Warrior's Wish: "When I am dead, cry for me a little. Think of me sometimes, but not too much. It is not good for you to dwell too long. Think of me now and again as I was in life, at some moment which is pleasant to recall, but not for long. Leave me in peace as I shall leave you, too, in peace."
I cannot imagine that this proposed device would help healing in any way. As long as we are temporal creatures, death is something we have to deal with in a healthy and productive way, and IMO, this ain't it.
YMMV.
Crowfoot, Chief of the Siksika, 1890, dying words: “A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
1) Since the Industrial revolution (and really with every advance in production technology), fewer people are necessary to create things that people value. The phenomenon is the "consolidation of the production of value." For example, instead of 10 farmers producing enough for a subsistence living with primitive technology, one farmer can produce a lot with advanced tech. Instead of 100 people required to run a store that generates 20 million a year in revenue, with advanced tech it now only requires 10.
2) So there's a "production pyramid": at the bottom, everyone makes everything they need. The next layer up it requires fewer people to make everything everyone needs. The next layer up even fewer.
3) Thought experiment: imagine the top of the pyramid. One man (or woman) can make everything everyone needs. He owns all the productive capital. How to distribute money then?
One thing to realize. i. People are necessary to create demand, for both goods and services, and the money to buy those goods and services. Without any people and no demand, money is worthless, and the single value creator is only making things for his own consumption.
So: How to distribute money in the one creator system, at the top of the pyramid? How about 2 layers down? How about 50 layers down?
Why is it a "worst" case scenario? Why not a best case scenario? Saturn will lose those freakish rings and will soon morph into a normal round planet like everyone else. It can be proud of its body for once.
A weakness of autonomous vehicles in general is sensor failure. I know a guy who's become reliant on parking sensors since getting a new car a few months ago. Twice the sensor has flaked out - not warned of a nearby object - and he's bumped into it. This has led to thousands of dollars in damage. And it fails silently, and intermittently.
So - it'll be quite important to stick to the old way of driving - i.e. you doing it visually - and not relying on a sensor and software solely, for, it seems to me, the foreseeable future. These assistive devices can be used as failsafes I suppose. Like automatic parachute deployers for skydivers, which fire at certain altitudes. But they don't always work correctly either and shouldn't be the primary source of parachute deployment. The question becomes then, how to make people aware of the nature of these assistive systems.
Employers always have a reason to cut costs, be it labor or otherwise. They're not running charities - they're running organizations where each member hopes to obtain a profit.
Years ago (like in the late 90s/early 2000s), Verizon (as one example) engaged in mass pre-emptive, prophylactic layoffs, despite being profitable. There's always an incentive to reduce labor costs.
No one is going to try and improve the workers' lot, other than the workers. No one is going to look out for the executives' interests, other than the executives. Both have different tools to achieve those ends.
All this nonsense, and the tax breaks/subsidies, while the headquarters were always going to go in close to his residences:)
Bezos is a brilliant guy no question, but this shows how effective a negotiator he is, and how ineffective, outside of military force, politicians are.
I always chuckle when Krugman goes to his IS-LM graphs and equations, and I think, "You really believe those describe the entire system?"
Considering he always says it does not describe the entire system, that's a rather odd thing to say if you're actually reading what he writes.
Krugman's NYT column is called "The Conscience of a Liberal." Nate Silver and Krugman had a public dispute when Silver left the NYT to form FiveThirtyEight. Silver said, about Krugman, "Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically,” Silver said in that interview."
Economic models are data fit to curves. See the 'Philips curve' and 'the breakdown of the Philips curve'. However, this data exists in the context of other systems. "All Models Are Wrong" of course, but it seems to me many economists don't appreciate the error in their models and are willing (and paid) to make grand pronouncements based on highly error-filled models. Often in support of one social narrative or another.
. The economy grows around those sources of money, which aren't geared towards addressing people's needs and wants. They wonder why productivity hasn't improved.
Except productivity has improved. The US, despite that whole "death of manufacturing" thing, is producing 3x the goods we made in the 1980s.....we're doing it with a lot less people because productivity has vastly improved, which is the one of the primary sources of that "death of manufacturing" thing.
I think going forward, there's a strong push towards socialist populism. Unless we can come up with a system that is again self-sustaining and self-organizing that allows people to create value and which fairly pays people for their labor. The view is dimming for the latter.
