YouTube Red / Premium is basically that plus some paywalled content. If everyone paid for it, advertisers wouldn't have a say in how YouTube operates anymore.
If anything, the government should butt out even more so that there can be a real competitive marketplace where you don't need to be as large as Amazon to participate in the education sector.
There's very little preventing you from starting your own private school, except for capital and a lack of customers that is.
The only kind of large stable society that exists without taxation is one with conscription. At some point, the society as a whole needs to get something done. So either they take money, which can then be paid to someone to do the work willingly, or they take unwilling people to do the work by conscripting them.
If you only have a hammer, then you should use it until you get yourself a better tool. It's much easier to build a ML model to identify children in general than to identify children in potentially compromising positions, especially when you don't know what some freak might be turned on by.
I also don't see how this can be a slippery slope. Having separate platforms for kids and adults to post content on makes a lot of sense. There's a good reason why schools are segregated by age, not the least of which is the potential for abuse.
Facebook is not anonymous, yet you see the same stuff. In some cases, you can get people to stop by raising big stink with their employer and getting them fired from their job. But I'm not sure that'd be a good route to go down.
If Slashdot or someone on Slashdot could send everything I posted here to my manager, I wouldn't be posting here at all. I'd rather deal with the shit hole that is 4chan than to risk my job for an internet discussion.
But here I really don't see any way to solve this, because what if someone really WANTS to see gymnastic related videos? That by itself is harmless or even useful.
Simple. You pay for it.
YouTube and almost all YouTube creators rely on ad revenue. If enough people make a fuss over something, no matter how dumb, advertisers will demand change and YouTube must comply.
The only way to change that is to stop relying on ad revenue, but YouTube Red / Premium didn't really take off.
If left alone, social networks actually trend towards cliques. They make it easy for like-minded people to find each other and reinforce their off-the-wall ideas.
As someone who coded on a Macbook pro for years and finally switched to a top-tier Dell laptop running Linux, the Dell is much better.
The hardware is a mixed bag. In exchange for the awkwardly placed webcam and speakers, I've not burned my legs or hunted for a dongle once since the switch, and there's a touchscreen for dealing with those web pages that desperately wanted to be a phone app.
As for the OS, Linux is way better. Just on the window management side, there's a proper maximize button, hotkeys for neatly resizing windows to take up the left or right half of the screen, multiple desktops in a 2D grid, and Alt-Tab that doesn't care what "app" a window belongs to.
Coding-wise, Terminal and Emacs work the same way in both, but having a second clipboard in the form of select & middle click (or triple touch) is amazing. I've also not had it crash despite leaving it on for months with automatic updates, whereas my Mac had to be rebooted once every week or two.
I'm sure there's difficult parts to embedded programming, just like any other technical discipline, however, you should not dismiss higher level work as easier, or even less paid. Now I don't know how much you make, but there are software engineers working at Facebook who make $400k in total comp. And yes, they are software engineers, not managers.
Difficulty for them comes from 3 directions: performance, multi-threading, and customers.
Performance is a given. A 5% reduction in CPU usage directly translates to millions of dollars of savings per year when something is executed billions of times per second. A lot of that involves a deep understanding of how the underlying hardware works. For example, you can get a pretty decent boost by massaging your data structure into something that could fit in the L1 cache.
Multi-threading is a fallout from performance demands, but it's difficult in it's own way. Shared memory can lead to inconsistencies that are extremely difficult to debug due to its non-deterministic nature, and the actual problems may surface long after the inconsistency has occurred. So you turn to using locks, but then you discover locking not only reduces performance but causes deadlocks. Now to process billions of requests per second, you're going to need more than one machine, and if there's a shared resource, such as a database, then suddenly you have all of those problems made even more fun with the addition of network delay.
Finally, since it's something customers can see, it also means they want a say in how it works. The worst of which are actually reasonable demands that just happen to be extremely difficult to implement due to a mismatch between how they envision the software to work and how it's actually designed to work. Keeping them happy while refusing their reasonable demands (that you've admitted was reasonable) is at least as difficult as all of the aforementioned difficulties.
That's not a bad model even if it doesn't work that well for specialists. By far the cheapest and most effective treatment is often preventative in nature. Quitting smoking cuts the risk of lung cancer by 2/3rds. Who better to push that than the primary care physician?
What kind of disaster that wipes out humanity on the Earth, even closed habitats, that will be recovered from in only a 100 years do you envision?
