Whether you like it or not, terrorism works. The government screwed up when they let in terrorists amongst with refugees. They should have background-checked everyone. Maybe even throw in a psychological evaluation. And now everyone is paying the price.
I don't disagree with GP, and I think mixed-use zones are a great way to lower costs and reduce traffic. However, that article is nonsense:
1. Social Isolation: Rural areas have some of the most friendly and talkative people. Try going up to anyone in New York and ask how their day was. Just because there's 10 people in front of you, doesn't mean you're having social interactions. I personally have never felt more alone than in a crowded room with people partying and "having a great time".
2. Discrimination: Forcing people to drive to places is less discriminatory than forcing them to walk to places. In fact, the elderly are more likely to be able to drive long distances than to walk long distances, especially in bad weather. Now imagine they're also carrying 20 lbs. of groceries. Self driving cars will solve much of the problem anyways.
3. Expense: The article defeats its own point. Cars are expensive, but if 60% of people still own cars, how is that saving money? Car infrastructure can't go away either, since you still need to deliver things with trucks. Besides, without cars, you need to build taller and build more public transport. Both costs money. Just compare living costs in Tokyo with just about any suburb. Heck, just buying train tickets for a month there will cost more than renting a room in much of the US.
4. Small businesses: Simply having more small businesses is not necessarily a good thing. Big ones have economies of scale and work more efficiently. Once again, the article defeats its own point. Take a closer look at the chart: the richest countries are all at the bottom: US, Germany, Denmark. And the country with the most small businesses? Greece... not exactly a shining beacon of prosperity right now.
5. Health: Finally a good point. However, simply ending the corn subsidy can do far more.
Given that it killed off Western health workers, who aren't exactly poor, and West Africa having plenty of rich people (given their income disparity), there's plenty of profit to be made in making this vaccine. Even Western countries might buy a bunch just because they're so terrified of Ebola. Besides, it's got good PR value.
tl;dr: UBI solves the problem for single-author works, while commissions are a much better way to produce collaborative works.
I personally feel the best type of content is the type that will be created even if the creator knows their only reward is to have others consume it. The best books I've read are written by people who simply wanted to say something. The best music came from people who wanted to exhibit their musical ability. They may or may not be paid. It doesn't matter. As long as they have enough to live on, they will create those works. Because to not do so would be suffering.
To support these people as they create their first works, and for many other reasons which I won't go into, we should have UBI. After they earn some recognition, they can either take commissions from people who like their work or just continue living off of UBI and create what they want to create rather than what other people want.
So the question of economics really only matters when it's in a medium that requires collaboration by many people, such as a movie, because it's nearly impossible to get hundreds of people to all buy in on an idea and then spend months working on it. Plus, not all of them are in critical roles where passion is necessary. The guy that holds the microphone over the actors' heads for example.
This is where money comes in. The most important role of money in society is to organize and distribute scarce resources. It tells individuals how important something is. When the microphone guy asks, should I work on movie A or movie B, the answer is simple: the one that will pay him more money.
But then, how does a movie producer decide how much to pay everyone working on the movie? Well, that's a complicated question. But the practical answer is: he makes a guess. If he guesses wrong, he loses money. Over time, the worst-guessing producers goes bankrupt and stops making movies, and the quality of movies goes up.
All well and good right? Not at all!
You see, artistic works are very hit and miss. As investments, they're very risky. To pour half a billion into a movie, then hoping that it's not one of the 10% of movies that only makes a quarter of it back, is going to give any investor a heart attack. To mitigate the risk, producers do many things that are at best unhelpful to the artistic quality of the work, and at worst, stifles any creativity and novelty. They are: marketing and advertising, targeting certain viewership groups, removing potentially difficult or contentious themes, breaking a long work out into several parts, making unnecessary sequels and prequels that dilute the impact of a story, avoiding tragedies, and the worst of all, doing what was profitable last time.
This is how we end up with so many "flicks". Action flicks, romance flicks, comedy flicks... Now the theme seems to be superheroes, because everybody loves superheroes right? Plus, several superhero movies made a lot of money. "There can't possibly be too many superhero movies!" says the producer.
They know these types of movies won't make it huge, but they also don't lose much either. They are safe investments, which in turn, means they're safe artistically. But for artistic works, safe just means unremarkable, uninteresting, and of little value. It's like scientific research. You're only a genius if you're the first to discover it.