So, your first option is to invent a new economic system that will be highly stable because.....reasons.
No, not because 'reasons'. Because of its fairness and resistance to corruption, cronyism and favoritism. A system which is self-organizing and automatically rewards people based on their contribution would be fair; but then it could lead to vast swaths where people cannot contribute anything of value because offshore labor or machines can do it more cheaply and efficiently. That would be bad for humanitarian reasons and it can lead to social unrest.
Your second option is democratic socialism as practiced by most of Europe. Including Germany that you laud as successful in your post.
There's precisely zero reasons we can't do the latter in the US. The barrier has been the "Me Generation". And they're gonna die soon.
Don't conflate all of Europe as one.
We don't want to emulate France, Spain, Portugal. They have high unemployment and lower standards of living and more volatile economies. We're not like Norway in which we basically rely on vast oil deposits for our national wealth. Not in Europe but
Much darker outlooks about the present and the future.
Economists are looking for easy answers. I always chuckle when Krugman goes to his IS-LM graphs and equations, and I think, "You really believe those describe the entire system?" The reality is simple yet difficult and chaotic. Unless you're creating things that people value, like Germany for example, you're not going to have an improving standard of living. But economists can't control that - politicians do. And there's a chaotic element about whether your population will be able to create things that improve the standard of living. Economists can only print money and inject it into the financial sector and government, and hope it has a beneficial effect on the economy. But it doesn't. The economy grows around those sources of money, which aren't geared towards addressing people's needs and wants. They wonder why productivity hasn't improved.
I saw a really interesting debate between David Frum and Steve Bannon ("The Munk Debates" series) about whether populism is the future. Frum was arguing for the old, happy talk globalist (37 genders, open borders and the US as the world policeman) system which held sway till about 2008. Bannon said the future belonged to populism, and the only question is whether it will socialist populism (Bernie Sanders), or capitalist populism (Trump).
Capitalism with controls was good because it was self-sustaining and self-organizing. The value you provided was in line with the remuneration you obtained, with minimal interference by political gatekeepers, who can be easily corrupted. But as the production of value becomes more and more consolidated, as the production of value is off-shored, and money corrupts/warps our political system, gatekeepers have grown in power (via crony capitalism and socialism for the wealthy) and they are not like AI's - they are highly influence-able and corruptible. As in any system where a gatekeeper hands out largesse.
I think going forward, there's a strong push towards socialist populism. Unless we can come up with a system that is again self-sustaining and self-organizing that allows people to create value and which fairly pays people for their labor. The view is dimming for the latter.
Put yourself in a politician's shoes. You love the power. How do you keep it? You make your constituents lives better and make sure they know about it. But cut to the chase even further - really, you only need to make your constituents think you're making their lives better. If you are, it's secondary. The most important thing is making them think that. That's how you get the precious votes.
Who really knows for sure what the net economic benefit will be? I suspect it's a lot like sports stadiums. Realize that the economy is a competition for resources and Amazon is a very successful competitor. And that politicians are not spending their own money, only trying to make their constituents think they are making those constituents' lives better.
Ultimately I think it's like a blood transfusion to yourself - diverting resources away from other priorities and taking on debt to pay for the shiny now. Ultimately, the source of wealth is creating things that people value. Does Amazon create value? I guess so. But they are also very good at retaining that value for themselves. Think of the WalMart effect. Or Facebook lights-out datacenters. These competitors are much better at retaining value they generate than any politician, whose primary skills like in raising money and getting votes. And they're also quite good at sloughing off costs on others, like the environmental polluters of yore. But this is "financial pollution" - company keeps the profits and socializes the losses, like WalMart and foodstamps. Or most famously, Wall Street after the financial crisis and bailouts.
Don't get me wrong, technology increases the productivity of people, which leads to the "Consolidation of the production of value." It's been going on since before the Industrial Revolution, but it leaps forward with the various technological revolutions. But just because a company is big doesn't mean that landing in your area is going to bring a prosperity windfall, and should get vast subsidies in anticipation of such.
The PROBLEM is the edge cases, which these pre-cast solutions miss.
