If the DNC wasn't corrupt at the core you probably would have had Sanders instead....
It's a good thing that didn't happen. Trump probably could have beaten Sanders. I like Sanders quite a bit myself (even though I disagree with a lot of his policy positions, I think he's a good man and would make a fair president), but his extreme-left history makes him virtually unelectable in the generals. The RNC would have had a field day with anti-Bernie ads if he'd gotten the Democratic nod; there's just so much to draw on.
b) It isn't "rape" he's wanted for questioning over.
Sweden says it is. Specifically, it's a lesser degree of rape which doesn't involve violence but still includes non-consensual intercourse. I suppose your scare quotes are because this doesn't meet the your definition of rape?
The focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on "goods and services needed and desired by humans".
While I get your point, you're still wrong. Focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on calculating everything, and especially transfer of property.
There are certainly situations where there IS a need to calculate transfer of property, basically to ensure that everyone gets his share, but making these calculations the alpha and omega of all human relations is certainly not a law of nature - in many societies family relations are not calculation-based, for example.
You apparently didn't read the last paragraph of my post.
What people say they will do in a situation and what people do in a situation rarely have any correlation.
In this case I think people would do exactly what they say. The first day. Maybe the second. The extraordinarily fearful might last a week or two. The majority would probably find themselves looking in momentary panic when something unexpected happens for the first few months, but even that would pass.
Personally, I trust math. If you can show me properly-gathered and evaluated statistics that demonstrate that the car drives as well as or better than the average human driver, I'm more than happy to let it do its thing while I do mine. In fact, even ignoring that I'd rather not waste my time driving, the car is probably better at getting me where I'm going safely than I would be. While I think I'm quite a good driver, odds and the Dunning-Kruger effect mean that I'm likely pretty average -- or lower.
If the NSA does not want the hassle of whistleblowers, then it should simply follow the law.
"Simply follow the law" isn't really good enough, because people who want to justify their actions can almost always construe the law in their favor. The NSA is an excellent case in point: they simply determined that "collected" meant "looked at by a human", leaving them free to hoover up everything and to process it all electronically, presenting it to human eyes only when they could be reasonably certain that it involved something they were authorized to "collect". That's a rather ludicrous definition of "collect" but everyone wanted to accept it, the people in power got attorneys to say it in writing, and off they went, all quite convinced that they were following the law.
No organization of humans can be trusted to follow a set of rules they'd like to work around unless there is oversight. Government employees are quite scrupulous about following the law as they understand it, but without oversight they have a tremendous amount of flexibility in how they interpret it.
We task Congress with the job of overseeing the actions of our intelligence organizations, which makes them directly culpable for any creative interpretations of the law. This seems ideal, since you'd expect the body that makes the law to be the best possible authority on what it actually means. But what happened was that Congress, and in particular the House and Senate intelligence committees failed utterly at doing their job.
Snowden showed the world how badly those committees had failed. We shouldn't be surprised that their response is to excoriate him, because the alternative is to castigate themselves and they're not going to do that, especially not in an election year.
But many will do better than you condescendingly suppose.
But not most, and that will be a huge problem.
Assuming they get assistance with the transition, I think it will be most. Not neurosurgery, certainly but productive careers. Not that it won't still be a problem.
You make think you're funny, but you're actually ignorant. There are thousands and thousands of people in the US who pay Federal income tax, but cannot vote. They are visa holders.
Millions, actually. Many -- perhaps most -- undocumented immigrants also pay federal and state income taxes.
I mostly agree with your post, but I have to take issue with this:
A college education is now seen as a must and to get it means taking on substantial debt for a lot of people.
There's really no reason that a college education requires taking on debt. You don't have to go to a school that charges $25K per year in tuition, there are lots of smaller state schools which can educate you for $6K per year. For a young person with no family to support it's perfectly feasible to work part-time and summer jobs and pay your way through, graduating with no debt and even a small amount of money in the bank.
For older people with families to support it's harder, though.
Why do you think people like Donald Trump generate so much support? It is because vast swaths of our society that enjoyed relative financial security in the past, no longer do. Why do you think people are suspicious of immigration and trade deals? Because there aren't enough well paying jobs.
