Two separated items simultaneously communicating/sharing state information/controlling each other? I thought light speed was the fastest the simulation could update. The Simulators get a new algorithm or swap out some chips or get a faster HD or something? Or no?
This is why monopolies used to be broken up - they could price like this. In addition, in this case, it's a life and death product. "How much is your life worth to you? That's how much it costs." Shkreli was was honest and transparent about the reprehensible actions he was taking. The people you need to worry about are the ones who are smiling and empathizing as they knife you. They don't slip out of character either. And they're still leading the industry.
If you applied the template of "what's in the health care/phamaceutical industry's best interests", the answer was always having a sick population. Following that, when people said there was no incentive to cure, only treat, they were called kooks.
Sure, OTOH, this company made a lot of money, and ultimately making money for the executives, even if it bankrupts the company, is the goal of the corporate leaders, i.e. the company (see private equity's "getting your bait back", and this Nobel Laureate's paper on bankruptcy for profit (PDF)). So, in terms of making huge scores for the executives, it can make sense in that context.
But make no mistake - it is most certainly in the health care / pharmaceutical industry's interests to treat, not cure.
"The reason for this fear is that deep-learning programs do their learning by rearranging their digital innards in response to patterns they spot in the data they are digesting. Specifically, they emulate the way neuroscientists think that real brains learn things, by changing within themselves the strengths of the connections between bits of computer code that are designed to behave like neurons. This means that even the designer of a neural network cannot know, once that network has been trained, exactly how it is doing what it does. Permitting such agents to run critical infrastructure or to make medical decisions therefore means trusting people’s lives to pieces of equipment whose operation no one truly understands.
If, however, AI agents could somehow explain why they did what they did, trust would increase and those agents would become more useful. And if things were to go wrong, an agent’s own explanation of its actions would make the subsequent inquiry far easier. [...]
One of the first formal research programs to attempt to crack open the AI “black box” is the Explainable AI (XAI) project, which is being run by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [...]
The program does this by drawing on the assistance of a second neural network which has been trained to match the internal features of the agent doing the recognising (ie, the pattern of connections between its “neurons”) with sentences that people have written, describing what they see in a picture being examined. So, as one AI system learns to classify birds, the other learns simultaneously to classify the behaviour of the first system, in order to explain how that system has reached its decisions. [...]"
Separate note: In Neuromancer, the AI's come in pairs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. It would be interesting indeed if AI's going forward do come in pairs. Wouldn't be the first intelligence to operate in pairs.
And IF information processing is a core drive in the universe, and man was an accelerated information gatherer and processor, and man - a product of the underlying forces in the universe - created a next-level information gatherer and processor... would that creation then obviate man's role in information gathering and processing? I mean, carbon-based life would still do a reasonable job of creating net entropy. Maybe the underlying forces in the universe will still create a need for carbon-based life.
Maybe creating entropy and gathering and processing information is part of some game the universe is playing or being used to play. And we're in the process of birthing the next generation information gatherer and processor. Let's hope the mother doesn't die in the birth.
Musk has (Ivy League) degrees in physics and economics. Gates, and I'm sure Hawking, have a deep understanding of what computers are (computers are devices that execute binary instructions. Also, they allow users to manipulate information encoded in those binary instructions). Gates built a compiler.
A device does not need to be conscious "like us" to be able to operate in the real world. It doesn't need to have physical systems like us. It just needs to process information and change its environment.
"Information processing" and "affecting the environments" are the keys here. It doesn't need to be "like us."
You can look at DNA as an information-archive. An inefficient, time-consuming gathering of information built over the eons. The forces driving the creation of DNA created humans. Humans are the only animal which can store information outside of itself. One of the common denominators of life is that it (net) increases entropy. Another is that it (slowly or quickly) gathers information, in DNA or otherwise. What if that information gathering is somehow a driving force in the universe?