Like, I have JSON coming in from a form. I can mechanically loop through it and load them into maps for preparation to load into a database. But some fields need to be concatenated, like dollars and cents fields. Gotta detect for them, as a pair, and take them out of the loop, and handle them differently.
Other edge cases exist. The general principles exist to guide development, but each company, each agency, each device deals with its information in ever so slightly different ways. Yes, of course, there are general guidelines which have been tested over decades but because the structure of the information and what you do with it is not exactly the same everywhere, the way you handle it varies a bit as well.
It's like cars - "they got 4 wheels, a steering wheel and a motor. They all obey the same physical principles." Yes, but there's quite a bit of variation within those general parameters, and thus building and maintaining them varies.
Take language compilers. Doesn't matter what the structure of the incoming language, how huge or complex the program, as long as it parses according the EBNF rules, the compiler will translate it faithfully into processor instructions. This structure fools people, because they think this level of structure should apply to human information. But even compilers have flags to change the generated output. As complex and difficult as compilers are, the variable and real complexity is encoded into the source text which handles the organizational information and processes.
A lot of people (here, especially) reject the 'appeal to expert' logical fallacy. It takes some form of 'experts say' and related. They want to see the data and decide for themselves. Whenever they hear an appeal to expert, it turns them off. But if I don't have the time or expertise to delve into the data, one can accept suitably formed appeals.
Some part of the response to climate change does involve power grabs and redistribution.
It is important to separate the question of whether there is global warming or anthropogenic global warming, and the responses to it.
If the least productive members of society are actually able to get off the treadmill of a minimum-wage job, they'll have time to better themselves through education, training, reading, etc should they desire to.
I don't know if this is true.
Our senses process information: eyes process visual information, ears process audio information, nose processes smell-related information, etc. Our brains process the meaning behind this information. And also processes catch-all information.
Now, with machinery processing information more effectively than people, in certain areas, that doesn't leave much for those with a mental information processing ability below a certain threshold. If machines move into physical tasks (which they have), how do these people create value for which others will want to pay?
The Industrial Revolution was a physical revolution. A machine could plow a field or dig a ditch or assemble a device more effectively than a human doing it manually. This Information Processing Revolution squeezes humans out of simple information processing, and simple physical tasks. How can these people convince people to give them money?
People pay money in order to get some satisfaction - some thing they value. Give to homeless, give to charity, give to bill collector, buy a shirt, make a bet, watch a movie, pay a prostitute - all ways to get satisfaction, provided by another.
From physical labor to information processing. But from information processing, to what?
In the United States, we have had a rapidly growing money supply, based entirely on the Fed printing money, and it has not led to inflation.
This is misleading. The whole point of QE was to prevent a deflationary spiral in the aftermath of the financial crisis. So while it didn't lead to high inflation, it did lead to much higher inflation than we would have otherwise had.
The money was pumped into the financial sector and government. The Fed bought mortgages and government debt. I seem to recall the Fed buying some unusual loans, auto and the like, for a while.
The financial sector trades in financial and physical assets. It's the "house" for making bets on real life. There has been quite a bit of inflation in financial assets and real estate. The government, via the GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) is heavily involved in real estate, financing (purchasing) nearly all new mortgages since the 2008 Financial Crisis.
It does smell ridiculous that the government and central bank bailed out Wall Street for the benefit of the rest of society; that implies that Wall Street is operating for the benefit of the rest of society. I don't think that's true. The bailouts rescued the old system. The problem with the old system is that it was extractive, not productive.
This is similar to what happened at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: Instead of 10 farmers being minimally productive and all eking out a living, one farmer could become highly productive, obtain dollars for the things of value he's producing, and the other farmers go out of business. This has continued till the present day, where we have mega-farms and agribusiness, and few smaller (though still large) farms.
Automation and centralized purchasing centers (web sites) are similarly consolidating value. As a company is able to replace more and more workers with machinery, it does not require assistance in the creation of things that people value. The company - the management - is able to keep it all for itself. Instead of a store requiring 100 people to generate 20 million a year in value, it now only requires 10.
It's the "Consolidation of the Production of Value."
Initially, there's tremendous dislocation. People gotta eat and have shelter and clothes everyday. But it can take decades for new sectors to form which can make use of the displaced workers.