So how do we get away from making tons and tons of movies that are all basically the same? Well, the problem stems from risk. Investors don't like risk, so they avoid novel things, and therefore stifles creativity. But really, the risky part is the producers guessing what people would like to see. So the better option is to simply ask people what they like.
And the way to do that is with commissions. The creator first comes up with some ideas. Then people decide whether they really want to see that idea as a movie. They pool their money together, and viola, the movie has a budget.
So writing software that beat the ex-world champion in Go was not innovative? Or creating the first self-driving car that could drive on the streets? Or building an on-demand translator that is actually usable? I guess you only consider something innovative if it was done by a small company.
Maybe illegal immigration is going down because there are no jobs, and the southern part of country is so full of Mexicans, it's basically Mexico. Nobody wants to go through all that hassle of immigrating just to end up in the exact same situation.
I think the fact that it's been working is more of a coincidence than anything else. Because if Texas actually voted for the Dems, the other rural states would have no hope of turning around the election, at least, not without help from other states with big cities. In fact, the city population in Texas has been growing significantly, and cities are always liberal. So this might actually be true in the distant future.
Besides, even with the electoral college, 438 out of 538 electors are proportioned according to state population, or 81% of the vote. It's not really that effective, especially when you consider the fact that the senate can already block any legislation, and its votes are entirely based on the number of states.
It'd be hilarious if this turns out to be pushing against some aspect of the normally intangible fabric of space-time, after physicists so thoroughly debunked luminiferous ether. Or maybe Newton's 3rd law isn't true in some circumstances. Now that would be exciting.
When coding I often need documentation to several libraries, each with several classes that needs their own tab. And then I have a dozen search tabs (stackoverflow and similar sites). Then there's the bug tracker, with the bug I'm working on, and several related bugs for reference. Maybe there's a few tabs for mocks and other product descriptions too. In total I probably use 20-40 tabs to do just one thing.
But that's not all. I also switch context pretty often, so I use multiple desktops. For example, while I'm waiting for code to compile, I switch to another desktop to start writing a DB query. Once that's running, I head over to another desktop to do code reviews. Each task requires many tabs open so I can reference them without having to spend time searching my bookmarks, and they can add up very quickly.
I know Slashdot loves car analogies, but this is a particularly unfitting one. Unlike a car, in no way does running 100 tabs on you browser make your computer more likely to break. The moment you close them, your computer is back to where it was before you opened them.
Of the 538 electors, 438 are proportioned according to state population, or 81%. Is this better than a pure popular vote? Yes. Does it really protect the less populous states from the more populous ones? Not at all. And if you think this system is working, just wait until California and Texas finds something they agree on.
The electoral college was designed to prevent an overwhelming popular vote from a minority of states electing the president without getting input from the less populous states.
That's just not true. With the right selection of states, you'd only need the votes from 16% of the area of the US to get to electoral majority. Someone did the calculations for 2012, and here's an updated map for 2016. Now do those maps look representative of small states to you?
Not useless, just less useful. If even one city built smart roads that helps guide self-driving cars, it will make sense for that city's residents to buy self-driving cars. Most of the time they'll be driving in the city where the car drives itself, and when they leave it, they can still drive manually.
Given that self-driving cars are the future, smart roads do make sense. If you compare the total cost of building hundreds of millions of self-driving cars with the cost of making all roads smart, then I would expect the smart roads will win on cost. The signal transmitters can cost on the order of a Raspberry Pi, and you really only need a few of them at intersections, interchanges and construction zones, since lane-keeping is an already-solved problem.
Sometimes in an argument, you need to pull some evidence that the other side is a nutjob, and the best way to do that is to link to their own writings.
Other times, an uncommon opinion is actually better than the accepted one. If search engines, amongst other information sources, actively suppress them, then we'll enter an era of intellectual conservatism. New ideas often start unpopular and run counter to the mainstream ones, but eventually overtake them as more people encounter it, try to disprove it, then finally fail to do so and accepts them. Having search engines be the gate keepers will break that cycle. Society can only advance if it can let go of it's old ideas and accept new ones, but if the new ones are all smothered in the cradle, then how can society advance?