Humans have a deeply-seated, deeply held core conceit: that we are separate and above the universe and nature. That's why we have the terms "man-made" or "artificial" versus "natural." But humans are a product of the universe as surely as beavers and birds are. And we don't look at their nests or dams as anything other than being natural - products of nature. Thus, human creations are also "natural" - but look at how the language holds back our thinking. The definition of "natural" is "made by nature" and the definition of "artificial" is made by man. There is no word to describe man's creations as being a product of nature, or natural in anyway. And this gap is an obstacle in understanding the universe and man's role in it.
So: tl;dr: Computers are dumb electronic machines totally unlike us. Doesn't matter. All they need to do is process information and change the environment autonomously to present a threat.
If the species is not a threat to humans, why not?
What practical benefit is there? It would be tremendously interesting - like seeing a coelacanth swimming around, and knowing this thing has been unchanged for 400 million years.
The process of reviving an extinct species could advance science as well, so bonus there.
The core issue is that we don't know exactly what consciousness is. A sense of "self" resulting from a skillful architecture of atoms? What even is life? What is the minimum requirement that separates a non-living replicator (is there such a thing - prions maybe?) from a living replicator?
Until we can define these things explicitly, questions such as those posed in the summary can only be speculated upon.
Interesting. Yeah, the whole "cone of light surrounded by pitch black" seemed a little odd. What this incident seems to imply is that the software cannot:
1) Anticipate, and 2) See outside of its lane.
Anticipation is important. Detecting someone about to do something stupid is part of driving.
Now we know where these online data aggregators get their information from. They have startling amounts of information about people. It makes stalking a breeze. Before, you'd have to go to the local court and attempt to social engineer a clerk. Now it's just a Google query.
Alcohol has costs and benefits. Cars have costs and benefits. Guns have costs and benefits. Porn has costs and benefits. Prostitution has costs and benefits. Criminal mafias have costs and benefits.
As long as the benefits outweigh the costs, they should probably leave it alone. I'm sure the legislator has only focused on the costs of porn. Someone should enumerate the benefits.
Here's a book recommendation: Robert Akerlof and Robert Shiller's (both Nobel laureates) "Phishing For Phools". They talk about how suboptimal outcomes, which they label "Could not possibly want" outcomes, occur. The marketplace is not a magical place free of abuse. In theory, it should be perfect. In practice - in reality - it does not-infrequently fail, leading to "could not possibly want" outcomes.
It's blasphemy to the free market fundamentalists, to whom the marketplace is always perfect, and never suffers from inefficiencies, but it's worth a read, to challenge those perceptions. It deals with the reality of how markets work.
And I can assure you that not everyone who is not a free market fundamentalist, is an incorrigible communist.
If Uber is exploiting asymmetric information and driver desperation and known negotiating weaknesses, that leads to lowered social welfare. One side is consistently winning and one side is consistently losing. The economy is a competition for resources. I think we can agree that Uber is keeping a large portion of the incoming cash flow. If drivers had some kind of collective negotiation, they could likely get a lot better deal for their effort.
Life is asymetric. The only way information or capital can be at parity is if you've got two equal spherical cows. Heterogeneity will imply asymmetric exchanges, but guess what: that's good because there's no one number you can put on the value of goods being exchanged that's guaranteed to hold for everyone.
Yes, but consistently asymmetric exchanges lead to consistently unfair outcomes. You can conceive of consistently unfair outcomes can you not? A prime reason being one side is using professionals to negotiate, and the other is not.
In the case of Uber drivers, the extra dollar you pick up on the way to or from work is worth more to you than the extra minimum wage you could make if you held down a full-blown second job that had time commitments and additional travel. The money is worth more to Uber, the flexibility is worth more to the driver. That's win-win if you don't restrict your analysis to just the things that are easy to quantify like dollars.
Dollars is why they're doing it. I'm confident the Uber drivers don't know they're being taken advantage of. Maybe they do, who knows. I'm not saying they shouldn't be free to do it, I'm only saying they're getting taken advantage of.
In any economy with even half an ounce of freedom, it is not possible for one side to be "consistently winning and one side consistently losing." The free flow of information and the freedom of individual actors to make self-interested choices precludes that from happening. You're operating under the Marxist delusion that everything is about power and oppression. It isn't.