And because the people who support Trump don't have the education to realize that he would make it worse, not better.
Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy.
Then explain how national banks the world over create money from nothing.
What I said is the explanation. Money being a convenient fiction, banks can create it. Not just national banks, either. Every time a loan is made in the fractional reserve system, the lending bank creates most of the money it loans.
Explain how entire market sectors are dedicated to making money with money. They certainly are not using money as "a stand-in [to] represent real resources and labor."
By and large, they actually are. The financial system's competitive money movers are out for their own interest and don't care so much about the goods and services that underlie what they're doing, but what they're doing is pushing capital into the businesses that can most effectively use it... meaning they're enabling those who can most effectively produce goods and services people want to get the capital needed to produce. There are many layers of abstraction that obscure this, and there are some components of the financial system that are so distant from anything resembling real goods that there may not actually be any real connection. That's unfortunate, but on the grand scale a fairly minor flaw in the system and one that doesn't change the fundamental role and purpose of money, or even of financial systems.
Unless the federal reserve managed to find a way around the laws of physics and are creating real resources from nothing.
Obviously they're not. The money they create is a medium of exchange, not the resources it's used to represent. But it actually is true that creating money and lending it to businesses who need it to expand actually does produce the corresponding resources later... goods or services that are sold in order to pay off the debt (of invented money; thereby uninventing it), plus some more.
Well, you see, putting long haul truck drivers out of work will allow them to pursue their real passion of becoming a nuclear engineer or neurosurgeon. After all, anyone can do anything so long as they try really hard and get training.
On the other hand, many truck drivers are pretty intelligent people who are capable of doing something more valuable, but drifted into driving because it was easy and convenient. Several members of my family fall into that category. If they were to lose their trucking jobs and be given a little bit of assistance to get more education, they probably would go into various more useful and lucrative fields, especially engineering.
Not all, of course, and even many of those who might have been capable of doing something more challenging when they were young are now too old to spend a decade in school (as would be required for neurosurgery) to start a new career. But many will do better than you condescendingly suppose.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.
Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.
Comments like your betray a deep and important misunderstanding of what money is. Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy. The focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on "goods and services needed and desired by humans".
If what you're saying is that modern humanity is too materialistic, too focused on comfort and convenience and too accustomed to living in a world of plenty, you can make that argument. But complaining about a focus on money just demonstrates that you don't understand what money is.
Note that I'm not claiming that money is the only way to manage the production and exchange of goods and services. It's just the best one we've yet found in an environment of economic scarcity. If automation transitions us to a post-scarcity economy, in which there's so much of everything that everyone can have whatever they like, money may no longer be a good way to manage it. But we're certainly not there yet.
Is there any real life example of people in USA who suffered from surveillance of the NSA over the last decade or two?
There is documented evidence of the chilling effect that the spying has had on the press. Outside of that, obviously you're not going to find any direct evidence of injury because it's all covered in secrecy. You'd have to be able to get into the files and see what they did and when and why.
This being Android, if enough people are upset about it, someone will create a widget which lets you change the setting with a single tap whenever you want.
After one of the more recent OS updates I noticed that my android phone would now tell me every morning just before I left for work how long my commute would be. Even though I've never identified my work address as "work", it has (probably easily) figured out where I work and tries to be helpful by doing a quick route lookup just before the usual time it detects that I leave the house.
I work from home and live near a ski resort, which makes it very easy for me to go skiing on a regular basis during the winter. So, my typical winter workday is to start work at 6, work until 8:45 then drive to the resort, arriving right at 9 when the lifts open, ski for a couple of hours, then back home to work until 5 or so, with a break for lunch.
So, Google noticed that I drive to this location every weekday morning, arriving at 9 AM. Obviously I must work there, right? I didn't correct it, because having Google Now pop up with traffic conditions for the route to the ski resort was quite useful.
Society's perspective is always about survival, so the purpose of corporation is to be "job creators" and what the business produces is secondary.