Let's take this idea for example: it is common knowledge is that communism is evil and is terrible for the people living under it. However, I can make an argument that it is in fact, not true. Compare for example, Haiti, a democratic, capitalist nation in the Caribbean, and Cuba, a communist dictatorship. They're both in the same geographic area. Both have populations of around 10 million. However, Haiti is one of the poorest nations around, with a per-capita GDP (PPP) of only $1,784, whereas Cuba is at $20,649, and that's with a US trade embargo in place. In fact, that makes Cuba above average.
Now is my idea crazy? Well, I came up with it 5 minutes ago, so it could very well be. But should it be suppressed and hidden away on the 4th or 5th page? Even when someone searches for "evidence that communism is better"?
Obviously, if a search engine could identify which ideas are good and which are pure fantasy, then this wouldn't be a problem. But that's not the case. In fact, I doubt even highly educated humans could accurately distinguish them.
There should be a point system that scales the punishment according to how many crimes they've committed. Steal once? They should get a slap on the wrist. Steal a hundred times? They need to be locked away for a long time.
If other people want to subsidize this kind of behavior, why are you against it? Your only responsibility is to pay taxes so that nobody has to starve or freeze to death. Even if they're making extra money on the side, they're not hurting you.
We should worry about the concentration of power rather than robots becoming sentient. Sentience is a long ways off, whereas even with the technology today, a single human can command a large number of autonomous drones and missiles. The more autonomy the weapon has, the less the human is required in the loop, which means eventually, a single general or hacker can command the equivalent of the entire armed forces. At that point, who can stop them from starting unnecessary wars or becoming dictators?
What? Since when does renting make you less American? You realize the majority of renters are young people who haven't yet acquired enough money to buy a house? People who are the children of land owners? They are the people who will be impacted by public policy 50 years down the road, and they have every reason to vote for a better future for America.
Slashdot Mirror
Or they're worried a truck might run them over.
Whether you like it or not, terrorism works. The government screwed up when they let in terrorists amongst with refugees. They should have background-checked everyone. Maybe even throw in a psychological evaluation. And now everyone is paying the price.
I don't disagree with GP, and I think mixed-use zones are a great way to lower costs and reduce traffic. However, that article is nonsense:
1. Social Isolation: Rural areas have some of the most friendly and talkative people. Try going up to anyone in New York and ask how their day was. Just because there's 10 people in front of you, doesn't mean you're having social interactions. I personally have never felt more alone than in a crowded room with people partying and "having a great time".
2. Discrimination: Forcing people to drive to places is less discriminatory than forcing them to walk to places. In fact, the elderly are more likely to be able to drive long distances than to walk long distances, especially in bad weather. Now imagine they're also carrying 20 lbs. of groceries. Self driving cars will solve much of the problem anyways.
3. Expense: The article defeats its own point. Cars are expensive, but if 60% of people still own cars, how is that saving money? Car infrastructure can't go away either, since you still need to deliver things with trucks. Besides, without cars, you need to build taller and build more public transport. Both costs money. Just compare living costs in Tokyo with just about any suburb. Heck, just buying train tickets for a month there will cost more than renting a room in much of the US.
4. Small businesses: Simply having more small businesses is not necessarily a good thing. Big ones have economies of scale and work more efficiently. Once again, the article defeats its own point. Take a closer look at the chart: the richest countries are all at the bottom: US, Germany, Denmark. And the country with the most small businesses? Greece... not exactly a shining beacon of prosperity right now.
5. Health: Finally a good point. However, simply ending the corn subsidy can do far more.
So if 107 alarmists told you that you were going to die very soon, and you didn't die, does that make you immortal?
Given that it killed off Western health workers, who aren't exactly poor, and West Africa having plenty of rich people (given their income disparity), there's plenty of profit to be made in making this vaccine. Even Western countries might buy a bunch just because they're so terrified of Ebola. Besides, it's got good PR value.
I feel like they tweaked the recommendations, and I'm not getting as many videos coming from my subscriptions.
That said, I like getting more exposure to channels I haven't subscribed to. I found some awesome channels that way.
tl;dr: UBI solves the problem for single-author works, while commissions are a much better way to produce collaborative works.
I personally feel the best type of content is the type that will be created even if the creator knows their only reward is to have others consume it. The best books I've read are written by people who simply wanted to say something. The best music came from people who wanted to exhibit their musical ability. They may or may not be paid. It doesn't matter. As long as they have enough to live on, they will create those works. Because to not do so would be suffering.
