long doing that.
Try finding the face of a lost student in an engineering class (100 or so people are a major university) or worse a student in an intro class (300-600) students at a major university.
These online classes are being designed to solve the large scale problems we already have. Sure it would be great if everyone had small classes and personal attention from professors but that is not what we have now. To often we have poor textbooks and poor teachers and have to learn most of the information on our own anyways from online resources. Might as well formalize that.
I have had a few classes now where even the professor thought the textbook was horrible and we shouldn't use it. He did not get any say in the textbook assigned and there where vastly better resources online. For other classes the only reason to have the textbook is homework is assigned from it but other than that the textbook is horrible and wikipedia is a better reference.
Not a clue. I never had to take the basic english classes since enough of that was covered in my high school. The only english class I have had to take was a technical writing class for engineers and that only had about 20 people in it.
Ah yes lines of 40+ people trying to talk to the professor and a policy about not answering emails because it is too hard. Yeah I will get back to you on when that one works.
I have not seen many high schools that cover the basic college math stuff up through differential equations, chemistry up through organic chemistry, biology physics etc.
However those are still basically intro classes that you take up through your sophomore year to do pretty much anything in engineering and sciences. Those are massive lecture hall classes because so many people have to take those classes.
My actually degrees classes for engineering have about a hundred students.
Try to get natural feedback or face-to-face communication with an instructor in a class of 400 students which is pretty common now. For intro classes in any sciences this is no different than what students already have.
Smaller classes can definitely be better (they can also be spectacularly worse) but for the large lecture classes you have for intro physics, chemistry, biology, math through calc 1, calc 2, calc 3 and diff eq the online classes are really no worse.
The problem I ran into is that in practice people rarely actually use expires. They just let their web framework send a 304 when the browser checks. Also if you use expires it makes things more complex since if you change the image the new information does not show up instantly.
Mostly though the problem is very very crappy web frameworks.
What I do is set the expires etc stuff to 30 years or so and then I change the urls to the images whenever the image changes. That works insanely well since everything caches it correctly but you still see changes instantly.
The best use case I know of is to inline all your small images you use for styling the site in the master stylesheet for the website. This way you only have one request instead of the hundred plus that many sites have.
Based on some tests I have done on many sites the vast majority of the time is spent on just getting 304s back on all the resources that have not changed. Inlining those small images can save 90% or more of the page load time.
I don't actually believe in White Man's Burden. I think damage would occur anytime one culture adopts bits and pieces of technology from another culture, the greater the average technology difference the greater the damage.
The people in africa are definitely not savages and there are probably some types of technology they use that we don't that would cause damage if we applied it here.
That is why I think we should be very careful. We don't want to make problems even worse.
I would probably give this to them with strings attached like attending school for a year, teaching them about birth control, making it freely available, helping setup sustainable ways they can help themselves etc.
I am not saying we should not do this. I think we need to be extremely careful and try to think through our decisions not just hand out technology like candy and hope that eventually we hand out enough and the problem finally solves itself.
Many parts of western technology caused western birthrates, not taking one or two pieces in isolation.
It was our food system along with education, the industrial revolution, health care and many other factors that have led to lower birth rates. You can't just take only our food technology and give it to someone else and expect it to work out.
We should really not have given them all the food and other technology we did without also requiring birth control. Western technology is not really suited for high population levels and by giving them our technology without the culture that goes with it we pushed them into a pretty nasty situation.
Without our help their populations could not have reached such high levels which causes a great deal of other problems and causes a cycle of needing even more help. It is even possible that because we interfered that we basically made AIDS the epidemic that it became. By helping them (inadvertently) massively increase their populations they lived in much closer proximity and also relied more on bush meat including primates which is considered one of the likely sources for AIDS in the first place.
It is horrible to have anyone starve and we do need to figure out ways to help but we have setup a situation where we have to keep helping on a larger and larger scale or even more will starve and every time we repeat that cycle without lowering the populating growth rates we are only making the problem worse. What I think will happen is at some point the western countries are going to withdraw support for the area since they have too many things to take care of for themselves and there will be far more that will die in africa than could ever be possible without our help. The wars will be very bloody and many will die from starvation and fighting and in the end it will be our fault even though the outcome was not intentional.
You could even say that they are coupled problems. If our population was not so large we would not have the kinds of climate change problems we are having.
In many ways I think we (the west) are kind of like the greek gods in many myths. We often intend to help and do try to help but our attempts to help just make the situation worse because of unintended consequences.
