I guess I should have said "people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important area of cognitive ability", to make the point clearer.
There would be a certain amount of resistance to that, but only because we have been there before and found that such claims tend to be unfounded.
Okay, I'm done with this conversation, because you're clearly blind. I don't know whether it's willful, but there is a long history of huge resistance to that exact concept. Career-destroying resistance that takes no note of the strength or weakness of the actual research and occasionally edges into violence.
Note that I agree that the apparently race-related variance in cognitive ability is proven to be cultural, not racial, in origin. Further, I don't believe races are actually a biological thing; they're primarily a social construct. My favorite evidence of that is the research showing that going to prison may turn you black. But it's critical that researchers not be attacked professionally and personally for uncomfortable ideas.
You really don't want to believe that happens. But you're flat wrong.
There have also been cases of regimes who purged academia entirely, because they perceived anyone with an education as opposed to their ideology.
True, but many of those educated people were in favor of totalitarian regimes and then are quite surprised when they are carted off to the firing squad.
Beware any ideology that believes in itself so much that it can contemplate purges of any sort.
Beware of any intellectual claiming that they want to protect you from totalitarianism, because most of them are lying.
Beware of anyone claiming they want to protect you from anything. I won't go so far as to claim that most of them are lying, but some of them are.
Without all the tracking and authoritarian features they've been crying for all these decades. Why do we suddenly need them now?
I don't think we do.
However, your question is disingenuous. Even if the Internet has gotten along well so far (which is a claim that really needs to be defined and supported, but I'll ignore that), society's level of dependence on the Internet clearly has changed. As the Internet becomes more and more central to everyone's lives, the context and implications change. When there were only a handful of horseless carriages tooling around on rutted dirt roads the need for regulating them was nil. Within a decade virtually the same vehicles were a major part of traffic and the need for regulation became significant. Within a few more decades they became central to life in the developed world and regulation became critical.
If your argument is "why now?", there is no need for a sharp answer. As a process of gradual change continues, problems become gradually more clear and the level of interest in addressing them gradually rises until it surfaces in the public discourse. This is normal.
At this point, this is a debate that we do need to have or, more precisely, to continue having. There are difficult issues here, of how to balance the public interest in law enforcement and security against the public interest in freedom of speech, association and other actions. Anyone who admits only one side or the other of these questions needs to learn some history and to study the way the same issues have been balanced in the past, in other contexts.
My preference is to err on the side of freedom, and even to accept a certain level of crime and public safety risk as the price of that freedom. But there is room for -- and need for -- constructive debate.
You mean, several hundred thousand years of hominid evolution in the natural world, wasn't a key indicator?
We've only had 'screen-learning', what, a few decades at most? Sure. That's clearly the better environment..../s
Hominids have also relied solely on their legs for transportation for several hundreds of thousands of years. We've only had horses and camels for a few millennia, steam-powered trains for a couple of centuries, cars for just over a century and jet airplanes for a few decades... so surely using only legs to get around is better.
Everything has pros and cons, and the only way to figure out what is better is to actually try it and observe the results. Arguing that X is better just because it's what humans have done for a long time is just stupid. In some cases it might be true, but counterexamples abound.
Suppose, for example, that some highly qualified, methodical and determinedly unbiased researcher has conducted a brilliant set of experiments which appear to show that people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important way. The work appears to be extremely well-conceived and well-executed. Now think about which universities you're familiar with would be interested in employing her and funding her research. TU would care only about the quality of her research. SJU would give at least as much weight to the potential social impact.
This is actually quite common, especially in medical and sports sciences.
But Haidt is talking about the social sciences. I guess I should have said "people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important area of cognitive ability", to make the point clearer. (Note that I'm not making the claim that such exists; merely proposing a hypothetical of a scientific result. If you find yourself unable to grant the hypothetical premise, you should think about what that means.)
If social justice was not interested in truth, rational argument and careful wide-ranging research without artificial limits then it wouldn't be so strong in academia.
It should also be noted that the phenomenon Haidt is describing is less about the goals and behaviors of academics, and more about the goals and behaviors of administrators and students. Yes, researchers want to study whatever they find interesting and they tend to have a very narrow focus and relatively little concern for the big picture, especially when they're in the process of producing substantial new results. This focus is necessary and appropriate. It's when the researchers become older and their work is mostly supervisory, or when academics go into administration which leads them to be primarily concerned with internal and external relationships, that the suppressive influences arise.