To support these people as they create their first works, and for many other reasons which I won't go into, we should have UBI. After they earn some recognition, they can either take commissions from people who like their work or just continue living off of UBI and create what they want to create rather than what other people want.
So the question of economics really only matters when it's in a medium that requires collaboration by many people, such as a movie, because it's nearly impossible to get hundreds of people to all buy in on an idea and then spend months working on it. Plus, not all of them are in critical roles where passion is necessary. The guy that holds the microphone over the actors' heads for example.
This is where money comes in. The most important role of money in society is to organize and distribute scarce resources. It tells individuals how important something is. When the microphone guy asks, should I work on movie A or movie B, the answer is simple: the one that will pay him more money.
But then, how does a movie producer decide how much to pay everyone working on the movie? Well, that's a complicated question. But the practical answer is: he makes a guess. If he guesses wrong, he loses money. Over time, the worst-guessing producers goes bankrupt and stops making movies, and the quality of movies goes up.
All well and good right? Not at all!
You see, artistic works are very hit and miss. As investments, they're very risky. To pour half a billion into a movie, then hoping that it's not one of the 10% of movies that only makes a quarter of it back, is going to give any investor a heart attack. To mitigate the risk, producers do many things that are at best unhelpful to the artistic quality of the work, and at worst, stifles any creativity and novelty. They are: marketing and advertising, targeting certain viewership groups, removing potentially difficult or contentious themes, breaking a long work out into several parts, making unnecessary sequels and prequels that dilute the impact of a story, avoiding tragedies, and the worst of all, doing what was profitable last time.
This is how we end up with so many "flicks". Action flicks, romance flicks, comedy flicks... Now the theme seems to be superheroes, because everybody loves superheroes right? Plus, several superhero movies made a lot of money. "There can't possibly be too many superhero movies!" says the producer.
They know these types of movies won't make it huge, but they also don't lose much either. They are safe investments, which in turn, means they're safe artistically. But for artistic works, safe just means unremarkable, uninteresting, and of little value. It's like scientific research. You're only a genius if you're the first to discover it.
So how do we get away from making tons and tons of movies that are all basically the same? Well, the problem stems from risk. Investors don't like risk, so they avoid novel things, and therefore stifles creativity. But really, the risky part is the producers guessing what people would like to see. So the better option is to simply ask people what they like.
And the way to do that is with commissions. The creator first comes up with some ideas. Then people decide whether they really want to see that idea as a movie. They pool their money together, and viola, the movie has a budget.
With the tech
So writing software that beat the ex-world champion in Go was not innovative? Or creating the first self-driving car that could drive on the streets? Or building an on-demand translator that is actually usable? I guess you only consider something innovative if it was done by a small company.
Maybe illegal immigration is going down because there are no jobs, and the southern part of country is so full of Mexicans, it's basically Mexico. Nobody wants to go through all that hassle of immigrating just to end up in the exact same situation.
Would going down in history as the greatest president ever be in his interest?
Not that I expect him to, but why wouldn't he want it? He's already got everything money could buy.
I think the fact that it's been working is more of a coincidence than anything else. Because if Texas actually voted for the Dems, the other rural states would have no hope of turning around the election, at least, not without help from other states with big cities. In fact, the city population in Texas has been growing significantly, and cities are always liberal. So this might actually be true in the distant future.
Besides, even with the electoral college, 438 out of 538 electors are proportioned according to state population, or 81% of the vote. It's not really that effective, especially when you consider the fact that the senate can already block any legislation, and its votes are entirely based on the number of states.
It'd be hilarious if this turns out to be pushing against some aspect of the normally intangible fabric of space-time, after physicists so thoroughly debunked luminiferous ether. Or maybe Newton's 3rd law isn't true in some circumstances. Now that would be exciting.
When coding I often need documentation to several libraries, each with several classes that needs their own tab. And then I have a dozen search tabs (stackoverflow and similar sites). Then there's the bug tracker, with the bug I'm working on, and several related bugs for reference. Maybe there's a few tabs for mocks and other product descriptions too. In total I probably use 20-40 tabs to do just one thing.
But that's not all. I also switch context pretty often, so I use multiple desktops. For example, while I'm waiting for code to compile, I switch to another desktop to start writing a DB query. Once that's running, I head over to another desktop to do code reviews. Each task requires many tabs open so I can reference them without having to spend time searching my bookmarks, and they can add up very quickly.
