Being a game development myself, and one who's put years of work into a self-funded indie game (and hopefully released soon), I'm sure it will be disheartening to see people passing it around without paying for it.
Think of it this way, of the hundreds of other things people could be doing, whether it be lurking on Facebook, hanging out with friends, watching movies, going for a hike, or playing one of the thousands of other game titles out there, they chose to play your game. If they like it, they will sink days, weeks or even years into it. As a creator, you should be proud when you see someone sharing it, not disheartened. You made something great, and people recognized your creativity and hard work, so much so that they want others to try it too.
But then what about income? A business doesn't survive on good will alone.
Yes, income is critical to a business, but remember, every game company is in the same boat. They all managed to deal with it. In fact, the AAA titles are far more sought after and suffer far more from piracy, yet they still rake in millions. I also know many people who bought games after pirating it first, mostly to support the creator. Without a way to try the game, I doubt the developers would've gotten any of those sales. If everyone had to buy before they could find out whether they like it, most of them would go for the well known AAA titles that their friends are raving about. For most indie titles though, word of mouth really doesn't work, since everybody has their own niche they like.
In the end, the only thing that really matters is that people love the game. So go and make that game awesome and stop worrying about the rest.
The thing is, it's not like anybody had any trouble getting food delivered before they invented robots.
That argument applies to cars just as easily: Nobody had trouble getting from place to place before automobiles were invented. They walked, biked, rode in horse carriages or trains. People got to where they needed to be.
Cars also don't add value and should've been banned from the beginning. I mean, they're way more dangerous than these robots!
The reality is, until something has been tried, you don't really know its value. Most new things flop, but a few takes off. If you proactively ban all new things, then you'll never get any of the advances that makes modern life possible.
It might not be the police he's worried about. There are many people who, given the right incentives, would turn over security camera footage to the friends of the person being ratted out.
Given that Denmark doesn't build their own cars, it's the exact same thing as an import tax. You can call it whatever you want, but I'm going to call it an import tax.
Re 'social media activity on a different account. Or delete everything that could be incriminating. Or just lie and say they don't have one. "
The US has the ability to note any and all changes to social media over time. Upload an interesting image a few years ago, removing it in 2017 will just attract attention.
To "delete" anything would just remove that image from the public in 2017 on the internet.
If the image has been up for years, the US gov/mil has that funding event or supporting image and facial recognition of everyone at the event.
What about keeping all their terrorist social media activity on a different account, one without their real name?
The US has the ability to note any and all changes to social media over time.
That's just not true. Facebook alone has way more data centers than the CIA, and they only keep the current data. If you add Google, Twitter and dozens of other social platforms, you're probably 100's of data centers away from being able to store all historical social media information.
Re "wouldn't be able to validate 90% of what people are telling you anyways" One lie, one omission, some funding, some support for a banned group, one image, one account is all that is needed to show a person is trying to cover their past and present a totally fake story to sneak into the USA.
How do you distinguish an innocent mistake from an intentional lie? Someone with 15 social media accounts can easily miss one by accident, which you'd interpret as a lie or omission.
And yet, even with all of those questions, all a terrorist has to do to sneak in is to keep all their terrorist social media activity on a different account. Or delete everything that could be incriminating. Or just lie and say they don't have one.
Meanwhile, of the legitimate travelers, not everyone has old passports, not everyone has social media accounts, not everyone has an address (yes, not all places people live have streets or street numbers), or one that you can cross reference (many governments don't keep tabs on who lives where), not everyone has a work history (such as teenagers), and not everyone can remember literally everything they've done for the past 2 decades. Unless the CIA somehow became omniscient overnight, you wouldn't be able to validate 90% of what people are telling you anyways.
Your choices are to either grant so many exceptions that you might as well not have the questions in the first place, or deny everyone who doesn't fit your idea of the "perfect traveler", which is basically everyone.
Why even have gendered bathrooms? You know what's the one thing that'll stop men who are perverts? Other men who are not perverts. Of course the police can stop them too, but they're always a few minutes late.
Pretty much the only thing you need to do for unisex bathrooms is to extend all of the dividers, which they really should be doing anyways. I don't want to make accidental eye contact with someone in a stall, whatever their gender is.
I'm curious, would you agree with the following then?
A law against a man owning a gun is to prevent murder. Not all cases of a man owning a gun results in murder, but a law preventing a man from owning a gun is still proper.
John McCarthy, the person who coined the term in 1956, defined it as making machines "behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving."