A minority of students (about 20%, according to recent research) have begun demanding that their university experience be made "safe" for them, with extensive demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces, and suppression of ideas that contradict their notions of social justice. SJUs are the ones who listen to these student demands and similar external pressures. TUs are the ones who declare that students' must be exposed to the broadest selection of views. As Chicago University put it in its letter to the class of 2020:
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called “trigger warnings,” we
do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone
the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at
odds with their own.
In contrast, Brown president tries to defend academic freedom while simultaneously defending safe spaces, trigger warnings and the de-invitation of speakers who have bad ideas. Her letter to the Washington Post is written so that it's easy to extract quotes arguing for unlimited academic freedom, but the overall narrative is the opposite.
If you truly haven't seen the suppression of academic freedom in the name of political correctness, I highly recommend that you read the first few chapter's of Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate". Even if you don't agree with the larger conclusions of the book, the first few chapters provide a great overview of how extensively politically incorrect research has been suppressed over the last two or three decades.
There have also been cases of regimes who purged academia entirely, because they perceived anyone with an education as opposed to their ideology. The Khmer Rough are perhaps the best example. Populists, like Trump, lean this way as well.
Beware any ideology that believes in itself so much that it can contemplate purges of any sort.
I read that blog post and he has some weird ideas about social justice. The "blasphemy" section is a great example, where he says that "Truth U" has no such thing but "Social Justice U" has many things that cannot be said. That's clearly and rather obviously nonsense.
It is not nonsensical at all, though it is perhaps a bit hyperbolic. It might be better to say that TU aspires to mark no investigation as off limits, while SJU aspires to discover only that which does not damage social justice.
Suppose, for example, that some highly qualified, methodical and determinedly unbiased researcher has conducted a brilliant set of experiments which appear to show that people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important way. The work appears to be extremely well-conceived and well-executed. Now think about which universities you're familiar with would be interested in employing her and funding her research. TU would care only about the quality of her research. SJU would give at least as much weight to the potential social impact.
In practice if someone were to actually set up either of these I think they would both simply attract trolls. Having a mixture is the best option, because none of this stuff is all that useful in isolation anyway.
Of course real universities are not pure TU or pure SJU. Haidt's point is that we appear to be moving toward a situation where the conflicts between social justice on the left and attempts to relabel conservative orthodoxy as truth on the right are so sharp that it becomes impossible for SJU-like universities to support any research that might undermine their political goals, which in turn forces universities to decide explicitly whether they're willing to take the political risks inherent in an unconstrained search for truth. Those who are will appear to those who are not as opponents of social justice (note that there are also conservative "SJUs" who also constrain research, but in a different direction).
As an aside, if this blog post is your first exposure to Haidt's research and ideas, you should do some reading -- and you should note that Haidt, himself, is a social justice-favoring moderate leftist. He has a tendency to apply the results of his research a little more broadly than is really warranted by the research itself, but don't let that blind you to the value of his ideas. His Moral Foundations theory is powerful and well-supported. Which isn't to say that it's "correct" in any absolute sense, science can never provide certainty, but until another theory that better fits the data comes along it's the best tool we have for analyzing the moral basis of human motives. If you're not familiar with it, you should read it.
Haidt does little more than regurgitate Schopenhauer—badly.
If you believe that, then you don't understand either. Really, the only commonality between them is that both view ethics and morality as phenomena to study rather than sets of principles to define. But even there, Schopenhauer lacked both the perspective and the tools needed to actually study how human ethical systems really work. That requires data gathering techniques from modern sociology and psychology and analytic techniques from modern-ish statistics. So even in the occasions where Schopenhauer's and Haidt's theories coincide, the former are philosophical, based on navel gazing, and the latter scientific, based on falsifiable research.
Also, if you're looking for an 18th-century philosopher whose ideas track most closely to Haidt's discoveries, Hume is a much better fit than Schopenhauer. Granted that Schopenhauer was a big fan of Hume and there is a lot of commonality between their ideas.
App stores are a way of bringing the benefits of unix package managers to a wider audience.