I too started feeling pitchforky when I read the summary. There is, in fact, a tremendous amount of psychopathic malfeasance at the top levels of the economy and government. But, we need to understand what's going on, in order to fairly and justly address it, in order to provide the greatest standard of living for the most people.
Rule Number F-cking One: Never give out information to anyone who contacts you first.
It's just that simple. You find the number or confirm the number they left is legit, and you initiate the contact.
CSB: Once I was being legitimately audited by the IRS, and the IRS employee/contractor calls me and asks for my SSN. I was 99% sure it was the IRS, and the person threatened me with escalation, and I know you don't eff with the IRS. But I did not give out my SSN because it violated Rule Number F--king One. Ultimately it worked out, I'd done nothing wrong, they dropped my case. But wow.
The problem with a rich client is that it increases the attack surface. If the web browser were essentially like the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or Windows Common Language Runtime (CLR), on which remote sites could run arbitrary code, it would be instant pwnage for everyone connected to the Internet. Yes, we could get Microsoft Office levels of usability and functionality, but at quite a cost.
Right now, Google Apps run within the browser, which is deeply embedded in the local PC, but it also designed to protect from malicious actors.
Resolving the security needs of connecting to the wild and malicious Web (which the browser does) versus functionality and usability enabled by a local language interpreter (like the JVM or CLR) is a tricky problem.
Google Docs are in fact, fantastic for editing documents. Sending a link to a doc in email, and telling people "click on this link to edit the document for the meeting Tuesday" works very well. As opposed to trading it via email. Or even putting it on a shared drive, because that requires non-computer types to navigate to that directory, as opposed to just clicking on a link.
The predictive typing feature is IMO kind of amusing. I used the term "reach out" which I loathe, for the first time, because it suggested it.
In reality, the new upgrades have degraded my experience. It takes a LOT longer to load. Sometimes freezes while typing in my password. Sometimes accepts my password then kicks me back to the login screen (I get these issues on the latest Firefox or Chrome).
Ironically, the new Gmail works best on an older version of IE (11) which I guess doesn't support the feature bloat.
Carbon dioxide is what our plants need to respire (else they'd die and we'd starve)
That's a good point, it's like food. Just enough food, you stay slim and trim and healthy. Too much, over a long period of time, and you become obese and unhealthy. Don't take steps to turn it around and you become ever more obese until it causes significant injury or death.
Then why don't you name your variables introversion and extroversion?
* The -version is in common. * Short variables with meaning > long variables with same meaning. * Less likely to screw up typing short variable names. * Hopefully the context in which the variables are used would provide the "-version" meaning. If not, then I could see typing the full "introversion" and "extroversion." * I'm not opposed to typing long variable names, if it adds useful meaning.
It's symmetrical that way (introversion - extroversion) to reflect opposite meanings in the subject of human personality.
The Jung thing references a German text. It's not bad Latin any more than extrude or external are.
You know how naming variables is important? That the variable name itself is supposed to convey meaning? Intro- and extro- are more likely to be linked - thus conveying meaning - than 'intro' and 'extra':
int intro; int extro;
vs.
int intro; int extra;
The symmetry is logical and conveys meaning. Thus extroversion is the superior spelling.
Freddie Mercury never fixed his teeth because they thought it would negatively affect his singing. I'm not a kernel dev but I sure have used, and appreciate (including supporting them monetarily) their efforts over the years. I hope this doesn't dispel the magic.
People who have a lot of power, people who own newspapers, politicians who rely on those people and other people at that level, are quite concerned about the Internet. The Internet is designed to facilitate the free flow of information. That means "curated" information, packaged with approved, "correct" messages (designed to make people more pliant and easier to govern) is harder to project onto the masses.
Expect this sort of thing to continue. "Mistakes" that continuously occur in favor of the "curators" of correct thought are not mistakes. This is a constant, continuous push, and will never end until the Internet is fully curated as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Warrior's Wish: "When I am dead, cry for me a little. Think of me sometimes, but not too much. It is not good for you to dwell too long. Think of me now and again as I was in life, at some moment which is pleasant to recall, but not for long. Leave me in peace as I shall leave you, too, in peace."
I cannot imagine that this proposed device would help healing in any way. As long as we are temporal creatures, death is something we have to deal with in a healthy and productive way, and IMO, this ain't it.
YMMV.