We notice that a country has starving people so we send them food. So then there are more people and their water table and other natural resources start to fail because of increased usage. We also notice more of them die from various diseases so we send cures for that which increases pressure even more.
The basic problem I see is that you can't use western technology without also having things like western birthrates or you can have some pretty nasty consequences. I think that as we try to help africa all we are really doing right now is increasing how many people will eventually die when they exceed what we can do to try to and an unsustainable situation going.
I am not saying we can never help people from other cultures but we have to be vastly more careful about it and realize that our technology does not exist in isolation and it is instead part of our culture and often our culture operates as a kind of control on the usage of technology. If you just hand that technology to another culture they may not have the controls for it and it can cause massive damage.
Overall I am not even worried about the last question.
I don't see any actual conflict between religion and evolution. What I find strange is all of those that define god as existing in areas that we don't understand since it means as we learn more that their idea of god gets put into smaller and smaller holes.
The catholic view seems to make more sense in that god created this large and complex system and we are learning how it works. I am not saying I believe that doctrine or that it is right or wrong but it does seem more stable as technology advances.
At least with that viewpoint as we learn more the people with that view are not in conflict with science since they can say that we now understand the world and thus understand the design of gods better. I would prefer to have people neutral over those that actively oppose learning. Some religions have even encouraged science as a religious pursuit since it was considered a very good thing to try to understand how reality worked as some kind of praise to god. It means they took the time to learn how this system works.
I wish we did not have this conflict between science and religion but my view is that it is mostly the fault of a few religions that set themselves up as an opposition where none was needed. Science is not attacking religion it is just searching out and learning and there is no reason that religions should be standing in the way of that search when they could be helping or at least staying out of it.
It seems that we are where we are as a culture because of science and all those that followed it while the creationists have largely just hitched a ride. I also don't see that they actually have an evolutionary advantage.
Overall I am not very worried about this long term since I want to get a robot body and head out into space and explore and what you guys do on this planet will be your problem. I want to spend millions of years learning and understanding what is out there. I am sure there will be others interested in the same and they can come along.
I wonder how well this world would work if the engineers and scientists left and what kind of evolutionary advantage those remaining would have.
I am working on a degree in Chemical and Biological engineering and we definitely use evolution. There are even computer models now based on adaptation speeds for things like resistance to drugs etc.
Evolution is critically important to modern biotech work.
There is so much to learn in the universe. Even if I lived a million years there would still be more to learn, more to find, more to figure out and more fun to have.
I want to completely get rid of all my organic parts and turn myself into a robot to explore and learn. I really don't care if anyone else wants to do it I just want to have the option available for that that do want to. As an initial step you could build a robot body with a brain life support system. Once we learned how to rebuild the brain out of better components you could replace that also.
Why would anyone want to die when there is so much to learn? Look at nanotechnology that we are just scratching the surface of? Imagine what we will learn to do over the next hundred years with that? How about over the next thousand? How about once we get spaceflight and you can start exploring other planets. Imagine all the stuff you would see on various planets.
Even if you had to travel at speeds slower than light you could do it. Worse case you could hook yourself into a VR world so you could move around, learn, play games etc while the ship traveled.
Life is far too exciting to want to leave it, the only problem with growing old is your physical body and brain deteriorating, lets fix that and not have the problem anymore. If you decide you want to die then go for it, I am sure there are a lot of fun ways to go. Think of doing an atmospheric reentry skydive cannonball into the ocean. You would die with a huge adrenaline rush.
I have given up in a situation like that and I know that many others have also. Look at most companies that pay off patent trolls they are also in that same position. Winning can have far too high of a price and in a rigged system there is no guarantee.
Sometimes it makes more sense to just walk away and spend your time on something else.
I hope this is what we end up with. It would be a huge gain over what we have now and it would definitely give a more accurate view of if someone has learned the material. So many are good at regurgitating facts but can't apply it it save their lives.
All systems are eventually replaced with a better system. Capitalism won't last forever. I don't know what the new system will be or when it will get here but geeze I hope it comes soon. I am hoping for something like the venus project but who knows what it will be. It is not like we have had capitalism for very long or that any of these systems last for very long. Our technology ends up at odds with our economic system and destabilizes it and we create a new economic system capable of working under the new technological reality.
Whatever the new system is I hope it does better by a greater number than our current system. I don't think any of the prior systems are viable paths forward so no I don't believe the next system will be communism etc.