First of all, there are no operational closed habitats on Earth right now. Nuclear bunkers are not sealed off and their supplies are slowly consumed, not renewed. They're also not permanently manned, which means sudden events could wipe out their potential users before they even come into the picture.
As for scenarios, I'll defer to Wikipedia's page. Risks from AI, bioterrorism, volcanism or asteroids are all limited to Earth. Machines controlled by AI would stop working a few decades after all of the mechanics are killed off. Superviruses also need human hosts to survive. Volcanism might last anywhere from a few decades to a few millennia. And asteroid impacts only affect Earth for a few decades.
The only scenario that might affect space colonies is alien invasion. But even then, aliens would have a much easier time locating a habitable planet than a comparably tiny space colony.
There's also the possibility of several of them happening at the same time, e.g. asteroid impact putting a heavy strain on society, leading to war and bioterrorism. Aliens might also use an asteroid or bioweapons to avoid revealing themselves.
As for closed habitats in space, there is always going to be leakage.
There's ways to minimize leakage such that it's not a real concern for millennia, for example by building a double-hulled vessel. Entrances could be welded shut for decades at a time and only cut open to perform exterior maintenance. Building bigger also helps, since being 10 times as large increases the surface area by 100x and the volume by 1000x.
And while it might be possible to live for generations without advanced technology, it is going to be needed at some point, if only to re-colonize the Earth.
Since they don't need it for almost their entire stay, it can be stored at the beginning and left alone until they need it. Machinery generally don't degrade in a freezing vacuum.
While you make a good point about having a large breeding population. The real problem with a self sufficient colony is the self sufficiency part. We're talking about an advanced industrial system that can produce everything that is needed to maintain a space fairing population. And then maintaining that industrial system for up to thousands of years (assuming something wiped out humanity on the Earth, it's going to take a lot of time to recover).
As an example, consider what it takes to build a computer, raw materials, fabricating factories etc.
They only need to survive long enough for Earth to become habitable again. In some cases, that could be as little as 100 years. The especially difficult to make stuff can simply be warehoused. E.g. if CPUs wear out at a rate of 1 every 2 years, a stockpile of 500 would be sufficient for 1000 years.
Moreover, complex machinery would not be necessary a majority of the time. It's fine to live a stone-aged existence inside a well-designed space-age habitat for 900 out of those 1000 years. Once placed in a stable orbit and spun up to speed, what do you actually need to maintain it? Just occasional repairs to meteorite damage would be necessary to the habitat itself, everything else is constantly being recycled inside the habitat by natural processes.
This is without even considering what it takes to keep humans alive. As an example, a Moon base when the Moon has almost no sodium or chlorine (it's an example, don't know if true). Salt is pretty basic to keeping alive. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous are similar, needed to grow plants. Then there are the micro-nutrients, no selenium, well there's a limit.
None of those are consumed in a closed ecosystem. Just bring some and use it forever.
Then there's society. Lots of people seem to assume a space colony could be a libertarian paradise. Really it is probably going to be militaristic in nature with strong authorities to enforce everything that needs enforcing, from garbage disposal, to making sure doors are closed securely to who breeds with who. Whether that type of society is stable in the long run seems questionable. The new generation always thinks they know better.
It will be a libertarian paradise in the sense that each colony would be free to make its own rules. A group of rich pedophiles can start their own colony where sex with minors would not only legal but encouraged. As long as they keep producing things needed to keep the colony alive, who's going to stop them?
War, space colonies are fragile, a war could easily see colonies wiped out.
All colonies would be operating under MAD. High speed impactors, which are difficult to defend against and could easily wipe out a colony, would be fired in response to aggression. Not all that different from nuclear-tipped ICBMs of today.
More importantly, because the colonies are so fragile, it would be very difficult to acquire resources from other colonies by means of conquest. Things that could be salvaged from a destroyed colony, such as soil and metal, are also things that are the easiest to collect elsewhere. Whereas the real valuable resources, such as complex machinery, production systems and people are easily destroyed. Trade would be a much more profitable enterprise than war.
I think it would take numerous space colonies to have any hope of survival, colonies in different situations, colonies trading with each other so the colony short on sodium can trade their lithium.
That would definitely help. But it might not be necessary and the costs will be even more astronomical.
Then there is the consideration that any disaster that wipes out the Earth is going to make the whole solar system messy as a big rock hitting is going to eject a lot of material. Diseases are likely to escape before being recognized and war is likely to expand. Other
Scott Manley just made a video about this. In short, it takes 4 km/s delta v if you can wait 30+ years for it to arrive, which is not a huge problem given it's nuclear waste.