Total nonsense. The "free flow of information" is heavily limited. Hell, it's typically against company policy to talk about your salary to other employees! That's an attempt to restrict vital information. In the financial sector, it's a big game of poker. Limiting information from your counterparty is a key part of doing business. Now for the financial sector, with "sophisticated investors" going against other "sophisticated investors", I've got no issue - everyone is aware of the parameters of the game. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Google "The London Whale" and the guy who bet against him and beat him.
The economy is not a competition for resources.
The economy is an arena where people try to convince others to give them money, by however means they can. On my commute, I'll see panhandlers trying to prevail on the sympathies of passing motorists. Panhandlers get money, donators get a good feeling. A step up are the squeegee kids - aggressive, trying to invoice people for a service. In the business space, I try to sell a good or a service to a buyer, in order to get the most compensation I can. My employer wants to give me the least compensation that will keep me on board. A competition.
It is a competition for money, goods and services - resources.
That would only be true if there were a finite amount of resources that could only be used by one party and then vanish off into the void. Win-win transactions would be impossible if that were literally true. Free markets enable resources to be developed, harvested, used, reused and to have value added to them with each transaction. In the most simplistic example, if I make a killing in the stock market, I get to buy a new house, but someone else gets to sell it to me
No one forces anyone to do anything. If a programmer wants to "negotiate" he can bill himself out and cut out the middle man. Many do. Many don't. I know a bunch from column A and a bunch from column B. The ones who don't don't because they don't want the hassle of running a business on top of doing the work they're paid to do and the difference in dollars isn't worth it.
I'm not saying they need to become a business, just that they're being taken advantage of because they're poor negotiators. I'm just saying it's not an equitable outcome.
Same thing with Uber. No one is making you drive for them. If you've got the entrepreneurial bent, you can start your own car service. You'll have to do a lot more leg work though, and that means giving up your day job if you've got one. That's not worth it for a lot of people. So they take the lower pay for the lower amount of things to have to worry about.
They can do what they want. I'm just saying it's not particularly fair that they're being taken advantage of. And they probably don't realize it either. They're just bad negotiators.
What is it in the water that's making people automatically assume that when money changes hands in exchange for services rendered that it means someone's doing something to someone?
The economy is a competition for resources. Sometimes the exchange is win-win: vendor makes a profit, and customer pays less than the benefit he's getting from the transaction. Sometimes one side is victimized: vendor taking a loss and customer getting a big win, or vendor making a big win and customer taking a loss. If that's continuously happening, either due to monopoly, fraud or asymmetric information, that doesn't lead to good social outcomes. I'm not looking for authoritarian or micromanaged solutions, but at least identifying the problem can lead to ideas on how to create more fair and just outcomes.
If I buy a sandwich from a food truck, am I exploiting the guy making it for me?
When I pay my mechanic to change my oil and rotate my tires, am I exploiting him? Is he exploiting me? Or do I make the judgement that the thirty or forty bucks he charges me to do it is worth it if I don't have to jack up my car one tire at a time and mess around with recycling the used oil?
These are almost certainly win-win transactions. The time and effort and skill of the mechanic, along with his plant investment, allows him to make a profit on the transaction, and you obtain benefit from it as well, by not having to spend 3 hours doing something that you'd productively spend doing something more to your liking/profit.
If several hundred thousand people drive for Uber, give them some credit that they know what they're doing and you don't know better than them what works for them. You do that and I'll refrain from telling you how you're making your bed wrong or how you're messing up your grocery shopping.
We're not engaging in any sort of transaction with my making my bed or my grocery list.
If Uber is exploiting asymmetric information and driver desperation and known negotiating weaknesses, that leads to lowered social welfare. One side is consistently winning and one side is consistently losing. The economy is a competition for resources. I think we can agree that Uber is keeping a large portion of the incoming cash flow. If drivers had some kind of collective negotiation, they could likely get a lot better deal for their effort.