At least for what they can work for they are better than what most people have now. I do agree that labs could be useful but so far from taking physics and chemistry labs up through organic chemistry 2 none have been useful so far. All just follow x procedure and get y result. I could program a robot to do the lab and it would change nothing. It is not a learning experience since no original thought is actually required or wanted.
I don't know how a system I propose would work for things like english or history but it would work better than what we have now for STEM field classes. Yes you should still have labs but until the labs are not just follow x direction to get y result I don't see the value in them.
I don't actually support video lectures. I think they can be okay as supplements. I am thinking of online learning more like how some online programming tutorials are a tiny piece of information and then immediate application followed up by a more complex integration of previous steps of information.
That approach would definitely work for things like fluid mechanics, chemistry, physics, math etc STEM type programs.
It seems that knowledge that is gained in small pieces and immediately used is remembered much better than watching a video for 30 minutes and then applying it. I don't think we can use video games as an actual model but they do a good job of handing someone a small piece of information and then immediately applying it and that same concept can be used in education.
One of the big deals is immediate feedback on if you have done something right. I have had classes where a skill was taught badly and was being done incorrectly by over half the class but it was a few weeks before the homework was returned and the error was discovered. At that point you then have to unlearn the skill and try to learn it again correctly and sometimes you have a test in between. With computer grading systems you an often get immediate and helpful feedback which short circuits that entire process.
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What about all the externalized costs of many corporations and their pollutants. They get to dump pollution into the air, land and sea and don't have to pay the costs. In the end the taxpayers have to pay the costs to deal with the damage.
Many businesses could not exist without taxpayer handouts. Those systems are also a drain on our economy. Any business that is costing us more to clean up their mess then they create in value for our economy are a loss for us.
Do you think that coal power is really cheaper when you consider the total cost to run the business and the cost to clean up the damage? So long as we make future generations pay for the damage we do we can have the illusion that many things are cheap.
I also think this has a massively slowing effect on technology. We are at our best as a species when faced with a challenge we need to work together to overcome and having the true cost of things charged would provide large incentives and funding for better systems.
The only problem is doing that is very expensive. It sounds great when you first think of it but in the end the math does not work out.
Without health care coverage you have lower worker productivity and higher costs. You also have higher costs from crime related to people trying to get the money to cover their healthcare. You also have higher costs at the emergency room and if the person dies or is permanently damaged you lose a large investment society has already made in the person.
It is cheaper overall to cover everyone and continue to invest in technology to cure diseases over treatment. It is not socialist, capitalist, liberal, conservative etc it is just a pure cost vs expense argument that makes good financial sense.
I have a llano laptop and it has been working great for me. I have gone back to school to become an engineer and I run various engineering programs that are GPU accelerated. On battery power this thing stomps on the intel chips since it can do GPU acceleration on battery power. In some operations it is hundreds of times faster while still having good battery power.
Also with web browsers and other office types apps getting gpu accelerated a decent igp is good for performance and battery life. Sure you can turn on a dedicated gpu while on battery power but your battery won't last long doing that.
All things are not equal.
Try finding the face of a lost student in an engineering class (100 or so people are a major university) or worse a student in an intro class (300-600) students at a major university.
These online classes are being designed to solve the large scale problems we already have. Sure it would be great if everyone had small classes and personal attention from professors but that is not what we have now. To often we have poor textbooks and poor teachers and have to learn most of the information on our own anyways from online resources. Might as well formalize that.
I have had a few classes now where even the professor thought the textbook was horrible and we shouldn't use it. He did not get any say in the textbook assigned and there where vastly better resources online. For other classes the only reason to have the textbook is homework is assigned from it but other than that the textbook is horrible and wikipedia is a better reference.
Not a clue. I never had to take the basic english classes since enough of that was covered in my high school. The only english class I have had to take was a technical writing class for engineers and that only had about 20 people in it.
Ah yes lines of 40+ people trying to talk to the professor and a policy about not answering emails because it is too hard. Yeah I will get back to you on when that one works.
I have not seen many high schools that cover the basic college math stuff up through differential equations, chemistry up through organic chemistry, biology physics etc.
However those are still basically intro classes that you take up through your sophomore year to do pretty much anything in engineering and sciences. Those are massive lecture hall classes because so many people have to take those classes.
My actually degrees classes for engineering have about a hundred students.
Try to get natural feedback or face-to-face communication with an instructor in a class of 400 students which is pretty common now. For intro classes in any sciences this is no different than what students already have.