You mean Linux package managers. AFAICT, this notion was invented by the Linux community, specifically Debian -- and it's a really good idea, so I want credit apportioned correctly.
As long as they are not the only method of installing, they can be very nice.
I would say that while it's important that they not be the only method of installing, it's also important that they be the primary method of installing. I think this move by Epic is bad for the Android ecosystem because if end users get accustomed to grabbing APKs from random places, a large percentage of those APKs will be malware.
F-droid and other alternative app stores, on the other hand, are great. The best approach is freedom to choose between multiple curated app stores. Freedom to download from other places is also important, but that should not be a common thing.
How many times are you really going to listen to that same song?
Just as I've done all my life: as many times as I freaking want to, without worrying about whether I have a network connection and without getting billed for it each and every time, thanks very much.
Meh. If I want to listen to a song without a network connection, I just hit "download", and then it's on my device. Actually what I really do is hit the "Thumbs up" button, and I have the auto-generated thumbs up playlist set to download. So if I get a new phone, I just have to hit "download" on the thumbs up playlist and pretty soon I have my whole collection available for offline listening with almost zero effort.
I don't get billed for each time I listen to a song. I pay a flat monthly fee, for which I have access to basically all published music. Whatever I want to listen to, I can. If it's not already downloaded I'll have to have a network connection, but I nearly always do.
I used to say that subscription music services were stupid and swear that I would never use such a thing. Then I tried it, and now I can't imagine ever going back to buying albums. It's not just the convenience, it's the freedom to listen to absolutely anything I want to, even something I haven't bought because I'd never heard of it until two seconds ago. If I'm walking around and hear bit of a song I like, I can listen to the whole thing, or the whole album, or the artist's entire discography. Streamed or downloaded, my choice.
Subscription music is awesome. Yeah, I have to pay every month, but I end up spending roughly the same amount of money on music as when I was buying a few albums a year. And I get so much more music, so much more conveniently.
You didn't answer my question: why is it important what country they settle in? Is it more important for them to contribute to Australias economy, or the US economy or India's economy? That is very Nationalist of you.
From the perspective of humanity as a whole, it matters only that the brightest people get the resources they need to realize their full potential.
From the perspective of any one nation, smart people want all of the big brains to live and work in their country, which means they want a fairly open immigration policy. This is an approach that worked fantastically well for the US in the 20th century. Idiots prefer to harass foreign visitors and build walls, ensuring that the smart people from every other country stay away.
Put some numbers to it. Mean per capita income in 2017 was $50,392. So to fund a $12K per year UBI you have to add a 24% flat tax (ideally you should be able to offset that by cutting the progressive tax because of the other welfare programs you can cut, but let's ignore that -- particularly because this program wouldn't replace all of them.).
Assuming two-adult households, no UBI for kids, and no change to earnings (which would not be true, see below), here are some numbers for pre-UBI income and net UBI income (income plus UBI less UBI taxes).
Not bad. Of course, the big wildcard is the assumption that people stick with their current jobs / incomes. We don't really know what would happen there.
We're probably safe to assume that in the short term some people would stop working and live on their UBI while they go to school to move themselves up the income ladder. Others might quit their current jobs and start businesses. It seems likely that there would be some changes at the bottom of the pay scales (I'm assuming that the minimum wage would be abolished with enactment of a UBI) as employers might be able to pay less because their employees would need less... but maybe not too much less because employees would feel more freedom to walk away from jobs they dislike.
Some percentage of the low-income population might well decide that the UBI is enough for them and just choose not to work any more. I don't think this group would be large, but we can't really know.
Assuming UBI is not available to unemancipated teens, it would have some interesting effects on teen employment, since young adults eligible for UBI would in many cases be willing to work for less than ineligible teens. I assume teens would still be paying the UBI tax.
We really need some large-scale, long-term UBI tests to find out how people really respond, what decisions they make. And these tests need to be performed in different areas, in different cultures, because there's no reason to believe that every culture will react the same.
Finally, the whole thing assumes that you have a 4G or 5G connection all of the time wherever you go.
And the data plan blil for that is substantially more expensive than buying a traditional laptop and relying on sync whenever you're at home or an open WLAN.*
Chromebooks can function offline and sync when Wifi is available just fine. No mobile data connection is required.