I know Slashdot loves car analogies, but this is a particularly unfitting one. Unlike a car, in no way does running 100 tabs on you browser make your computer more likely to break. The moment you close them, your computer is back to where it was before you opened them.
Of the 538 electors, 438 are proportioned according to state population, or 81%. Is this better than a pure popular vote? Yes. Does it really protect the less populous states from the more populous ones? Not at all. And if you think this system is working, just wait until California and Texas finds something they agree on.
The electoral college was designed to prevent an overwhelming popular vote from a minority of states electing the president without getting input from the less populous states.
My point is that this is not true.
That's just not true. With the right selection of states, you'd only need the votes from 16% of the area of the US to get to electoral majority. Someone did the calculations for 2012, and here's an updated map for 2016. Now do those maps look representative of small states to you?
Not useless, just less useful. If even one city built smart roads that helps guide self-driving cars, it will make sense for that city's residents to buy self-driving cars. Most of the time they'll be driving in the city where the car drives itself, and when they leave it, they can still drive manually.
Given that self-driving cars are the future, smart roads do make sense. If you compare the total cost of building hundreds of millions of self-driving cars with the cost of making all roads smart, then I would expect the smart roads will win on cost. The signal transmitters can cost on the order of a Raspberry Pi, and you really only need a few of them at intersections, interchanges and construction zones, since lane-keeping is an already-solved problem.
Sometimes in an argument, you need to pull some evidence that the other side is a nutjob, and the best way to do that is to link to their own writings.
Other times, an uncommon opinion is actually better than the accepted one. If search engines, amongst other information sources, actively suppress them, then we'll enter an era of intellectual conservatism. New ideas often start unpopular and run counter to the mainstream ones, but eventually overtake them as more people encounter it, try to disprove it, then finally fail to do so and accepts them. Having search engines be the gate keepers will break that cycle. Society can only advance if it can let go of it's old ideas and accept new ones, but if the new ones are all smothered in the cradle, then how can society advance?
Let's take this idea for example: it is common knowledge is that communism is evil and is terrible for the people living under it. However, I can make an argument that it is in fact, not true. Compare for example, Haiti, a democratic, capitalist nation in the Caribbean, and Cuba, a communist dictatorship. They're both in the same geographic area. Both have populations of around 10 million. However, Haiti is one of the poorest nations around, with a per-capita GDP (PPP) of only $1,784, whereas Cuba is at $20,649, and that's with a US trade embargo in place. In fact, that makes Cuba above average.
Now is my idea crazy? Well, I came up with it 5 minutes ago, so it could very well be. But should it be suppressed and hidden away on the 4th or 5th page? Even when someone searches for "evidence that communism is better"?
Obviously, if a search engine could identify which ideas are good and which are pure fantasy, then this wouldn't be a problem. But that's not the case. In fact, I doubt even highly educated humans could accurately distinguish them.
There should be a point system that scales the punishment according to how many crimes they've committed. Steal once? They should get a slap on the wrist. Steal a hundred times? They need to be locked away for a long time.
If other people want to subsidize this kind of behavior, why are you against it? Your only responsibility is to pay taxes so that nobody has to starve or freeze to death. Even if they're making extra money on the side, they're not hurting you.
Maybe the guy will turn some of those hacked devices into TOR nodes and actually do some good for the world.
We should worry about the concentration of power rather than robots becoming sentient. Sentience is a long ways off, whereas even with the technology today, a single human can command a large number of autonomous drones and missiles. The more autonomy the weapon has, the less the human is required in the loop, which means eventually, a single general or hacker can command the equivalent of the entire armed forces. At that point, who can stop them from starting unnecessary wars or becoming dictators?
What? Since when does renting make you less American? You realize the majority of renters are young people who haven't yet acquired enough money to buy a house? People who are the children of land owners? They are the people who will be impacted by public policy 50 years down the road, and they have every reason to vote for a better future for America.
Obviously, visiting those sites will lead you to radicalize, and you'll probably end up in jail or worse.
... because central banks can then impose negative interest rates, and you'd have no place to hide your savings
Yes you do. Just buy stocks, bonds, forex, or gold. Have them shipped to you if you're that paranoid.
Besides, holding cash doesn't prevent them from imposing negative interest rates, they already do that with inflation.