Those of us who like to eat, wear clothing, communicate electronically and a million and one other things beg to disagree. The stuff that businesses produce is rather important at every level of Maslow's hierarchy.
seriously you may or may not have your wallet? but you always have your phone? what fucked up universe do you live in where you think that is the norm.
I never claimed it was the norm. However, it's not all that uncommon, especially among younger people.
You'd better keep your license with you while you're driving. In my state you could still get a ticket for driving without a license, whether you have the number memorized or not. Asking a cop to look it up is a waste of time. He'll just write the ticket. If you take your license with you to court, the judge will throw out the case, but look at the time you've lost going to court.
Same in my state, excepting that state law actually requires the judge to dismiss it if I show up and present my DL.
OTOH, I haven't been pulled over in, what, 10 years? An hour spent going to court once every decade or two is likely to be less than the cumulative time required to handle my DL on a daily basis.
When I leave the house, my "must have" items are: ID, CC, keys and cash.
My only "must have" item is my phone.
I take a car key and driver's license if I'm driving. I never carry a house key. I always enter through the garage, opening it with the numeric keypad or -- more often -- with my phone, using an Android app I wrote that establishes a secure connection to an Arduino controller connected to the garage door opener.
In the not-too-distant future I expect to be able to use my phone to unlock and start my car. At that point, I really hope I can also put my ID on my phone, so the phone will be the only thing I need to carry, ever.
Slashdot Mirror
If the DNC wasn't corrupt at the core you probably would have had Sanders instead....
It's a good thing that didn't happen. Trump probably could have beaten Sanders. I like Sanders quite a bit myself (even though I disagree with a lot of his policy positions, I think he's a good man and would make a fair president), but his extreme-left history makes him virtually unelectable in the generals. The RNC would have had a field day with anti-Bernie ads if he'd gotten the Democratic nod; there's just so much to draw on.
He quotes it because the evidence better supports trumped-up charges.
The charges may be trumped up, but that doesn't change the nature of the alleged offense which is rape, per Swedish law.
a) He hasn't been charged with anything
Only because he can't be charged in absentia.
b) It isn't "rape" he's wanted for questioning over.
Sweden says it is. Specifically, it's a lesser degree of rape which doesn't involve violence but still includes non-consensual intercourse. I suppose your scare quotes are because this doesn't meet the your definition of rape?
The focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on "goods and services needed and desired by humans".
While I get your point, you're still wrong. Focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on calculating everything, and especially transfer of property. There are certainly situations where there IS a need to calculate transfer of property, basically to ensure that everyone gets his share, but making these calculations the alpha and omega of all human relations is certainly not a law of nature - in many societies family relations are not calculation-based, for example.
You apparently didn't read the last paragraph of my post.
What people say they will do in a situation and what people do in a situation rarely have any correlation.
In this case I think people would do exactly what they say. The first day. Maybe the second. The extraordinarily fearful might last a week or two. The majority would probably find themselves looking in momentary panic when something unexpected happens for the first few months, but even that would pass.
Personally, I trust math. If you can show me properly-gathered and evaluated statistics that demonstrate that the car drives as well as or better than the average human driver, I'm more than happy to let it do its thing while I do mine. In fact, even ignoring that I'd rather not waste my time driving, the car is probably better at getting me where I'm going safely than I would be. While I think I'm quite a good driver, odds and the Dunning-Kruger effect mean that I'm likely pretty average -- or lower.
Sorry I missed the US part :)
Yeah, it's 177 wordwide, but the previous poster claimed that figure for the US only. That's what I was correcting.
If the NSA does not want the hassle of whistleblowers, then it should simply follow the law.
"Simply follow the law" isn't really good enough, because people who want to justify their actions can almost always construe the law in their favor. The NSA is an excellent case in point: they simply determined that "collected" meant "looked at by a human", leaving them free to hoover up everything and to process it all electronically, presenting it to human eyes only when they could be reasonably certain that it involved something they were authorized to "collect". That's a rather ludicrous definition of "collect" but everyone wanted to accept it, the people in power got attorneys to say it in writing, and off they went, all quite convinced that they were following the law.