Are you really saying home owner -> plumber is the same as consumer -> Amazon -> Amazon employee? Does the fact that there's an extra hop in there make any difference to you?
If you think businesses should not pay taxes, then just say that. I can think of legitimate arguments for it. Don't pretend that they're actually paying it the same way people are, because they're not.
First of all, corporations aren't people, although they do represent people, which is why they are treated that way in certain circumstances (as a pass through for a person's rights, for example).
Ah of course, they're not people when it comes to responsibilities. But they totally are when it comes to rights and privileges. I'm still surprised that Citizens United didn't make false advertising legal, given how advertisement is speech and corporations apparently have a right to free speech.
As for the rest of your comment, I'll just say this: Giving employees stock options in exchange for their labor and paying a plumber to fix a water heater are both transactions involving an exchange of value for services. Amazon's financial gymnastics does not change the fact that what would've been double taxed had Amazon been an individual is now taxed only once.
We are getting stiffed. If taxes worked properly, they would pay a business income tax, and then when someone is paid by that business, they pay individual income tax on top of it.
If that doesn't make sense, remember that corporations are people. If Joe makes $2000 from his job, he pays income tax on it. When he hires me to fix his water heater, I receive $1000 from Joe. Now I pay income tax on $1000. Am I getting double taxed? Or is the tax system working as it should?
The average taxpayer doesn't buy billions of dollars worth of depreciating assets that incentivize economic growth through myriad other mechanisms than a simple income tax return.
The average tax payer spends a thousand dollars a month. There's a few hundred million of them, and combined they spend tens of billions on the economy. Yet we tax them just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Red / Premium is basically that plus some paywalled content. If everyone paid for it, advertisers wouldn't have a say in how YouTube operates anymore.
The big companies are looking to commoditize programming because there is a lot of grunt work to be done that doesn't require a great deal of skill.
There's no such thing as grunt work in software. If there is, somebody would've already written a script or library to handle it.
The best developers in China are already at $40k annually and growing 10-20% YoY. At this rate they'll catch up to Americans within a decade.
If anything, the government should butt out even more so that there can be a real competitive marketplace where you don't need to be as large as Amazon to participate in the education sector.
There's very little preventing you from starting your own private school, except for capital and a lack of customers that is.
Maybe taxation is a bad way to organize society.
The only kind of large stable society that exists without taxation is one with conscription. At some point, the society as a whole needs to get something done. So either they take money, which can then be paid to someone to do the work willingly, or they take unwilling people to do the work by conscripting them.
I know which one I prefer.
If you only have a hammer, then you should use it until you get yourself a better tool. It's much easier to build a ML model to identify children in general than to identify children in potentially compromising positions, especially when you don't know what some freak might be turned on by.
I also don't see how this can be a slippery slope. Having separate platforms for kids and adults to post content on makes a lot of sense. There's a good reason why schools are segregated by age, not the least of which is the potential for abuse.
Facebook is not anonymous, yet you see the same stuff. In some cases, you can get people to stop by raising big stink with their employer and getting them fired from their job. But I'm not sure that'd be a good route to go down.
If Slashdot or someone on Slashdot could send everything I posted here to my manager, I wouldn't be posting here at all. I'd rather deal with the shit hole that is 4chan than to risk my job for an internet discussion.
But here I really don't see any way to solve this, because what if someone really WANTS to see gymnastic related videos? That by itself is harmless or even useful.
Simple. You pay for it.
YouTube and almost all YouTube creators rely on ad revenue. If enough people make a fuss over something, no matter how dumb, advertisers will demand change and YouTube must comply.
The only way to change that is to stop relying on ad revenue, but YouTube Red / Premium didn't really take off.
If left alone, social networks actually trend towards cliques. They make it easy for like-minded people to find each other and reinforce their off-the-wall ideas.
Why wouldn't censorship be a solution?
Kids watching YouTube makes them money. Kids uploading videos generates bad press. Block all videos with kids in them and the problem goes away.
You mean there's no better computer for hipsters.
As someone who coded on a Macbook pro for years and finally switched to a top-tier Dell laptop running Linux, the Dell is much better.
The hardware is a mixed bag. In exchange for the awkwardly placed webcam and speakers, I've not burned my legs or hunted for a dongle once since the switch, and there's a touchscreen for dealing with those web pages that desperately wanted to be a phone app.