Uber is a large, well capitalized entity. The labor is dispersed, unorganized and has little bargaining power. They're generating a lot of income but not keeping much of it. Like small farmers or like college basketball players as an extreme example. IMO it's not a fair transaction between Uber and its drivers. Like I said in another post, it currently is like pre-1970s sports negot
You're free to be as innovative and entrepreneurial as you want, as long as you're not imposing negative externalities on others.
However, rideshare drivers are not entrepreneurs. They're signing up with a central entity that is using them to make money. The individual drivers are terrible negotiators and as a result, keep a small fraction of the income they generate. This is true in a lot of industries. For programmers working at government contractors, get a look at the rates you're billed out at, and the amount you actually receive. The difference is pretty astonishing. But even though the programmer's share is small, the billed rates are high enough so that the programmer typically makes an "adequate" income.
There's little need to debate the meaning of words nowadays. We have long-established, centralized dictionaries which all can instantaneously access via the Internet:
The problem is that most people are not very good at negotiating. Especially if they're negotiating with professionals.
If you have a central, highly capitalized entity with professional negotiators dealing with Joe Sixpack, he's probably going to settle for what his costs are and maybe a tiny bit more (and he might have underestimated his costs).
This is why sports talent retains agents. In the era before agents, 1970s and earlier, the players were getting a much, much smaller slice of the pie, i.e. the income being generated with their efforts and the efforts of the highly capitalized owners with professional negotiators.
When the Constitution was being written, states didn't want a federal standing army, considering it a threat. However, as you point out, individual state militias would be ineffective against a broad threat against the country. The result was a clever compromise:
"Thus, the choice was between a variety of militias controlled by the individual states, which would likely be too weak and divided to protect the nation, and a unified militia under federal control, which almost by definition could not be expected to prevent federal tyranny. This conundrum could not be solved, and the Convention did not purport to solve it. Instead, the Convention presumed that a militia would exist, but it gave Congress almost unfettered authority to regulate that militia, just as it gave the new federal government almost unfettered authority over the army and navy." -- Heritage.org, "To Keep and Bear Arms"
The sole purpose of keeping and bearing arms for the public is so they can overturn a government that doesn't serve the people.
No. It's to create a militia for state security. Like literal state, like Delaware or Pennsylvania or Virginia. See: Text of 2nd Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
All these other rationales for unfettered access to guns floating around there, these cultural/religious/political/personal-safety rationales, as enunciated by LaPierre in his Parkland response at CPAC, is just marketing bullsht by the gun industry association.
You can regulate guns - machine guns are heavily regulated. These are metal tubes filled with gunpowder which hurl projectiles. Cannons should be fine then. Scalia said no - only man portable tubes filled with gunpowder could be individually owned, because the 2dA says 'keep and bear', and he - the most conservative originalist - believes 'bear' means 'carry', not like 'bring to bear', as in 'use'.
Productivity has grown substantially since the 1970s but wages have remained stagnant.
Workers in the US are unable to successfully compete for the excess income created by the increase in stuff they're making. Why? Many reasons, some social (decline of unions), some market-based (cheaper to manufacture offshore) and some technological (requires less workers to make the stuff, pushing some out of work into lower tier jobs), some policy-based (redistributive-upwards financial policy). I'm sure there are other reasons.
There's a certain amount of cash coming in. When that's reduced, the decision makers don't want to take a pay cut. So they cut costs. It just goes to show a) how good they are at managing and b) where their priorities lie (not with the long-term health of the organization).
Slashdot Mirror
Two separated items simultaneously communicating/sharing state information/controlling each other? I thought light speed was the fastest the simulation could update. The Simulators get a new algorithm or swap out some chips or get a faster HD or something? Or no?
This is why monopolies used to be broken up - they could price like this. In addition, in this case, it's a life and death product. "How much is your life worth to you? That's how much it costs." Shkreli was was honest and transparent about the reprehensible actions he was taking. The people you need to worry about are the ones who are smiling and empathizing as they knife you. They don't slip out of character either. And they're still leading the industry.