In the second stage, with controls for all forms of aid, the authors found that each additional Pell grant dollar to an institution leads to about a 55-cent increase in sticker price tuition. For subsidized loans, they a found a somewhat larger passthrough effect of 70 percent, and for unsubsidized loans, the loading of tuition is about 30 percent. Those results, which are identified through cross-sectional exposures to the changes in student federal aid programs between 2007 and 2010 and contain numerous controls for other effects, support the hypothesis that increases in federal support for higher education lead to increases in tuition and not the other way around. The finding for subsidized loans is quite strong across different regression specifications in both magnitude and statistical significance.
Leaded gas was still available for automotive use at least into the early eighties, even in California. It wasn't fully banned until 1988.
Levels were lowered significantly in the mid 70s, though, and blood lead levels started to decline by the late 70s. Though I suppose the "our children" comment can apply to people who are a few years older than me; my oldest was born in 1993.
And it's still being used in aviation, on planes with absolutely zero emissions equipment, and a strong tendency to throw unburned fuel right out the tailpipe (especially during takeoff.)
People who live right next to airports may need to be concerned (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/), but across the population as a whole, blood lead levels have dropped to pre-leaded gas levels.
Back to the point, this is clearly much less of a concern than mountains of rotting manure.
It doesn't. Blood lead levels in children have dropped to pre leaded-gas days. Indeed they dropped off very quickly once we stopped pumping the stuff into the atmosphere and painting our walls with it.
I know lots of gun owners who hate Trump... including for the fact that they don't trust a New Yorker and sometime Democrat to actually care about protecting gun rights. Sure, he says the right things (except when he doesn't; see his comments after the Parkland shooting before his handlers managed to reign him in), but to anyone with a brain it's clearly just a position adopted out of convenience to pander to his base, not a real conviction.
Although half of them would be on the side of tyranny.
Why do you say that? Guns only become important for liberty when the democratic processes have already broken down and a minority is oppressing the majority.
As far as I know you can't manufacture the parts needed to turn a semi auto into full auto even though it's trivial to do so.
You can manufacture any gun you can legally possess. Since you can't legally possess a fully automatic firearm (without a tax stamp, and even then only if the gun existed prior to 1986, which by definition it didn't if you're building it in 2018), you can't manufacture one. Manufacturing the parts so that you can turn a semi auto into full auto in minutes is equivalent to manufacturing a fully automatic firearm.
The Hyundai Kona is the first affordable, long range model, for example. It's got autopilot, 300 mile range, decent performance etc. Costs $20,000 less than a Model 3 equivalent and is available to buy.
Where can I buy one? The Hyundai web site allows me to order an ICE version, or sign up for email alerts for "availability and pricing".
Also, other carmakers are lagging Tesla in another area as well: fast charging. I own two EVs (2012 Nissan LEAF and 2014 Tesla Model S 60) so I understand the charging dynamics very well, and for most people there's very little point in more than about 200 miles' range if you don't have a fast charging solution for road trips. For commuting and around town, 200 miles is fine -- heck my 70-mile LEAF is mostly just fine for those purposes -- because the car is full every morning and who drives 200+ miles in a day bopping around town?
I suppose people who live in more densely-populated countries might be able to take a road trip to their destination with a 300-mile range, then charge overnight and return, but in the US road trips normally start at about 500 miles, and 1000+-mile trips aren't uncommon. To do that you need (1) enough range to drive to the next meal or bathroom break using no more than 80% of the battery and (2) a network of fast chargers able to refill that battery in 30 minutes or so. A 300-mile battery is achieves the first, but you need a solution for the second. Actually the second is more important. With enough fast chargers you can get by with a smaller battery. My Model S only has about 200 miles of range, but I can take it most anywhere in the US that's within 70 miles of an Interstate. Charging stops increase travel time by about 20% over the way I'd drive an ICEV on a similar trip, but it's workable.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I should have said "people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important area of cognitive ability", to make the point clearer.
There would be a certain amount of resistance to that, but only because we have been there before and found that such claims tend to be unfounded.
Okay, I'm done with this conversation, because you're clearly blind. I don't know whether it's willful, but there is a long history of huge resistance to that exact concept. Career-destroying resistance that takes no note of the strength or weakness of the actual research and occasionally edges into violence.