Crowfoot, Chief of the Siksika, 1890, dying words: “A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
1) Since the Industrial revolution (and really with every advance in production technology), fewer people are necessary to create things that people value. The phenomenon is the "consolidation of the production of value." For example, instead of 10 farmers producing enough for a subsistence living with primitive technology, one farmer can produce a lot with advanced tech. Instead of 100 people required to run a store that generates 20 million a year in revenue, with advanced tech it now only requires 10.
2) So there's a "production pyramid": at the bottom, everyone makes everything they need. The next layer up it requires fewer people to make everything everyone needs. The next layer up even fewer.
3) Thought experiment: imagine the top of the pyramid. One man (or woman) can make everything everyone needs. He owns all the productive capital. How to distribute money then?
One thing to realize.
i. People are necessary to create demand, for both goods and services, and the money to buy those goods and services. Without any people and no demand, money is worthless, and the single value creator is only making things for his own consumption.
So: How to distribute money in the one creator system, at the top of the pyramid? How about 2 layers down? How about 50 layers down?
Why is it a "worst" case scenario? Why not a best case scenario? Saturn will lose those freakish rings and will soon morph into a normal round planet like everyone else. It can be proud of its body for once.
A weakness of autonomous vehicles in general is sensor failure. I know a guy who's become reliant on parking sensors since getting a new car a few months ago. Twice the sensor has flaked out - not warned of a nearby object - and he's bumped into it. This has led to thousands of dollars in damage. And it fails silently, and intermittently.
So - it'll be quite important to stick to the old way of driving - i.e. you doing it visually - and not relying on a sensor and software solely, for, it seems to me, the foreseeable future. These assistive devices can be used as failsafes I suppose. Like automatic parachute deployers for skydivers, which fire at certain altitudes. But they don't always work correctly either and shouldn't be the primary source of parachute deployment. The question becomes then, how to make people aware of the nature of these assistive systems.
Employers always have a reason to cut costs, be it labor or otherwise. They're not running charities - they're running organizations where each member hopes to obtain a profit.
Years ago (like in the late 90s/early 2000s), Verizon (as one example) engaged in mass pre-emptive, prophylactic layoffs, despite being profitable. There's always an incentive to reduce labor costs.
No one is going to try and improve the workers' lot, other than the workers. No one is going to look out for the executives' interests, other than the executives. Both have different tools to achieve those ends.
All this nonsense, and the tax breaks/subsidies, while the headquarters were always going to go in close to his residences :)
Bezos is a brilliant guy no question, but this shows how effective a negotiator he is, and how ineffective, outside of military force, politicians are.
I always chuckle when Krugman goes to his IS-LM graphs and equations, and I think, "You really believe those describe the entire system?"
Considering he always says it does not describe the entire system, that's a rather odd thing to say if you're actually reading what he writes.
Krugman's NYT column is called "The Conscience of a Liberal." Nate Silver and Krugman had a public dispute when Silver left the NYT to form FiveThirtyEight. Silver said, about Krugman, "Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically,” Silver said in that interview."
Economic models are data fit to curves. See the 'Philips curve' and 'the breakdown of the Philips curve'. However, this data exists in the context of other systems. "All Models Are Wrong" of course, but it seems to me many economists don't appreciate the error in their models and are willing (and paid) to make grand pronouncements based on highly error-filled models. Often in support of one social narrative or another.
. The economy grows around those sources of money, which aren't geared towards addressing people's needs and wants. They wonder why productivity hasn't improved.
Except productivity has improved. The US, despite that whole "death of manufacturing" thing, is producing 3x the goods we made in the 1980s.....we're doing it with a lot less people because productivity has vastly improved, which is the one of the primary sources of that "death of manufacturing" thing.
Yes, it has since the 1980s, but it started stalling around 2005, and that is the point of curiosity. Here are other links. This is a basic, widely discussed topic.
I think going forward, there's a strong push towards socialist populism. Unless we can come up with a system that is again self-sustaining and self-organizing that allows people to create value and which fairly pays people for their labor. The view is dimming for the latter.
So, your first option is to invent a new economic system that will be highly stable because.....reasons.