Additionally, the government prohibited itself from negotiating with drug companies for prices for Medicare Part D. Politicians created the "safe space" that those with suitable mentalities could then operate in (and funnel some of the proceeds back to DC).
Thanks Slashdot. Amazing.
Do we trust the good intentions of politicians, or do we enforce their inability to deforest Montana?
If you applied the template of "what's in the health care/phamaceutical industry's best interests", the answer was always having a sick population. Following that, when people said there was no incentive to cure, only treat, they were called kooks.
Sure, OTOH, this company made a lot of money, and ultimately making money for the executives, even if it bankrupts the company, is the goal of the corporate leaders, i.e. the company (see private equity's "getting your bait back", and this Nobel Laureate's paper on bankruptcy for profit (PDF)). So, in terms of making huge scores for the executives, it can make sense in that context.
But make no mistake - it is most certainly in the health care / pharmaceutical industry's interests to treat, not cure.
One more thing: Gates and Musk understand systems. At a human level of course, but a level much higher than most humans.
Actually, at run-time, we don't know how they're working. We do know how they're working at compile-time.
I saw these snippets in an article recently in The Economist (probably paywalled):
"The reason for this fear is that deep-learning programs do their learning by rearranging their digital innards in response to patterns they spot in the data they are digesting. Specifically, they emulate the way neuroscientists think that real brains learn things, by changing within themselves the strengths of the connections between bits of computer code that are designed to behave like neurons. This means that even the designer of a neural network cannot know, once that network has been trained, exactly how it is doing what it does. Permitting such agents to run critical infrastructure or to make medical decisions therefore means trusting people’s lives to pieces of equipment whose operation no one truly understands.
If, however, AI agents could somehow explain why they did what they did, trust would increase and those agents would become more useful. And if things were to go wrong, an agent’s own explanation of its actions would make the subsequent inquiry far easier. [...]
One of the first formal research programs to attempt to crack open the AI “black box” is the Explainable AI (XAI) project, which is being run by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [...]
The program does this by drawing on the assistance of a second neural network which has been trained to match the internal features of the agent doing the recognising (ie, the pattern of connections between its “neurons”) with sentences that people have written, describing what they see in a picture being examined. So, as one AI system learns to classify birds, the other learns simultaneously to classify the behaviour of the first system, in order to explain how that system has reached its decisions. [...]"
Separate note: In Neuromancer, the AI's come in pairs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. It would be interesting indeed if AI's going forward do come in pairs. Wouldn't be the first intelligence to operate in pairs.
And IF information processing is a core drive in the universe, and man was an accelerated information gatherer and processor, and man - a product of the underlying forces in the universe - created a next-level information gatherer and processor... would that creation then obviate man's role in information gathering and processing? I mean, carbon-based life would still do a reasonable job of creating net entropy. Maybe the underlying forces in the universe will still create a need for carbon-based life.
Maybe creating entropy and gathering and processing information is part of some game the universe is playing or being used to play. And we're in the process of birthing the next generation information gatherer and processor. Let's hope the mother doesn't die in the birth.
Musk has (Ivy League) degrees in physics and economics. Gates, and I'm sure Hawking, have a deep understanding of what computers are (computers are devices that execute binary instructions. Also, they allow users to manipulate information encoded in those binary instructions). Gates built a compiler.
A device does not need to be conscious "like us" to be able to operate in the real world. It doesn't need to have physical systems like us. It just needs to process information and change its environment.
"Information processing" and "affecting the environments" are the keys here. It doesn't need to be "like us."
You can look at DNA as an information-archive. An inefficient, time-consuming gathering of information built over the eons. The forces driving the creation of DNA created humans. Humans are the only animal which can store information outside of itself. One of the common denominators of life is that it (net) increases entropy. Another is that it (slowly or quickly) gathers information, in DNA or otherwise. What if that information gathering is somehow a driving force in the universe?