Note that I agree that the apparently race-related variance in cognitive ability is proven to be cultural, not racial, in origin. Further, I don't believe races are actually a biological thing; they're primarily a social construct. My favorite evidence of that is the research showing that going to prison may turn you black. But it's critical that researchers not be attacked professionally and personally for uncomfortable ideas.
You really don't want to believe that happens. But you're flat wrong.
True, but many of those educated people were in favor of totalitarian regimes and then are quite surprised when they are carted off to the firing squad.
Beware of any intellectual claiming that they want to protect you from totalitarianism, because most of them are lying.
Beware of anyone claiming they want to protect you from anything. I won't go so far as to claim that most of them are lying, but some of them are.
Without all the tracking and authoritarian features they've been crying for all these decades. Why do we suddenly need them now?
I don't think we do.
However, your question is disingenuous. Even if the Internet has gotten along well so far (which is a claim that really needs to be defined and supported, but I'll ignore that), society's level of dependence on the Internet clearly has changed. As the Internet becomes more and more central to everyone's lives, the context and implications change. When there were only a handful of horseless carriages tooling around on rutted dirt roads the need for regulating them was nil. Within a decade virtually the same vehicles were a major part of traffic and the need for regulation became significant. Within a few more decades they became central to life in the developed world and regulation became critical.
If your argument is "why now?", there is no need for a sharp answer. As a process of gradual change continues, problems become gradually more clear and the level of interest in addressing them gradually rises until it surfaces in the public discourse. This is normal.
At this point, this is a debate that we do need to have or, more precisely, to continue having. There are difficult issues here, of how to balance the public interest in law enforcement and security against the public interest in freedom of speech, association and other actions. Anyone who admits only one side or the other of these questions needs to learn some history and to study the way the same issues have been balanced in the past, in other contexts.
My preference is to err on the side of freedom, and even to accept a certain level of crime and public safety risk as the price of that freedom. But there is room for -- and need for -- constructive debate.
You mean, several hundred thousand years of hominid evolution in the natural world, wasn't a key indicator?
We've only had 'screen-learning', what, a few decades at most? Sure. That's clearly the better environment.... /s
Hominids have also relied solely on their legs for transportation for several hundreds of thousands of years. We've only had horses and camels for a few millennia, steam-powered trains for a couple of centuries, cars for just over a century and jet airplanes for a few decades... so surely using only legs to get around is better.
Everything has pros and cons, and the only way to figure out what is better is to actually try it and observe the results. Arguing that X is better just because it's what humans have done for a long time is just stupid. In some cases it might be true, but counterexamples abound.
Suppose, for example, that some highly qualified, methodical and determinedly unbiased researcher has conducted a brilliant set of experiments which appear to show that people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important way. The work appears to be extremely well-conceived and well-executed. Now think about which universities you're familiar with would be interested in employing her and funding her research. TU would care only about the quality of her research. SJU would give at least as much weight to the potential social impact.
This is actually quite common, especially in medical and sports sciences.
But Haidt is talking about the social sciences. I guess I should have said "people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important area of cognitive ability", to make the point clearer. (Note that I'm not making the claim that such exists; merely proposing a hypothetical of a scientific result. If you find yourself unable to grant the hypothetical premise, you should think about what that means.)
If social justice was not interested in truth, rational argument and careful wide-ranging research without artificial limits then it wouldn't be so strong in academia.
It should also be noted that the phenomenon Haidt is describing is less about the goals and behaviors of academics, and more about the goals and behaviors of administrators and students. Yes, researchers want to study whatever they find interesting and they tend to have a very narrow focus and relatively little concern for the big picture, especially when they're in the process of producing substantial new results. This focus is necessary and appropriate. It's when the researchers become older and their work is mostly supervisory, or when academics go into administration which leads them to be primarily concerned with internal and external relationships, that the suppressive influences arise.
A minority of students (about 20%, according to recent research) have begun demanding that their university experience be made "safe" for them, with extensive demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces, and suppression of ideas that contradict their notions of social justice. SJUs are the ones who listen to these student demands and similar external pressures. TUs are the ones who declare that students' must be exposed to the broadest selection of views. As Chicago University put it in its letter to the class of 2020:
In contrast, Brown president tries to defend academic freedom while simultaneously defending safe spaces, trigger warnings and the de-invitation of speakers who have bad ideas. Her letter to the Washington Post is written so that it's easy to extract quotes arguing for unlimited academic freedom, but the overall narrative is the opposite.