Smaller classes can definitely be better (they can also be spectacularly worse) but for the large lecture classes you have for intro physics, chemistry, biology, math through calc 1, calc 2, calc 3 and diff eq the online classes are really no worse.
The problem I ran into is that in practice people rarely actually use expires. They just let their web framework send a 304 when the browser checks. Also if you use expires it makes things more complex since if you change the image the new information does not show up instantly.
Mostly though the problem is very very crappy web frameworks.
What I do is set the expires etc stuff to 30 years or so and then I change the urls to the images whenever the image changes. That works insanely well since everything caches it correctly but you still see changes instantly.
The best use case I know of is to inline all your small images you use for styling the site in the master stylesheet for the website. This way you only have one request instead of the hundred plus that many sites have.
Based on some tests I have done on many sites the vast majority of the time is spent on just getting 304s back on all the resources that have not changed. Inlining those small images can save 90% or more of the page load time.
I don't actually believe in White Man's Burden. I think damage would occur anytime one culture adopts bits and pieces of technology from another culture, the greater the average technology difference the greater the damage.
The people in africa are definitely not savages and there are probably some types of technology they use that we don't that would cause damage if we applied it here.
That is why I think we should be very careful. We don't want to make problems even worse.
I would probably give this to them with strings attached like attending school for a year, teaching them about birth control, making it freely available, helping setup sustainable ways they can help themselves etc.
I am not saying we should not do this. I think we need to be extremely careful and try to think through our decisions not just hand out technology like candy and hope that eventually we hand out enough and the problem finally solves itself.
Many parts of western technology caused western birthrates, not taking one or two pieces in isolation.
It was our food system along with education, the industrial revolution, health care and many other factors that have led to lower birth rates. You can't just take only our food technology and give it to someone else and expect it to work out.
We should really not have given them all the food and other technology we did without also requiring birth control. Western technology is not really suited for high population levels and by giving them our technology without the culture that goes with it we pushed them into a pretty nasty situation.
Without our help their populations could not have reached such high levels which causes a great deal of other problems and causes a cycle of needing even more help. It is even possible that because we interfered that we basically made AIDS the epidemic that it became. By helping them (inadvertently) massively increase their populations they lived in much closer proximity and also relied more on bush meat including primates which is considered one of the likely sources for AIDS in the first place.
It is horrible to have anyone starve and we do need to figure out ways to help but we have setup a situation where we have to keep helping on a larger and larger scale or even more will starve and every time we repeat that cycle without lowering the populating growth rates we are only making the problem worse. What I think will happen is at some point the western countries are going to withdraw support for the area since they have too many things to take care of for themselves and there will be far more that will die in africa than could ever be possible without our help. The wars will be very bloody and many will die from starvation and fighting and in the end it will be our fault even though the outcome was not intentional.
You could even say that they are coupled problems. If our population was not so large we would not have the kinds of climate change problems we are having.
In many ways I think we (the west) are kind of like the greek gods in many myths. We often intend to help and do try to help but our attempts to help just make the situation worse because of unintended consequences.
We notice that a country has starving people so we send them food. So then there are more people and their water table and other natural resources start to fail because of increased usage. We also notice more of them die from various diseases so we send cures for that which increases pressure even more.
The basic problem I see is that you can't use western technology without also having things like western birthrates or you can have some pretty nasty consequences. I think that as we try to help africa all we are really doing right now is increasing how many people will eventually die when they exceed what we can do to try to and an unsustainable situation going.
I am not saying we can never help people from other cultures but we have to be vastly more careful about it and realize that our technology does not exist in isolation and it is instead part of our culture and often our culture operates as a kind of control on the usage of technology. If you just hand that technology to another culture they may not have the controls for it and it can cause massive damage.
Overall I am not even worried about the last question.
I don't see any actual conflict between religion and evolution. What I find strange is all of those that define god as existing in areas that we don't understand since it means as we learn more that their idea of god gets put into smaller and smaller holes.
The catholic view seems to make more sense in that god created this large and complex system and we are learning how it works. I am not saying I believe that doctrine or that it is right or wrong but it does seem more stable as technology advances.
At least with that viewpoint as we learn more the people with that view are not in conflict with science since they can say that we now understand the world and thus understand the design of gods better. I would prefer to have people neutral over those that actively oppose learning. Some religions have even encouraged science as a religious pursuit since it was considered a very good thing to try to understand how reality worked as some kind of praise to god. It means they took the time to learn how this system works.