No organization of humans can be trusted to follow a set of rules they'd like to work around unless there is oversight. Government employees are quite scrupulous about following the law as they understand it, but without oversight they have a tremendous amount of flexibility in how they interpret it.
We task Congress with the job of overseeing the actions of our intelligence organizations, which makes them directly culpable for any creative interpretations of the law. This seems ideal, since you'd expect the body that makes the law to be the best possible authority on what it actually means. But what happened was that Congress, and in particular the House and Senate intelligence committees failed utterly at doing their job.
Snowden showed the world how badly those committees had failed. We shouldn't be surprised that their response is to excoriate him, because the alternative is to castigate themselves and they're not going to do that, especially not in an election year.
they have about 170 of them throughout the entire US
There are 81 in the US. http://www.ldschurchtemples.co...
But many will do better than you condescendingly suppose.
But not most, and that will be a huge problem.
Assuming they get assistance with the transition, I think it will be most. Not neurosurgery, certainly but productive careers. Not that it won't still be a problem.
There is no way that any relativistic calculation changes a jota on such an orbit versus a newtonian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity
Even in a futuristic "post-scarcity" economy, money will still be needed for the oldest and grandest of all services: prostitution.
What would motivate prostitutes in a post-scarcity world?
False. Cash is more secure. It only makes a payment when I hand it over.
If someone steals your phone, they can't use it to spend your money -- and even if they somehow did, your bank would take the hit not you.
If someone steals your cash, it's gone.
You make think you're funny, but you're actually ignorant. There are thousands and thousands of people in the US who pay Federal income tax, but cannot vote. They are visa holders.
Millions, actually. Many -- perhaps most -- undocumented immigrants also pay federal and state income taxes.
I mostly agree with your post, but I have to take issue with this:
A college education is now seen as a must and to get it means taking on substantial debt for a lot of people.
There's really no reason that a college education requires taking on debt. You don't have to go to a school that charges $25K per year in tuition, there are lots of smaller state schools which can educate you for $6K per year. For a young person with no family to support it's perfectly feasible to work part-time and summer jobs and pay your way through, graduating with no debt and even a small amount of money in the bank.
For older people with families to support it's harder, though.
Why do you think people like Donald Trump generate so much support? It is because vast swaths of our society that enjoyed relative financial security in the past, no longer do. Why do you think people are suspicious of immigration and trade deals? Because there aren't enough well paying jobs.
And because the people who support Trump don't have the education to realize that he would make it worse, not better.
Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy.
Then explain how national banks the world over create money from nothing.
What I said is the explanation. Money being a convenient fiction, banks can create it. Not just national banks, either. Every time a loan is made in the fractional reserve system, the lending bank creates most of the money it loans.
Explain how entire market sectors are dedicated to making money with money. They certainly are not using money as "a stand-in [to] represent real resources and labor."
By and large, they actually are. The financial system's competitive money movers are out for their own interest and don't care so much about the goods and services that underlie what they're doing, but what they're doing is pushing capital into the businesses that can most effectively use it... meaning they're enabling those who can most effectively produce goods and services people want to get the capital needed to produce. There are many layers of abstraction that obscure this, and there are some components of the financial system that are so distant from anything resembling real goods that there may not actually be any real connection. That's unfortunate, but on the grand scale a fairly minor flaw in the system and one that doesn't change the fundamental role and purpose of money, or even of financial systems.
Unless the federal reserve managed to find a way around the laws of physics and are creating real resources from nothing.
Obviously they're not. The money they create is a medium of exchange, not the resources it's used to represent. But it actually is true that creating money and lending it to businesses who need it to expand actually does produce the corresponding resources later... goods or services that are sold in order to pay off the debt (of invented money; thereby uninventing it), plus some more.
Well, you see, putting long haul truck drivers out of work will allow them to pursue their real passion of becoming a nuclear engineer or neurosurgeon. After all, anyone can do anything so long as they try really hard and get training.
On the other hand, many truck drivers are pretty intelligent people who are capable of doing something more valuable, but drifted into driving because it was easy and convenient. Several members of my family fall into that category. If they were to lose their trucking jobs and be given a little bit of assistance to get more education, they probably would go into various more useful and lucrative fields, especially engineering.