The problem with that definition is that human intelligence and AI are very different beasts. A human who is capable of multiplying 8-digit numbers in a matter of milliseconds would be considered intelligent by most, or at least very talented. Does that make calculators AI?
... or drives a car down a street while obeying traffic laws and not hitting anything, everyone agrees they are displaying intelligence
Not really. Creating AI that could drive a car is very very hard, but you wouldn't put "can drive a car" in the skills section on your resume. Likewise, "cleaning the room" and "picking fruits" are not considered highly intelligent work by most people, but we've yet to see any AI that's capable of doing those things.
(1) make the UBI a daily , rather than monthly income, and give approved parties the ability to put a lien on your UBI, so that essentials get paid for first. In this scenario, you'd be given your government credit card, and every day a certain amount of money would be added to it, less the daily cost of rent, meals, etc., according to whatever contracts you have signed for your day-to-day living costs. Even if you go and drink or smoke away the rest, the maximum damage you can do is limited to 24 hours of income.
Someone will start a UBI loan company that gives you $5000 right away in exchange for your daily income for the next year. Stupidity is boundless in its ingenuity, and so is evil.
By your own numbers, his entire net worth (which took him a decade to earn) will last 8.9 days of UBI, assuming he can even convert it all to cash.
Using census data, there are 124.5 million households. The average household size is 2.54 people. Let's interpolate the poverty table to get an average expected UBI of about $18,497. Multiplying that out we can get the tab for providing UBI based on these assumptions, a total of about $2.303 trillion.
Why are you doing this the complicated way? Just take all working-age adults (about 190 million citizens, 10 million others) and multiply by $12k, then take all children (about 60 million) and multiply by $4k or whatever you want each child to get. You end up with a number roughly in the same ballpark with much less math and much fewer explanations.
So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare. Those totaled about $1.473T of the welfare expenditures, so add the $2.303 to the SS/Medicare $1.473T for a total cost of $3.776T. Perhaps the UBI reduces SS income dollar-for-dollar in an either-or situation reduces this cost a bit.
Why would you give UBI on top of SS? Do you think they're not making enough already and want to increase their income? Any reasonable plan would leave their income unchanged.
Total federal revenues collected from all sources (taxes, royalties, etc.) in 2014 (last year available) was $3.27 trillion. So UBI would consume somewhere north of 70% of all federal revenues.
If that's too much for you, then don't give people $12k. Choose a number that makes sense. People living purely on UBI might have to share a room or move to a cheaper location but they can manage even if they only get $6k a year.
Minimum wage has not slid, ever. There is no time in history that minimum wage was reduced.
You can say something true, but also lie at the same time. Minimum wage has never been reduced nominally, but the purchasing power of the dollar has always fallen 1-2% a year. So in a real sense, that is, the only sense that matters to people, a minimum wage job has gotten people worse and worse of a living standard.
Don't condemn the "older people" who don't want to pay for the useless educations of millennials any more than the millennials who don't feel compelled to pay back their student loans for the educations they now realize were useless.
Don't condemn "young people" for not wanting to pay social security and health care for you greedy old bastards then. Who was it that fucked those up?
witness Citizen's United, which takes the "corporation as people" concept beyond the commercial realm. And while I don't like that concept, I can't really fault the court too much because what the hell do you do with the NY Times, which is both a government-created entity and the Constitutionally-protected free press?
You stop considering money to be equivalent to speech. When an entity pays another, the service offered in exchange is examined to see whether paying for the service would be illegal. For example, in laws that prevent the hiring of hitmen, not only is the murder illegal, the payment is also illegal. And in laws banning prostitution, the sex itself is legal, but the payment is still illegal.
In this case, running political ads is legal, but paying for political ads when you are not the candidate's campaign can be made illegal. This does not prevent free speech because if you convince the ad network to run your ad for free, then they are still able to do so legally.
More importantly, if a heart surgery goes wrong, you will know about it. Whereas if the bank just accidentally took $10 from you, you probably wouldn't even realize. I've actually had that happen to me when they charged me a fee for something I didn't do and I didn't discover it until 4 months later. I was able to dispute the charge and get a refund, but you can imagine some banks might not be so nice.
Trillions of stars out there of immense variety and form and the moment someone sees something they don't recognize immediately it clearly must be an alien superstructure... Sigh... It's like the people who see some lights in the sky they aren't familiar with and immediately forget what the "U" in UFO stands for, instead going straight to deciding it must be alien visitors.