Humans have a deeply-seated, deeply held core conceit: that we are separate and above the universe and nature. That's why we have the terms "man-made" or "artificial" versus "natural." But humans are a product of the universe as surely as beavers and birds are. And we don't look at their nests or dams as anything other than being natural - products of nature. Thus, human creations are also "natural" - but look at how the language holds back our thinking. The definition of "natural" is "made by nature" and the definition of "artificial" is made by man. There is no word to describe man's creations as being a product of nature, or natural in anyway. And this gap is an obstacle in understanding the universe and man's role in it.
So: tl;dr: Computers are dumb electronic machines totally unlike us. Doesn't matter. All they need to do is process information and change the environment autonomously to present a threat.
If the species is not a threat to humans, why not?
What practical benefit is there? It would be tremendously interesting - like seeing a coelacanth swimming around, and knowing this thing has been unchanged for 400 million years.
The process of reviving an extinct species could advance science as well, so bonus there.
The core issue is that we don't know exactly what consciousness is. A sense of "self" resulting from a skillful architecture of atoms? What even is life? What is the minimum requirement that separates a non-living replicator (is there such a thing - prions maybe?) from a living replicator?
Until we can define these things explicitly, questions such as those posed in the summary can only be speculated upon.
Interesting. Yeah, the whole "cone of light surrounded by pitch black" seemed a little odd. What this incident seems to imply is that the software cannot:
1) Anticipate, and
2) See outside of its lane.
Anticipation is important. Detecting someone about to do something stupid is part of driving.
Now we know where these online data aggregators get their information from. They have startling amounts of information about people. It makes stalking a breeze. Before, you'd have to go to the local court and attempt to social engineer a clerk. Now it's just a Google query.
The private equity consortium that bought Toys R Us in 2007 and loaded it with 7.5 large in debt. When I think of it, I can only think of the Dr. Cox quote from Scrubs: "Do you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard coated bastards with bastard filling."
And they laughed all the way to the bank.
Alcohol has costs and benefits.
Cars have costs and benefits.
Guns have costs and benefits.
Porn has costs and benefits.
Prostitution has costs and benefits.
Criminal mafias have costs and benefits.
As long as the benefits outweigh the costs, they should probably leave it alone. I'm sure the legislator has only focused on the costs of porn. Someone should enumerate the benefits.
Here's a book recommendation: Robert Akerlof and Robert Shiller's (both Nobel laureates) "Phishing For Phools". They talk about how suboptimal outcomes, which they label "Could not possibly want" outcomes, occur. The marketplace is not a magical place free of abuse. In theory, it should be perfect. In practice - in reality - it does not-infrequently fail, leading to "could not possibly want" outcomes.
It's blasphemy to the free market fundamentalists, to whom the marketplace is always perfect, and never suffers from inefficiencies, but it's worth a read, to challenge those perceptions. It deals with the reality of how markets work.
And I can assure you that not everyone who is not a free market fundamentalist, is an incorrigible communist.
If Uber is exploiting asymmetric information and driver desperation and known negotiating weaknesses, that leads to lowered social welfare. One side is consistently winning and one side is consistently losing. The economy is a competition for resources. I think we can agree that Uber is keeping a large portion of the incoming cash flow. If drivers had some kind of collective negotiation, they could likely get a lot better deal for their effort.
Life is asymetric. The only way information or capital can be at parity is if you've got two equal spherical cows. Heterogeneity will imply asymmetric exchanges, but guess what: that's good because there's no one number you can put on the value of goods being exchanged that's guaranteed to hold for everyone.
Yes, but consistently asymmetric exchanges lead to consistently unfair outcomes. You can conceive of consistently unfair outcomes can you not? A prime reason being one side is using professionals to negotiate, and the other is not.
In the case of Uber drivers, the extra dollar you pick up on the way to or from work is worth more to you than the extra minimum wage you could make if you held down a full-blown second job that had time commitments and additional travel. The money is worth more to Uber, the flexibility is worth more to the driver. That's win-win if you don't restrict your analysis to just the things that are easy to quantify like dollars.