No, not because 'reasons'. Because of its fairness and resistance to corruption, cronyism and favoritism. A system which is self-organizing and automatically rewards people based on their contribution would be fair; but then it could lead to vast swaths where people cannot contribute anything of value because offshore labor or machines can do it more cheaply and efficiently. That would be bad for humanitarian reasons and it can lead to social unrest.
Your second option is democratic socialism as practiced by most of Europe. Including Germany that you laud as successful in your post.
There's precisely zero reasons we can't do the latter in the US. The barrier has been the "Me Generation". And they're gonna die soon.
Don't conflate all of Europe as one.
We don't want to emulate France, Spain, Portugal. They have high unemployment and lower standards of living and more volatile economies. We're not like Norway in which we basically rely on vast oil deposits for our national wealth. Not in Europe but
Back in 1986, there was a hit song, "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades", by Timbuk3
In 1990, there was "I'm Free" by the Soupdragons.
Decidedly hopeful songs about the future.
In 2016, the song "Stressed Out" by 21 Pilots was a radio hit.
In 2013, the song "Royals" by Lorde was a radio hit.
Much darker outlooks about the present and the future.
Economists are looking for easy answers. I always chuckle when Krugman goes to his IS-LM graphs and equations, and I think, "You really believe those describe the entire system?" The reality is simple yet difficult and chaotic. Unless you're creating things that people value, like Germany for example, you're not going to have an improving standard of living. But economists can't control that - politicians do. And there's a chaotic element about whether your population will be able to create things that improve the standard of living. Economists can only print money and inject it into the financial sector and government, and hope it has a beneficial effect on the economy. But it doesn't. The economy grows around those sources of money, which aren't geared towards addressing people's needs and wants. They wonder why productivity hasn't improved.
I saw a really interesting debate between David Frum and Steve Bannon ("The Munk Debates" series) about whether populism is the future. Frum was arguing for the old, happy talk globalist (37 genders, open borders and the US as the world policeman) system which held sway till about 2008. Bannon said the future belonged to populism, and the only question is whether it will socialist populism (Bernie Sanders), or capitalist populism (Trump).
Capitalism with controls was good because it was self-sustaining and self-organizing. The value you provided was in line with the remuneration you obtained, with minimal interference by political gatekeepers, who can be easily corrupted. But as the production of value becomes more and more consolidated, as the production of value is off-shored, and money corrupts/warps our political system, gatekeepers have grown in power (via crony capitalism and socialism for the wealthy) and they are not like AI's - they are highly influence-able and corruptible. As in any system where a gatekeeper hands out largesse.
I think going forward, there's a strong push towards socialist populism. Unless we can come up with a system that is again self-sustaining and self-organizing that allows people to create value and which fairly pays people for their labor. The view is dimming for the latter.
Put yourself in a politician's shoes. You love the power. How do you keep it? You make your constituents lives better and make sure they know about it. But cut to the chase even further - really, you only need to make your constituents think you're making their lives better. If you are, it's secondary. The most important thing is making them think that. That's how you get the precious votes.
Cue a sports stadium or a megacorp like Amazon. Big headline jobs numbers, construction spending, infrastructure spending. But how do you pay for it? Taxes, redeploying money from other priorities, and bond sales. Maryland for example, created a nearly 9 billion dollar subsidy/incentive package for Amazon. Baltimore, in Maryland, has two spectacular stadiums at the gateway to the city. But the rest of the city is a mess, with the highest murder rate of any large city in the country, on a par with Ciudad Juarez, a cartel war zone in a semi-failed state.
Who really knows for sure what the net economic benefit will be? I suspect it's a lot like sports stadiums. Realize that the economy is a competition for resources and Amazon is a very successful competitor. And that politicians are not spending their own money, only trying to make their constituents think they are making those constituents' lives better.
Ultimately I think it's like a blood transfusion to yourself - diverting resources away from other priorities and taking on debt to pay for the shiny now. Ultimately, the source of wealth is creating things that people value. Does Amazon create value? I guess so. But they are also very good at retaining that value for themselves. Think of the WalMart effect. Or Facebook lights-out datacenters. These competitors are much better at retaining value they generate than any politician, whose primary skills like in raising money and getting votes. And they're also quite good at sloughing off costs on others, like the environmental polluters of yore. But this is "financial pollution" - company keeps the profits and socializes the losses, like WalMart and foodstamps. Or most famously, Wall Street after the financial crisis and bailouts.