So are you saying that of the trillions of stars and trillions of habitable planets out there, not one of them has intelligent life on it?
As far as I can tell, "aliens" is just one of many explanations brought forth by the authors of the original paper. Unfortunately, many of the more mundane explanations such as dust clouds and massive comet clusters had since been ruled out, so that leaves "aliens" as one of the few remaining viable explanations (until somebody comes up with more of course). I personally would like to believe there's some cyclic process in the star itself, but I wouldn't rule out aliens just because it "sounds ridiculous".
Wouldn't the simple solution for this to require they pay into a cleanup fund as they bring in nuclear material? If it costs $20,000 to clean up a ton of waste, then charge them that amount when they import it into the country or dig it out of the ground.
Given that science is about problem solving, having more information to throw at a problem is always better.
I suspect this is not true for anything but the simplest problems. Anything that requires a bit of knowledge would not be helped by throwing random people into the conversation. At best they offer nothing, at worst they derail the conversation.
I can give you an obvious case where diversity fails: Right now science is almost completely done by people with PhD's from acclaimed universities. For a truly diverse perspective, we should include some who are not university-educated and kick out some of those ivory castle types. Let's replace some of the PhD's with flat-earthers and Wahabists. The Kardashians should review some physics papers. Oh and being a 10-year-old is also a unique perspective, let's bring in some of them. Now what about giraffes? Their perspective is quite interesting too!
If you actually tried this, what you end up with is not a scientific community, but a circus.
We've sure seen the results of China's forward looking environmental policies. Especially in scenic untouched places like Baotou, and in the pristine air of Beijing.
On the other hand, because they've screwed up so badly, and because poor air quality affects everyone, including the highest members of the government, they're actually doing something about it. China is the biggest investor in renewable power and has a dozen nuclear power plants under construction. They're not in a good place right now, but at least they're moving in the right direction. The same cannot be said of the US.
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Being a game development myself, and one who's put years of work into a self-funded indie game (and hopefully released soon), I'm sure it will be disheartening to see people passing it around without paying for it.
Think of it this way, of the hundreds of other things people could be doing, whether it be lurking on Facebook, hanging out with friends, watching movies, going for a hike, or playing one of the thousands of other game titles out there, they chose to play your game. If they like it, they will sink days, weeks or even years into it. As a creator, you should be proud when you see someone sharing it, not disheartened. You made something great, and people recognized your creativity and hard work, so much so that they want others to try it too.
But then what about income? A business doesn't survive on good will alone.
Yes, income is critical to a business, but remember, every game company is in the same boat. They all managed to deal with it. In fact, the AAA titles are far more sought after and suffer far more from piracy, yet they still rake in millions. I also know many people who bought games after pirating it first, mostly to support the creator. Without a way to try the game, I doubt the developers would've gotten any of those sales. If everyone had to buy before they could find out whether they like it, most of them would go for the well known AAA titles that their friends are raving about. For most indie titles though, word of mouth really doesn't work, since everybody has their own niche they like.
In the end, the only thing that really matters is that people love the game. So go and make that game awesome and stop worrying about the rest.
Especially those who sign those bills into law.
The thing is, it's not like anybody had any trouble getting food delivered before they invented robots.
That argument applies to cars just as easily: Nobody had trouble getting from place to place before automobiles were invented. They walked, biked, rode in horse carriages or trains. People got to where they needed to be.
Cars also don't add value and should've been banned from the beginning. I mean, they're way more dangerous than these robots!
The reality is, until something has been tried, you don't really know its value. Most new things flop, but a few takes off. If you proactively ban all new things, then you'll never get any of the advances that makes modern life possible.
It might not be the police he's worried about. There are many people who, given the right incentives, would turn over security camera footage to the friends of the person being ratted out.
Given that Denmark doesn't build their own cars, it's the exact same thing as an import tax. You can call it whatever you want, but I'm going to call it an import tax.
Re 'social media activity on a different account. Or delete everything that could be incriminating. Or just lie and say they don't have one. " The US has the ability to note any and all changes to social media over time. Upload an interesting image a few years ago, removing it in 2017 will just attract attention. To "delete" anything would just remove that image from the public in 2017 on the internet. If the image has been up for years, the US gov/mil has that funding event or supporting image and facial recognition of everyone at the event.
What about keeping all their terrorist social media activity on a different account, one without their real name?
The US has the ability to note any and all changes to social media over time.