If you truly haven't seen the suppression of academic freedom in the name of political correctness, I highly recommend that you read the first few chapter's of Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate". Even if you don't agree with the larger conclusions of the book, the first few chapters provide a great overview of how extensively politically incorrect research has been suppressed over the last two or three decades.
It would be like the self-proclaimed "rationals",
There have also been cases of regimes who purged academia entirely, because they perceived anyone with an education as opposed to their ideology. The Khmer Rough are perhaps the best example. Populists, like Trump, lean this way as well.
Beware any ideology that believes in itself so much that it can contemplate purges of any sort.
I read that blog post and he has some weird ideas about social justice. The "blasphemy" section is a great example, where he says that "Truth U" has no such thing but "Social Justice U" has many things that cannot be said. That's clearly and rather obviously nonsense.
It is not nonsensical at all, though it is perhaps a bit hyperbolic. It might be better to say that TU aspires to mark no investigation as off limits, while SJU aspires to discover only that which does not damage social justice.
Suppose, for example, that some highly qualified, methodical and determinedly unbiased researcher has conducted a brilliant set of experiments which appear to show that people of one race are consistently superior to people of another race in some important way. The work appears to be extremely well-conceived and well-executed. Now think about which universities you're familiar with would be interested in employing her and funding her research. TU would care only about the quality of her research. SJU would give at least as much weight to the potential social impact.
In practice if someone were to actually set up either of these I think they would both simply attract trolls. Having a mixture is the best option, because none of this stuff is all that useful in isolation anyway.
Of course real universities are not pure TU or pure SJU. Haidt's point is that we appear to be moving toward a situation where the conflicts between social justice on the left and attempts to relabel conservative orthodoxy as truth on the right are so sharp that it becomes impossible for SJU-like universities to support any research that might undermine their political goals, which in turn forces universities to decide explicitly whether they're willing to take the political risks inherent in an unconstrained search for truth. Those who are will appear to those who are not as opponents of social justice (note that there are also conservative "SJUs" who also constrain research, but in a different direction).
As an aside, if this blog post is your first exposure to Haidt's research and ideas, you should do some reading -- and you should note that Haidt, himself, is a social justice-favoring moderate leftist. He has a tendency to apply the results of his research a little more broadly than is really warranted by the research itself, but don't let that blind you to the value of his ideas. His Moral Foundations theory is powerful and well-supported. Which isn't to say that it's "correct" in any absolute sense, science can never provide certainty, but until another theory that better fits the data comes along it's the best tool we have for analyzing the moral basis of human motives. If you're not familiar with it, you should read it.
Haidt does little more than regurgitate Schopenhauer—badly.
If you believe that, then you don't understand either. Really, the only commonality between them is that both view ethics and morality as phenomena to study rather than sets of principles to define. But even there, Schopenhauer lacked both the perspective and the tools needed to actually study how human ethical systems really work. That requires data gathering techniques from modern sociology and psychology and analytic techniques from modern-ish statistics. So even in the occasions where Schopenhauer's and Haidt's theories coincide, the former are philosophical, based on navel gazing, and the latter scientific, based on falsifiable research.
Also, if you're looking for an 18th-century philosopher whose ideas track most closely to Haidt's discoveries, Hume is a much better fit than Schopenhauer. Granted that Schopenhauer was a big fan of Hume and there is a lot of commonality between their ideas.
It's easy to have equal wealth when everyone is dirt poor.
History shows that this is the quickest and most common path to equality of outcomes.
App stores are a way of bringing the benefits of unix package managers to a wider audience.
You mean Linux package managers. AFAICT, this notion was invented by the Linux community, specifically Debian -- and it's a really good idea, so I want credit apportioned correctly.
As long as they are not the only method of installing, they can be very nice.
I would say that while it's important that they not be the only method of installing, it's also important that they be the primary method of installing. I think this move by Epic is bad for the Android ecosystem because if end users get accustomed to grabbing APKs from random places, a large percentage of those APKs will be malware.