Don't get me wrong, technology increases the productivity of people, which leads to the "Consolidation of the production of value." It's been going on since before the Industrial Revolution, but it leaps forward with the various technological revolutions. But just because a company is big doesn't mean that landing in your area is going to bring a prosperity windfall, and should get vast subsidies in anticipation of such.
The PROBLEM is the edge cases, which these pre-cast solutions miss.
Like, I have JSON coming in from a form. I can mechanically loop through it and load them into maps for preparation to load into a database. But some fields need to be concatenated, like dollars and cents fields. Gotta detect for them, as a pair, and take them out of the loop, and handle them differently.
Other edge cases exist. The general principles exist to guide development, but each company, each agency, each device deals with its information in ever so slightly different ways. Yes, of course, there are general guidelines which have been tested over decades but because the structure of the information and what you do with it is not exactly the same everywhere, the way you handle it varies a bit as well.
It's like cars - "they got 4 wheels, a steering wheel and a motor. They all obey the same physical principles." Yes, but there's quite a bit of variation within those general parameters, and thus building and maintaining them varies.
Take language compilers. Doesn't matter what the structure of the incoming language, how huge or complex the program, as long as it parses according the EBNF rules, the compiler will translate it faithfully into processor instructions. This structure fools people, because they think this level of structure should apply to human information. But even compilers have flags to change the generated output. As complex and difficult as compilers are, the variable and real complexity is encoded into the source text which handles the organizational information and processes.
One more note: are the groups listed in the NOAA link anti-industry? Tree-huggers? Doom porn aficionados? Anti-American? I sincerely doubt it.
A lot of people (here, especially) reject the 'appeal to expert' logical fallacy. It takes some form of 'experts say' and related. They want to see the data and decide for themselves. Whenever they hear an appeal to expert, it turns them off. But if I don't have the time or expertise to delve into the data, one can accept suitably formed appeals.
Some part of the response to climate change does involve power grabs and redistribution.
It is important to separate the question of whether there is global warming or anthropogenic global warming, and the responses to it.
I don't know if this is true.
Our senses process information: eyes process visual information, ears process audio information, nose processes smell-related information, etc. Our brains process the meaning behind this information. And also processes catch-all information.
Now, with machinery processing information more effectively than people, in certain areas, that doesn't leave much for those with a mental information processing ability below a certain threshold. If machines move into physical tasks (which they have), how do these people create value for which others will want to pay?
The Industrial Revolution was a physical revolution. A machine could plow a field or dig a ditch or assemble a device more effectively than a human doing it manually. This Information Processing Revolution squeezes humans out of simple information processing, and simple physical tasks. How can these people convince people to give them money?
People pay money in order to get some satisfaction - some thing they value. Give to homeless, give to charity, give to bill collector, buy a shirt, make a bet, watch a movie, pay a prostitute - all ways to get satisfaction, provided by another.
From physical labor to information processing. But from information processing, to what?
The money was pumped into the financial sector and government. The Fed bought mortgages and government debt. I seem to recall the Fed buying some unusual loans, auto and the like, for a while.
The financial sector trades in financial and physical assets. It's the "house" for making bets on real life. There has been quite a bit of inflation in financial assets and real estate. The government, via the GSEs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) is heavily involved in real estate, financing (purchasing) nearly all new mortgages since the 2008 Financial Crisis.
There are two kinds of inflation: 1) Cost push and 2) Demand Pull (they mean what they say: cost push means costs are pushing the prices higher; demand pull means demand is pulling the prices higher). The definition of inflation is "the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising."
It does smell ridiculous that the government and central bank bailed out Wall Street for the benefit of the rest of society; that implies that Wall Street is operating for the benefit of the rest of society. I don't think that's true. The bailouts rescued the old system. The problem with the old system is that it was extractive, not productive.
This is similar to what happened at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: Instead of 10 farmers being minimally productive and all eking out a living, one farmer could become highly productive, obtain dollars for the things of value he's producing, and the other farmers go out of business. This has continued till the present day, where we have mega-farms and agribusiness, and few smaller (though still large) farms.