Not all, of course, and even many of those who might have been capable of doing something more challenging when they were young are now too old to spend a decade in school (as would be required for neurosurgery) to start a new career. But many will do better than you condescendingly suppose.
Instead, we should pay people to achieve the goals of civilization: [...]
Who is this "we" that's doing the paying?
That's the problem with society today. We seemingly only find value in the almighty dollar.
Humans have already proven for thousands of years that money is not a necessary component of survival, no matter how the world today wants to paint it.
Comments like your betray a deep and important misunderstanding of what money is. Money is a convenient fiction, no more and no less. It's a stand-in that we use to represent real resources and labor, to make exchanging them easy. The focus on "the almighty dollar" is actually a focus on "goods and services needed and desired by humans".
If what you're saying is that modern humanity is too materialistic, too focused on comfort and convenience and too accustomed to living in a world of plenty, you can make that argument. But complaining about a focus on money just demonstrates that you don't understand what money is.
Note that I'm not claiming that money is the only way to manage the production and exchange of goods and services. It's just the best one we've yet found in an environment of economic scarcity. If automation transitions us to a post-scarcity economy, in which there's so much of everything that everyone can have whatever they like, money may no longer be a good way to manage it. But we're certainly not there yet.
Is there any real life example of people in USA who suffered from surveillance of the NSA over the last decade or two?
There is documented evidence of the chilling effect that the spying has had on the press. Outside of that, obviously you're not going to find any direct evidence of injury because it's all covered in secrecy. You'd have to be able to get into the files and see what they did and when and why.
This being Android, if enough people are upset about it, someone will create a widget which lets you change the setting with a single tap whenever you want.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mayhemsoftware.com.locationservicesshortcut
Not quite a single tap, but close.
After one of the more recent OS updates I noticed that my android phone would now tell me every morning just before I left for work how long my commute would be. Even though I've never identified my work address as "work", it has (probably easily) figured out where I work and tries to be helpful by doing a quick route lookup just before the usual time it detects that I leave the house.
I work from home and live near a ski resort, which makes it very easy for me to go skiing on a regular basis during the winter. So, my typical winter workday is to start work at 6, work until 8:45 then drive to the resort, arriving right at 9 when the lifts open, ski for a couple of hours, then back home to work until 5 or so, with a break for lunch.
So, Google noticed that I drive to this location every weekday morning, arriving at 9 AM. Obviously I must work there, right? I didn't correct it, because having Google Now pop up with traffic conditions for the route to the ski resort was quite useful.
Obligatory XKCD (yesterday's, actually, but very much on-point): http://xkcd.com/1732/
Society's perspective is always about survival, so the purpose of corporation is to be "job creators" and what the business produces is secondary.
Those of us who like to eat, wear clothing, communicate electronically and a million and one other things beg to disagree. The stuff that businesses produce is rather important at every level of Maslow's hierarchy.
seriously you may or may not have your wallet? but you always have your phone? what fucked up universe do you live in where you think that is the norm.
I never claimed it was the norm. However, it's not all that uncommon, especially among younger people.
You'd better keep your license with you while you're driving. In my state you could still get a ticket for driving without a license, whether you have the number memorized or not. Asking a cop to look it up is a waste of time. He'll just write the ticket. If you take your license with you to court, the judge will throw out the case, but look at the time you've lost going to court.
Same in my state, excepting that state law actually requires the judge to dismiss it if I show up and present my DL.
OTOH, I haven't been pulled over in, what, 10 years? An hour spent going to court once every decade or two is likely to be less than the cumulative time required to handle my DL on a daily basis.
When I leave the house, my "must have" items are: ID, CC, keys and cash.
My only "must have" item is my phone.
I take a car key and driver's license if I'm driving. I never carry a house key. I always enter through the garage, opening it with the numeric keypad or -- more often -- with my phone, using an Android app I wrote that establishes a secure connection to an Arduino controller connected to the garage door opener.
In the not-too-distant future I expect to be able to use my phone to unlock and start my car. At that point, I really hope I can also put my ID on my phone, so the phone will be the only thing I need to carry, ever.