Dollars is why they're doing it. I'm confident the Uber drivers don't know they're being taken advantage of. Maybe they do, who knows. I'm not saying they shouldn't be free to do it, I'm only saying they're getting taken advantage of.
In any economy with even half an ounce of freedom, it is not possible for one side to be "consistently winning and one side consistently losing." The free flow of information and the freedom of individual actors to make self-interested choices precludes that from happening. You're operating under the Marxist delusion that everything is about power and oppression. It isn't.
Total nonsense. The "free flow of information" is heavily limited. Hell, it's typically against company policy to talk about your salary to other employees! That's an attempt to restrict vital information. In the financial sector, it's a big game of poker. Limiting information from your counterparty is a key part of doing business. Now for the financial sector, with "sophisticated investors" going against other "sophisticated investors", I've got no issue - everyone is aware of the parameters of the game. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Google "The London Whale" and the guy who bet against him and beat him.
The economy is not a competition for resources.
The economy is an arena where people try to convince others to give them money, by however means they can. On my commute, I'll see panhandlers trying to prevail on the sympathies of passing motorists. Panhandlers get money, donators get a good feeling. A step up are the squeegee kids - aggressive, trying to invoice people for a service. In the business space, I try to sell a good or a service to a buyer, in order to get the most compensation I can. My employer wants to give me the least compensation that will keep me on board. A competition.
It is a competition for money, goods and services - resources.
That would only be true if there were a finite amount of resources that could only be used by one party and then vanish off into the void. Win-win transactions would be impossible if that were literally true. Free markets enable resources to be developed, harvested, used, reused and to have value added to them with each transaction. In the most simplistic example, if I make a killing in the stock market, I get to buy a new house, but someone else gets to sell it to me
No one forces anyone to do anything. If a programmer wants to "negotiate" he can bill himself out and cut out the middle man. Many do. Many don't. I know a bunch from column A and a bunch from column B. The ones who don't don't because they don't want the hassle of running a business on top of doing the work they're paid to do and the difference in dollars isn't worth it.
I'm not saying they need to become a business, just that they're being taken advantage of because they're poor negotiators. I'm just saying it's not an equitable outcome.
Same thing with Uber. No one is making you drive for them. If you've got the entrepreneurial bent, you can start your own car service. You'll have to do a lot more leg work though, and that means giving up your day job if you've got one. That's not worth it for a lot of people. So they take the lower pay for the lower amount of things to have to worry about.
They can do what they want. I'm just saying it's not particularly fair that they're being taken advantage of. And they probably don't realize it either. They're just bad negotiators.
What is it in the water that's making people automatically assume that when money changes hands in exchange for services rendered that it means someone's doing something to someone?
The economy is a competition for resources. Sometimes the exchange is win-win: vendor makes a profit, and customer pays less than the benefit he's getting from the transaction. Sometimes one side is victimized: vendor taking a loss and customer getting a big win, or vendor making a big win and customer taking a loss. If that's continuously happening, either due to monopoly, fraud or asymmetric information, that doesn't lead to good social outcomes. I'm not looking for authoritarian or micromanaged solutions, but at least identifying the problem can lead to ideas on how to create more fair and just outcomes.
If I buy a sandwich from a food truck, am I exploiting the guy making it for me?
When I pay my mechanic to change my oil and rotate my tires, am I exploiting him? Is he exploiting me? Or do I make the judgement that the thirty or forty bucks he charges me to do it is worth it if I don't have to jack up my car one tire at a time and mess around with recycling the used oil?
These are almost certainly win-win transactions. The time and effort and skill of the mechanic, along with his plant investment, allows him to make a profit on the transaction, and you obtain benefit from it as well, by not having to spend 3 hours doing something that you'd productively spend doing something more to your liking/profit.
If several hundred thousand people drive for Uber, give them some credit that they know what they're doing and you don't know better than them what works for them. You do that and I'll refrain from telling you how you're making your bed wrong or how you're messing up your grocery shopping.