F-droid and other alternative app stores, on the other hand, are great. The best approach is freedom to choose between multiple curated app stores. Freedom to download from other places is also important, but that should not be a common thing.
How many times are you really going to listen to that same song?
Just as I've done all my life: as many times as I freaking want to, without worrying about whether I have a network connection and without getting billed for it each and every time, thanks very much.
Meh. If I want to listen to a song without a network connection, I just hit "download", and then it's on my device. Actually what I really do is hit the "Thumbs up" button, and I have the auto-generated thumbs up playlist set to download. So if I get a new phone, I just have to hit "download" on the thumbs up playlist and pretty soon I have my whole collection available for offline listening with almost zero effort.
I don't get billed for each time I listen to a song. I pay a flat monthly fee, for which I have access to basically all published music. Whatever I want to listen to, I can. If it's not already downloaded I'll have to have a network connection, but I nearly always do.
I used to say that subscription music services were stupid and swear that I would never use such a thing. Then I tried it, and now I can't imagine ever going back to buying albums. It's not just the convenience, it's the freedom to listen to absolutely anything I want to, even something I haven't bought because I'd never heard of it until two seconds ago. If I'm walking around and hear bit of a song I like, I can listen to the whole thing, or the whole album, or the artist's entire discography. Streamed or downloaded, my choice.
Subscription music is awesome. Yeah, I have to pay every month, but I end up spending roughly the same amount of money on music as when I was buying a few albums a year. And I get so much more music, so much more conveniently.
In the long run it might not make sense to use Li-Ion batteries for this application but only once we've reached some sort of supply constraint.
In the long run Li-ion batteries will be the obvious choice for this application... because we'll use old EV batteries.
You didn't answer my question: why is it important what country they settle in? Is it more important for them to contribute to Australias economy, or the US economy or India's economy? That is very Nationalist of you.
From the perspective of humanity as a whole, it matters only that the brightest people get the resources they need to realize their full potential.
From the perspective of any one nation, smart people want all of the big brains to live and work in their country, which means they want a fairly open immigration policy. This is an approach that worked fantastically well for the US in the 20th century. Idiots prefer to harass foreign visitors and build walls, ensuring that the smart people from every other country stay away.
Put some numbers to it. Mean per capita income in 2017 was $50,392. So to fund a $12K per year UBI you have to add a 24% flat tax (ideally you should be able to offset that by cutting the progressive tax because of the other welfare programs you can cut, but let's ignore that -- particularly because this program wouldn't replace all of them.).
Assuming two-adult households, no UBI for kids, and no change to earnings (which would not be true, see below), here are some numbers for pre-UBI income and net UBI income (income plus UBI less UBI taxes).
$0 -- $24K
$10K -- $32K
$20K -- $40K
$30K -- $47K
$40K -- $54K
$50K -- $62K
$60K -- $70K
$80K -- $85K
$90K -- $93K
$100K -- $100K
$110K -- $107K
$120K -- $115K
$150K -- $138K
$180K -- $161K
$200K -- $176K
$250K -- $214K
$300K -- $253K
$400K -- $329K
$500K -- $405K
$800K -- $633K
$1M -- $786K
$2M -- $1.55M
$3M -- $2.3M
$5M -- $3.8M
$10M -- $7.6M
$20M -- $15M
$50M -- $38M
Not bad. Of course, the big wildcard is the assumption that people stick with their current jobs / incomes. We don't really know what would happen there.
We're probably safe to assume that in the short term some people would stop working and live on their UBI while they go to school to move themselves up the income ladder. Others might quit their current jobs and start businesses. It seems likely that there would be some changes at the bottom of the pay scales (I'm assuming that the minimum wage would be abolished with enactment of a UBI) as employers might be able to pay less because their employees would need less... but maybe not too much less because employees would feel more freedom to walk away from jobs they dislike.
Some percentage of the low-income population might well decide that the UBI is enough for them and just choose not to work any more. I don't think this group would be large, but we can't really know.
Assuming UBI is not available to unemancipated teens, it would have some interesting effects on teen employment, since young adults eligible for UBI would in many cases be willing to work for less than ineligible teens. I assume teens would still be paying the UBI tax.