As for the OS, Linux is way better. Just on the window management side, there's a proper maximize button, hotkeys for neatly resizing windows to take up the left or right half of the screen, multiple desktops in a 2D grid, and Alt-Tab that doesn't care what "app" a window belongs to.
Coding-wise, Terminal and Emacs work the same way in both, but having a second clipboard in the form of select & middle click (or triple touch) is amazing. I've also not had it crash despite leaving it on for months with automatic updates, whereas my Mac had to be rebooted once every week or two.
Oh and the Dell was $800 cheaper.
I'm sure there's difficult parts to embedded programming, just like any other technical discipline, however, you should not dismiss higher level work as easier, or even less paid. Now I don't know how much you make, but there are software engineers working at Facebook who make $400k in total comp. And yes, they are software engineers, not managers.
Difficulty for them comes from 3 directions: performance, multi-threading, and customers.
Performance is a given. A 5% reduction in CPU usage directly translates to millions of dollars of savings per year when something is executed billions of times per second. A lot of that involves a deep understanding of how the underlying hardware works. For example, you can get a pretty decent boost by massaging your data structure into something that could fit in the L1 cache.
Multi-threading is a fallout from performance demands, but it's difficult in it's own way. Shared memory can lead to inconsistencies that are extremely difficult to debug due to its non-deterministic nature, and the actual problems may surface long after the inconsistency has occurred. So you turn to using locks, but then you discover locking not only reduces performance but causes deadlocks. Now to process billions of requests per second, you're going to need more than one machine, and if there's a shared resource, such as a database, then suddenly you have all of those problems made even more fun with the addition of network delay.
Finally, since it's something customers can see, it also means they want a say in how it works. The worst of which are actually reasonable demands that just happen to be extremely difficult to implement due to a mismatch between how they envision the software to work and how it's actually designed to work. Keeping them happy while refusing their reasonable demands (that you've admitted was reasonable) is at least as difficult as all of the aforementioned difficulties.
That's not a bad model even if it doesn't work that well for specialists. By far the cheapest and most effective treatment is often preventative in nature. Quitting smoking cuts the risk of lung cancer by 2/3rds. Who better to push that than the primary care physician?
The difference is, witch doctors don't actually know how to cure people.
What kind of disaster that wipes out humanity on the Earth, even closed habitats, that will be recovered from in only a 100 years do you envision?
First of all, there are no operational closed habitats on Earth right now. Nuclear bunkers are not sealed off and their supplies are slowly consumed, not renewed. They're also not permanently manned, which means sudden events could wipe out their potential users before they even come into the picture.
As for scenarios, I'll defer to Wikipedia's page. Risks from AI, bioterrorism, volcanism or asteroids are all limited to Earth. Machines controlled by AI would stop working a few decades after all of the mechanics are killed off. Superviruses also need human hosts to survive. Volcanism might last anywhere from a few decades to a few millennia. And asteroid impacts only affect Earth for a few decades.
The only scenario that might affect space colonies is alien invasion. But even then, aliens would have a much easier time locating a habitable planet than a comparably tiny space colony.
There's also the possibility of several of them happening at the same time, e.g. asteroid impact putting a heavy strain on society, leading to war and bioterrorism. Aliens might also use an asteroid or bioweapons to avoid revealing themselves.
As for closed habitats in space, there is always going to be leakage.
There's ways to minimize leakage such that it's not a real concern for millennia, for example by building a double-hulled vessel. Entrances could be welded shut for decades at a time and only cut open to perform exterior maintenance. Building bigger also helps, since being 10 times as large increases the surface area by 100x and the volume by 1000x.
And while it might be possible to live for generations without advanced technology, it is going to be needed at some point, if only to re-colonize the Earth.
Since they don't need it for almost their entire stay, it can be stored at the beginning and left alone until they need it. Machinery generally don't degrade in a freezing vacuum.
While you make a good point about having a large breeding population. The real problem with a self sufficient colony is the self sufficiency part. We're talking about an advanced industrial system that can produce everything that is needed to maintain a space fairing population. And then maintaining that industrial system for up to thousands of years (assuming something wiped out humanity on the Earth, it's going to take a lot of time to recover).
As an example, consider what it takes to build a computer, raw materials, fabricating factories etc.
They only need to survive long enough for Earth to become habitable again. In some cases, that could be as little as 100 years. The especially difficult to make stuff can simply be warehoused. E.g. if CPUs wear out at a rate of 1 every 2 years, a stockpile of 500 would be sufficient for 1000 years.