Automation and centralized purchasing centers (web sites) are similarly consolidating value. As a company is able to replace more and more workers with machinery, it does not require assistance in the creation of things that people value. The company - the management - is able to keep it all for itself. Instead of a store requiring 100 people to generate 20 million a year in value, it now only requires 10.
It's the "Consolidation of the Production of Value."
Initially, there's tremendous dislocation. People gotta eat and have shelter and clothes everyday. But it can take decades for new sectors to form which can make use of the displaced workers.
I too started feeling pitchforky when I read the summary. There is, in fact, a tremendous amount of psychopathic malfeasance at the top levels of the economy and government. But, we need to understand what's going on, in order to fairly and justly address it, in order to provide the greatest standard of living for the most people.
Rule Number F-cking One: Never give out information to anyone who contacts you first.
It's just that simple. You find the number or confirm the number they left is legit, and you initiate the contact.
CSB: Once I was being legitimately audited by the IRS, and the IRS employee/contractor calls me and asks for my SSN. I was 99% sure it was the IRS, and the person threatened me with escalation, and I know you don't eff with the IRS. But I did not give out my SSN because it violated Rule Number F--king One. Ultimately it worked out, I'd done nothing wrong, they dropped my case. But wow.
The problem with a rich client is that it increases the attack surface. If the web browser were essentially like the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or Windows Common Language Runtime (CLR), on which remote sites could run arbitrary code, it would be instant pwnage for everyone connected to the Internet. Yes, we could get Microsoft Office levels of usability and functionality, but at quite a cost.
Right now, Google Apps run within the browser, which is deeply embedded in the local PC, but it also designed to protect from malicious actors.
Resolving the security needs of connecting to the wild and malicious Web (which the browser does) versus functionality and usability enabled by a local language interpreter (like the JVM or CLR) is a tricky problem.
Google Docs are in fact, fantastic for editing documents. Sending a link to a doc in email, and telling people "click on this link to edit the document for the meeting Tuesday" works very well. As opposed to trading it via email. Or even putting it on a shared drive, because that requires non-computer types to navigate to that directory, as opposed to just clicking on a link.
The predictive typing feature is IMO kind of amusing. I used the term "reach out" which I loathe, for the first time, because it suggested it.
In reality, the new upgrades have degraded my experience. It takes a LOT longer to load. Sometimes freezes while typing in my password. Sometimes accepts my password then kicks me back to the login screen (I get these issues on the latest Firefox or Chrome).
Ironically, the new Gmail works best on an older version of IE (11) which I guess doesn't support the feature bloat.
That's a good point, it's like food. Just enough food, you stay slim and trim and healthy. Too much, over a long period of time, and you become obese and unhealthy. Don't take steps to turn it around and you become ever more obese until it causes significant injury or death.
So, yeah, CO2 is a lot like food.
The answers are here.
Also worth reading about Dark Money.
* The -version is in common.
* Short variables with meaning > long variables with same meaning.
* Less likely to screw up typing short variable names.
* Hopefully the context in which the variables are used would provide the "-version" meaning. If not, then I could see typing the full "introversion" and "extroversion."
* I'm not opposed to typing long variable names, if it adds useful meaning.
Psychology today refers to it as extroversion.
It's symmetrical that way (introversion - extroversion) to reflect opposite meanings in the subject of human personality.
The Jung thing references a German text. It's not bad Latin any more than extrude or external are.
You know how naming variables is important? That the variable name itself is supposed to convey meaning? Intro- and extro- are more likely to be linked - thus conveying meaning - than 'intro' and 'extra':
int intro;
int extro;
vs.
int intro;
int extra;
The symmetry is logical and conveys meaning. Thus extroversion is the superior spelling.
Freddie Mercury never fixed his teeth because they thought it would negatively affect his singing. I'm not a kernel dev but I sure have used, and appreciate (including supporting them monetarily) their efforts over the years. I hope this doesn't dispel the magic.
People who have a lot of power, people who own newspapers, politicians who rely on those people and other people at that level, are quite concerned about the Internet. The Internet is designed to facilitate the free flow of information. That means "curated" information, packaged with approved, "correct" messages (designed to make people more pliant and easier to govern) is harder to project onto the masses.
Expect this sort of thing to continue. "Mistakes" that continuously occur in favor of the "curators" of correct thought are not mistakes. This is a constant, continuous push, and will never end until the Internet is fully curated as well.