We really need some large-scale, long-term UBI tests to find out how people really respond, what decisions they make. And these tests need to be performed in different areas, in different cultures, because there's no reason to believe that every culture will react the same.
Er, actually this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (a newer version, tested in actual public elections).
Better link for the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If he's working for the NRA he's not very effective (which shouldn't surprise anyone). The NRA supports the Defense Distributed position.
Finally, the whole thing assumes that you have a 4G or 5G connection all of the time wherever you go.
And the data plan blil for that is substantially more expensive than buying a traditional laptop and relying on sync whenever you're at home or an open WLAN.*
Chromebooks can function offline and sync when Wifi is available just fine. No mobile data connection is required.
I cover this elsewhere on this thread, but it was cuts to federal subsidies that raised tuition, not loans.
Got any evidence for that claim?
Here's some on the other side: https://www.mercatus.org/%5Bno.... Emphasis mine.
Leaded gas was still available for automotive use at least into the early eighties, even in California. It wasn't fully banned until 1988.
Levels were lowered significantly in the mid 70s, though, and blood lead levels started to decline by the late 70s. Though I suppose the "our children" comment can apply to people who are a few years older than me; my oldest was born in 1993.
And it's still being used in aviation, on planes with absolutely zero emissions equipment, and a strong tendency to throw unburned fuel right out the tailpipe (especially during takeoff.)
People who live right next to airports may need to be concerned (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3230438/), but across the population as a whole, blood lead levels have dropped to pre-leaded gas levels.
Back to the point, this is clearly much less of a concern than mountains of rotting manure.
Lead stays around damn near forever.
It doesn't. Blood lead levels in children have dropped to pre leaded-gas days. Indeed they dropped off very quickly once we stopped pumping the stuff into the atmosphere and painting our walls with it.
Pats head...
You keep believing that. 2 is not a large %.
I know lots of gun owners who hate Trump... including for the fact that they don't trust a New Yorker and sometime Democrat to actually care about protecting gun rights. Sure, he says the right things (except when he doesn't; see his comments after the Parkland shooting before his handlers managed to reign him in), but to anyone with a brain it's clearly just a position adopted out of convenience to pander to his base, not a real conviction.
Although half of them would be on the side of tyranny.
Why do you say that? Guns only become important for liberty when the democratic processes have already broken down and a minority is oppressing the majority.
As far as I know you can't manufacture the parts needed to turn a semi auto into full auto even though it's trivial to do so.
You can manufacture any gun you can legally possess. Since you can't legally possess a fully automatic firearm (without a tax stamp, and even then only if the gun existed prior to 1986, which by definition it didn't if you're building it in 2018), you can't manufacture one. Manufacturing the parts so that you can turn a semi auto into full auto in minutes is equivalent to manufacturing a fully automatic firearm.
The Hyundai Kona is the first affordable, long range model, for example. It's got autopilot, 300 mile range, decent performance etc. Costs $20,000 less than a Model 3 equivalent and is available to buy.
Where can I buy one? The Hyundai web site allows me to order an ICE version, or sign up for email alerts for "availability and pricing".
Also, other carmakers are lagging Tesla in another area as well: fast charging. I own two EVs (2012 Nissan LEAF and 2014 Tesla Model S 60) so I understand the charging dynamics very well, and for most people there's very little point in more than about 200 miles' range if you don't have a fast charging solution for road trips. For commuting and around town, 200 miles is fine -- heck my 70-mile LEAF is mostly just fine for those purposes -- because the car is full every morning and who drives 200+ miles in a day bopping around town?
I suppose people who live in more densely-populated countries might be able to take a road trip to their destination with a 300-mile range, then charge overnight and return, but in the US road trips normally start at about 500 miles, and 1000+-mile trips aren't uncommon. To do that you need (1) enough range to drive to the next meal or bathroom break using no more than 80% of the battery and (2) a network of fast chargers able to refill that battery in 30 minutes or so. A 300-mile battery is achieves the first, but you need a solution for the second. Actually the second is more important. With enough fast chargers you can get by with a smaller battery. My Model S only has about 200 miles of range, but I can take it most anywhere in the US that's within 70 miles of an Interstate. Charging stops increase travel time by about 20% over the way I'd drive an ICEV on a similar trip, but it's workable.