Moreover, complex machinery would not be necessary a majority of the time. It's fine to live a stone-aged existence inside a well-designed space-age habitat for 900 out of those 1000 years. Once placed in a stable orbit and spun up to speed, what do you actually need to maintain it? Just occasional repairs to meteorite damage would be necessary to the habitat itself, everything else is constantly being recycled inside the habitat by natural processes.
This is without even considering what it takes to keep humans alive. As an example, a Moon base when the Moon has almost no sodium or chlorine (it's an example, don't know if true). Salt is pretty basic to keeping alive. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous are similar, needed to grow plants. Then there are the micro-nutrients, no selenium, well there's a limit.
None of those are consumed in a closed ecosystem. Just bring some and use it forever.
Then there's society. Lots of people seem to assume a space colony could be a libertarian paradise. Really it is probably going to be militaristic in nature with strong authorities to enforce everything that needs enforcing, from garbage disposal, to making sure doors are closed securely to who breeds with who. Whether that type of society is stable in the long run seems questionable. The new generation always thinks they know better.
It will be a libertarian paradise in the sense that each colony would be free to make its own rules. A group of rich pedophiles can start their own colony where sex with minors would not only legal but encouraged. As long as they keep producing things needed to keep the colony alive, who's going to stop them?
War, space colonies are fragile, a war could easily see colonies wiped out.
All colonies would be operating under MAD. High speed impactors, which are difficult to defend against and could easily wipe out a colony, would be fired in response to aggression. Not all that different from nuclear-tipped ICBMs of today.
More importantly, because the colonies are so fragile, it would be very difficult to acquire resources from other colonies by means of conquest. Things that could be salvaged from a destroyed colony, such as soil and metal, are also things that are the easiest to collect elsewhere. Whereas the real valuable resources, such as complex machinery, production systems and people are easily destroyed. Trade would be a much more profitable enterprise than war.
I think it would take numerous space colonies to have any hope of survival, colonies in different situations, colonies trading with each other so the colony short on sodium can trade their lithium.
That would definitely help. But it might not be necessary and the costs will be even more astronomical.
Then there is the consideration that any disaster that wipes out the Earth is going to make the whole solar system messy as a big rock hitting is going to eject a lot of material. Diseases are likely to escape before being recognized and war is likely to expand. Other
It can't be done because there's no money for it. It's the same reason that self-sufficient off-world habitats can't be built.
Scott Manley just made a video about this. In short, it takes 4 km/s delta v if you can wait 30+ years for it to arrive, which is not a huge problem given it's nuclear waste.
Are you really saying home owner -> plumber is the same as consumer -> Amazon -> Amazon employee? Does the fact that there's an extra hop in there make any difference to you?
If you think businesses should not pay taxes, then just say that. I can think of legitimate arguments for it. Don't pretend that they're actually paying it the same way people are, because they're not.
First of all, corporations aren't people, although they do represent people, which is why they are treated that way in certain circumstances (as a pass through for a person's rights, for example).
Ah of course, they're not people when it comes to responsibilities. But they totally are when it comes to rights and privileges. I'm still surprised that Citizens United didn't make false advertising legal, given how advertisement is speech and corporations apparently have a right to free speech.
As for the rest of your comment, I'll just say this: Giving employees stock options in exchange for their labor and paying a plumber to fix a water heater are both transactions involving an exchange of value for services. Amazon's financial gymnastics does not change the fact that what would've been double taxed had Amazon been an individual is now taxed only once.
Well, good thing Amazon still have competitors who are paying taxes then. Their prices won't be affected the way Amazon's will.
This is why we need election reform.
We are getting stiffed. If taxes worked properly, they would pay a business income tax, and then when someone is paid by that business, they pay individual income tax on top of it.
If that doesn't make sense, remember that corporations are people. If Joe makes $2000 from his job, he pays income tax on it. When he hires me to fix his water heater, I receive $1000 from Joe. Now I pay income tax on $1000. Am I getting double taxed? Or is the tax system working as it should?
Now replace Joe in my example with Amazon.
So if we could tax Amazon without the cost being passed to everyone else, would you support it?
The average taxpayer doesn't buy billions of dollars worth of depreciating assets that incentivize economic growth through myriad other mechanisms than a simple income tax return.
The average tax payer spends a thousand dollars a month. There's a few hundred million of them, and combined they spend tens of billions on the economy. Yet we tax them just fine.