I wish we did not have this conflict between science and religion but my view is that it is mostly the fault of a few religions that set themselves up as an opposition where none was needed. Science is not attacking religion it is just searching out and learning and there is no reason that religions should be standing in the way of that search when they could be helping or at least staying out of it.
It seems that we are where we are as a culture because of science and all those that followed it while the creationists have largely just hitched a ride. I also don't see that they actually have an evolutionary advantage.
Overall I am not very worried about this long term since I want to get a robot body and head out into space and explore and what you guys do on this planet will be your problem. I want to spend millions of years learning and understanding what is out there. I am sure there will be others interested in the same and they can come along.
I wonder how well this world would work if the engineers and scientists left and what kind of evolutionary advantage those remaining would have.
I am working on a degree in Chemical and Biological engineering and we definitely use evolution. There are even computer models now based on adaptation speeds for things like resistance to drugs etc.
Evolution is critically important to modern biotech work.
There is so much to learn in the universe. Even if I lived a million years there would still be more to learn, more to find, more to figure out and more fun to have.
I want to completely get rid of all my organic parts and turn myself into a robot to explore and learn. I really don't care if anyone else wants to do it I just want to have the option available for that that do want to. As an initial step you could build a robot body with a brain life support system. Once we learned how to rebuild the brain out of better components you could replace that also.
Why would anyone want to die when there is so much to learn? Look at nanotechnology that we are just scratching the surface of? Imagine what we will learn to do over the next hundred years with that? How about over the next thousand? How about once we get spaceflight and you can start exploring other planets. Imagine all the stuff you would see on various planets.
Even if you had to travel at speeds slower than light you could do it. Worse case you could hook yourself into a VR world so you could move around, learn, play games etc while the ship traveled.
Life is far too exciting to want to leave it, the only problem with growing old is your physical body and brain deteriorating, lets fix that and not have the problem anymore. If you decide you want to die then go for it, I am sure there are a lot of fun ways to go. Think of doing an atmospheric reentry skydive cannonball into the ocean. You would die with a huge adrenaline rush.
I have given up in a situation like that and I know that many others have also. Look at most companies that pay off patent trolls they are also in that same position. Winning can have far too high of a price and in a rigged system there is no guarantee.
Sometimes it makes more sense to just walk away and spend your time on something else.
I hope this is what we end up with. It would be a huge gain over what we have now and it would definitely give a more accurate view of if someone has learned the material. So many are good at regurgitating facts but can't apply it it save their lives.
All systems are eventually replaced with a better system. Capitalism won't last forever. I don't know what the new system will be or when it will get here but geeze I hope it comes soon. I am hoping for something like the venus project but who knows what it will be. It is not like we have had capitalism for very long or that any of these systems last for very long. Our technology ends up at odds with our economic system and destabilizes it and we create a new economic system capable of working under the new technological reality.
Whatever the new system is I hope it does better by a greater number than our current system. I don't think any of the prior systems are viable paths forward so no I don't believe the next system will be communism etc.
At least for what they can work for they are better than what most people have now. I do agree that labs could be useful but so far from taking physics and chemistry labs up through organic chemistry 2 none have been useful so far. All just follow x procedure and get y result. I could program a robot to do the lab and it would change nothing. It is not a learning experience since no original thought is actually required or wanted.
I don't know how a system I propose would work for things like english or history but it would work better than what we have now for STEM field classes. Yes you should still have labs but until the labs are not just follow x direction to get y result I don't see the value in them.
I don't actually support video lectures. I think they can be okay as supplements. I am thinking of online learning more like how some online programming tutorials are a tiny piece of information and then immediate application followed up by a more complex integration of previous steps of information.
That approach would definitely work for things like fluid mechanics, chemistry, physics, math etc STEM type programs.
It seems that knowledge that is gained in small pieces and immediately used is remembered much better than watching a video for 30 minutes and then applying it. I don't think we can use video games as an actual model but they do a good job of handing someone a small piece of information and then immediately applying it and that same concept can be used in education.
One of the big deals is immediate feedback on if you have done something right. I have had classes where a skill was taught badly and was being done incorrectly by over half the class but it was a few weeks before the homework was returned and the error was discovered. At that point you then have to unlearn the skill and try to learn it again correctly and sometimes you have a test in between. With computer grading systems you an often get immediate and helpful feedback which short circuits that entire process.