We're not engaging in any sort of transaction with my making my bed or my grocery list.
If Uber is exploiting asymmetric information and driver desperation and known negotiating weaknesses, that leads to lowered social welfare. One side is consistently winning and one side is consistently losing. The economy is a competition for resources. I think we can agree that Uber is keeping a large portion of the incoming cash flow. If drivers had some kind of collective negotiation, they could likely get a lot better deal for their effort.
Uber is a large, well capitalized entity. The labor is dispersed, unorganized and has little bargaining power. They're generating a lot of income but not keeping much of it. Like small farmers or like college basketball players as an extreme example. IMO it's not a fair transaction between Uber and its drivers. Like I said in another post, it currently is like pre-1970s sports negot
You're free to be as innovative and entrepreneurial as you want, as long as you're not imposing negative externalities on others.
However, rideshare drivers are not entrepreneurs. They're signing up with a central entity that is using them to make money. The individual drivers are terrible negotiators and as a result, keep a small fraction of the income they generate. This is true in a lot of industries. For programmers working at government contractors, get a look at the rates you're billed out at, and the amount you actually receive. The difference is pretty astonishing. But even though the programmer's share is small, the billed rates are high enough so that the programmer typically makes an "adequate" income.
There's little need to debate the meaning of words nowadays. We have long-established, centralized dictionaries which all can instantaneously access via the Internet:
1) Definition of "incompetent": Not having or showing the necessary skills to do something successfully.
2) Definition of "wrong": Not correct or true; incorrect.
The problem is that most people are not very good at negotiating. Especially if they're negotiating with professionals.
If you have a central, highly capitalized entity with professional negotiators dealing with Joe Sixpack, he's probably going to settle for what his costs are and maybe a tiny bit more (and he might have underestimated his costs).
This is why sports talent retains agents. In the era before agents, 1970s and earlier, the players were getting a much, much smaller slice of the pie, i.e. the income being generated with their efforts and the efforts of the highly capitalized owners with professional negotiators.
Now, Uber/Lyft drivers are not as rare as top sports talent. So with the professional negotiating with each individual one by one, the drivers are gonna get a very small slice of the pie.
When the Constitution was being written, states didn't want a federal standing army, considering it a threat. However, as you point out, individual state militias would be ineffective against a broad threat against the country. The result was a clever compromise:
"Thus, the choice was between a variety of militias controlled by the individual states, which would likely be too weak and divided to protect the nation, and a unified militia under federal control, which almost by definition could not be expected to prevent federal tyranny. This conundrum could not be solved, and the Convention did not purport to solve it. Instead, the Convention presumed that a militia would exist, but it gave Congress almost unfettered authority to regulate that militia, just as it gave the new federal government almost unfettered authority over the army and navy." -- Heritage.org, "To Keep and Bear Arms"
No. It's to create a militia for state security. Like literal state, like Delaware or Pennsylvania or Virginia. See: Text of 2nd Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
All these other rationales for unfettered access to guns floating around there, these cultural/religious/political/personal-safety rationales, as enunciated by LaPierre in his Parkland response at CPAC, is just marketing bullsht by the gun industry association.
You can regulate guns - machine guns are heavily regulated. These are metal tubes filled with gunpowder which hurl projectiles. Cannons should be fine then. Scalia said no - only man portable tubes filled with gunpowder could be individually owned, because the 2dA says 'keep and bear', and he - the most conservative originalist - believes 'bear' means 'carry', not like 'bring to bear', as in 'use'.
Workers in the US are unable to successfully compete for the excess income created by the increase in stuff they're making. Why? Many reasons, some social (decline of unions), some market-based (cheaper to manufacture offshore) and some technological (requires less workers to make the stuff, pushing some out of work into lower tier jobs), some policy-based (redistributive-upwards financial policy). I'm sure there are other reasons.
There's a certain amount of cash coming in. When that's reduced, the decision makers don't want to take a pay cut. So they cut costs. It just goes to show a) how good they are at managing and b) where their priorities lie (not with the long-term health of the organization).