That's just not true. Facebook alone has way more data centers than the CIA, and they only keep the current data. If you add Google, Twitter and dozens of other social platforms, you're probably 100's of data centers away from being able to store all historical social media information.
Re "wouldn't be able to validate 90% of what people are telling you anyways" One lie, one omission, some funding, some support for a banned group, one image, one account is all that is needed to show a person is trying to cover their past and present a totally fake story to sneak into the USA.
How do you distinguish an innocent mistake from an intentional lie? Someone with 15 social media accounts can easily miss one by accident, which you'd interpret as a lie or omission.
And yet, even with all of those questions, all a terrorist has to do to sneak in is to keep all their terrorist social media activity on a different account. Or delete everything that could be incriminating. Or just lie and say they don't have one.
Meanwhile, of the legitimate travelers, not everyone has old passports, not everyone has social media accounts, not everyone has an address (yes, not all places people live have streets or street numbers), or one that you can cross reference (many governments don't keep tabs on who lives where), not everyone has a work history (such as teenagers), and not everyone can remember literally everything they've done for the past 2 decades. Unless the CIA somehow became omniscient overnight, you wouldn't be able to validate 90% of what people are telling you anyways.
Your choices are to either grant so many exceptions that you might as well not have the questions in the first place, or deny everyone who doesn't fit your idea of the "perfect traveler", which is basically everyone.
Why even have gendered bathrooms? You know what's the one thing that'll stop men who are perverts? Other men who are not perverts. Of course the police can stop them too, but they're always a few minutes late.
Pretty much the only thing you need to do for unisex bathrooms is to extend all of the dividers, which they really should be doing anyways. I don't want to make accidental eye contact with someone in a stall, whatever their gender is.
I'm curious, would you agree with the following then?
A law against a man owning a gun is to prevent murder. Not all cases of a man owning a gun results in murder, but a law preventing a man from owning a gun is still proper.
John McCarthy, the person who coined the term in 1956, defined it as making machines "behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving."
The problem with that definition is that human intelligence and AI are very different beasts. A human who is capable of multiplying 8-digit numbers in a matter of milliseconds would be considered intelligent by most, or at least very talented. Does that make calculators AI?
... or drives a car down a street while obeying traffic laws and not hitting anything, everyone agrees they are displaying intelligence
Not really. Creating AI that could drive a car is very very hard, but you wouldn't put "can drive a car" in the skills section on your resume. Likewise, "cleaning the room" and "picking fruits" are not considered highly intelligent work by most people, but we've yet to see any AI that's capable of doing those things.
There's still land and sea routes. We should just ban all people.
(1) make the UBI a daily , rather than monthly income, and give approved parties the ability to put a lien on your UBI, so that essentials get paid for first. In this scenario, you'd be given your government credit card, and every day a certain amount of money would be added to it, less the daily cost of rent, meals, etc., according to whatever contracts you have signed for your day-to-day living costs. Even if you go and drink or smoke away the rest, the maximum damage you can do is limited to 24 hours of income.
Someone will start a UBI loan company that gives you $5000 right away in exchange for your daily income for the next year. Stupidity is boundless in its ingenuity, and so is evil.
Can we start funding it by confiscating all his $
By your own numbers, his entire net worth (which took him a decade to earn) will last 8.9 days of UBI, assuming he can even convert it all to cash.
Using census data, there are 124.5 million households. The average household size is 2.54 people. Let's interpolate the poverty table to get an average expected UBI of about $18,497. Multiplying that out we can get the tab for providing UBI based on these assumptions, a total of about $2.303 trillion.
Why are you doing this the complicated way? Just take all working-age adults (about 190 million citizens, 10 million others) and multiply by $12k, then take all children (about 60 million) and multiply by $4k or whatever you want each child to get. You end up with a number roughly in the same ballpark with much less math and much fewer explanations.
So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare. Those totaled about $1.473T of the welfare expenditures, so add the $2.303 to the SS/Medicare $1.473T for a total cost of $3.776T. Perhaps the UBI reduces SS income dollar-for-dollar in an either-or situation reduces this cost a bit.
Why would you give UBI on top of SS? Do you think they're not making enough already and want to increase their income? Any reasonable plan would leave their income unchanged.
Total federal revenues collected from all sources (taxes, royalties, etc.) in 2014 (last year available) was $3.27 trillion. So UBI would consume somewhere north of 70% of all federal revenues.
If that's too much for you, then don't give people $12k. Choose a number that makes sense. People living purely on UBI might have to share a room or move to a cheaper location but they can manage even if they only get $6k a year.
every High School in America has a mandatory econ 101 class that covers personal finances.
Mine didn't, and I went to of the top tier schools in the US.
I don't even look down on people that can't properly manage their finances, because on average people are quite stupid.
You can blame the education system for that. Personal finances is seldom taught in high school.
Minimum wage has not slid, ever. There is no time in history that minimum wage was reduced.
You can say something true, but also lie at the same time. Minimum wage has never been reduced nominally, but the purchasing power of the dollar has always fallen 1-2% a year. So in a real sense, that is, the only sense that matters to people, a minimum wage job has gotten people worse and worse of a living standard.
Don't condemn the "older people" who don't want to pay for the useless educations of millennials any more than the millennials who don't feel compelled to pay back their student loans for the educations they now realize were useless.
Don't condemn "young people" for not wanting to pay social security and health care for you greedy old bastards then. Who was it that fucked those up?
witness Citizen's United, which takes the "corporation as people" concept beyond the commercial realm. And while I don't like that concept, I can't really fault the court too much because what the hell do you do with the NY Times, which is both a government-created entity and the Constitutionally-protected free press?
You stop considering money to be equivalent to speech. When an entity pays another, the service offered in exchange is examined to see whether paying for the service would be illegal. For example, in laws that prevent the hiring of hitmen, not only is the murder illegal, the payment is also illegal. And in laws banning prostitution, the sex itself is legal, but the payment is still illegal.
In this case, running political ads is legal, but paying for political ads when you are not the candidate's campaign can be made illegal. This does not prevent free speech because if you convince the ad network to run your ad for free, then they are still able to do so legally.
I run Chrome on a Mac. Same memory issues.
More importantly, if a heart surgery goes wrong, you will know about it. Whereas if the bank just accidentally took $10 from you, you probably wouldn't even realize. I've actually had that happen to me when they charged me a fee for something I didn't do and I didn't discover it until 4 months later. I was able to dispute the charge and get a refund, but you can imagine some banks might not be so nice.
Trillions of stars out there of immense variety and form and the moment someone sees something they don't recognize immediately it clearly must be an alien superstructure... Sigh... It's like the people who see some lights in the sky they aren't familiar with and immediately forget what the "U" in UFO stands for, instead going straight to deciding it must be alien visitors.
So are you saying that of the trillions of stars and trillions of habitable planets out there, not one of them has intelligent life on it?
As far as I can tell, "aliens" is just one of many explanations brought forth by the authors of the original paper. Unfortunately, many of the more mundane explanations such as dust clouds and massive comet clusters had since been ruled out, so that leaves "aliens" as one of the few remaining viable explanations (until somebody comes up with more of course). I personally would like to believe there's some cyclic process in the star itself, but I wouldn't rule out aliens just because it "sounds ridiculous".
Wouldn't the simple solution for this to require they pay into a cleanup fund as they bring in nuclear material? If it costs $20,000 to clean up a ton of waste, then charge them that amount when they import it into the country or dig it out of the ground.
What's her GPA? A 2.0 (C average) makes one a graduate. It does not, however, make one a scientist.
Given that science is about problem solving, having more information to throw at a problem is always better.
I suspect this is not true for anything but the simplest problems. Anything that requires a bit of knowledge would not be helped by throwing random people into the conversation. At best they offer nothing, at worst they derail the conversation.
I can give you an obvious case where diversity fails: Right now science is almost completely done by people with PhD's from acclaimed universities. For a truly diverse perspective, we should include some who are not university-educated and kick out some of those ivory castle types. Let's replace some of the PhD's with flat-earthers and Wahabists. The Kardashians should review some physics papers. Oh and being a 10-year-old is also a unique perspective, let's bring in some of them. Now what about giraffes? Their perspective is quite interesting too!
If you actually tried this, what you end up with is not a scientific community, but a circus.
If the statement has merit, does it matter from whose mouth it came from?
We've sure seen the results of China's forward looking environmental policies. Especially in scenic untouched places like Baotou, and in the pristine air of Beijing.
On the other hand, because they've screwed up so badly, and because poor air quality affects everyone, including the highest members of the government, they're actually doing something about it. China is the biggest investor in renewable power and has a dozen nuclear power plants under construction. They're not in a good place right now, but at least they're moving in the right direction. The same cannot be said of the US.