1) "Blindsight" by Peter Watts is the best Science Fiction book.
Haha! I don't know if I would go that far, but it certainly ranks up there on my list as well. That book changed the way I thought about reality, intelligence, and a hell of a lot of other things.
Perhaps - but even in that sense of "unreadable", would Frankenstein qualify? I'm no great enthusiast for literature - a good chunk of british classics are "unreadable" in that sense - I would put Jane Eyre in that category, for instance. There's no real plot or tension, nothing interesting happens, and it's basically just a wonderfully written pile of nothing at all.
You can't say that about the early sci-fi classics, though - there are interesting ideas and motivated, proactive characters in all of them.
You should check out Glory Road - the central premise is that the empress of the multiverse has no actual authority, adheres to a central principal of "hands off" governing, and basically just makes recommendations to subjects which they adhere to... out of the goodness of their hearts and respect for tradition?
Point is, it's Heinlein's picture of a libertarian utopia where people are left to their own devices and everything just works out. And no, I don't mean "libertarian" as an insult, but clearly "nutjob" is intended thus. There are rational libertarians as well - only some libertarians go overboard.
And, I do still regard his stuff really highly, like I said, TMIAHM is one of my favorites. Glory Road was just atrociously bad though.
"Frankenstein", while undoubtedly having a huge impact on modern society is basically unreadable by modern readers
What? Seriously? Frankenstein, along with many similarly classic works like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, War of the Worlds, are often placed in the children's section of book stores and libraries. I know that I read many classics growing up for just that reason - I saw some cool covers with aliens and monsters and submarines and got my start in sci-fi that way. If I was able to read that stuff as a kid, it's frankly absurd to call it "unreadable" for current adults.
Well, mainly pointing that out because parent poster was arguing that Pi/Arduino weren't for anything that would be rolled out en masse. Whereas the MSP430 always struck me as a more industry-focused solution, with the dev kit focused more on that environment than making things easy for the kid in his garage, as with Arduino. That said, certainly atmels and pics are their ilk are ubiquitous - and the overall point is that's all you need for most IoT applications, and the Atom or anything else Intel is bringing to the table doesn't really offer anything compelling.
Even then, though, why get an Atom when you could get something like the TI MSP430? Low power, cheap eval boards, dirt cheap in bulk, and already fairly established. Intel is just putting products out there with the idea that anything with the Intel name on it will sell, but they aren't offering anything better suited to the markets they claim to be targeting. IoT is going to be big, but it's going to be stuff so cheap as to be disposable - think Amazon's buttons, stuff like that. I don't see Intel having much success there.
Most of what Intel is pushing (Edison, Galileo, etc) in terms of IoT hardware is more expensive than existing solutions (Raspberry Pi, Arduino) which is pretty antithetical to many IoT applications where what you want is low cost. So I'm a bit skeptical that they are really serious about moving into that space, or at least if they are, they need to up their game. The Pi Zero, or the recently Kickstarted C.H.I.P. ($9 all-in-one computer with wifi and li-poly charging circuit) are much more aligned with IoT applications.
To get most business cases to close, you have big problems to address with respect to cost, power, and connectivity, and from what I'm seeing Intel isn't really fielding anything competitive.
Both Ringo and Weber have had female protagonists (Ringo with a female co-author in the Cally's War series). Weber has had several in the Honor Harrington series alone, including at least two who were the major focus of a novel (the eponymous Harrington, and Michele Henke). There's also Shannon Foraker, Eloise Pritchart, Alice Truman, and many others.
Correia writes a good range of B-movie fare, at least; Grimnoir to Dead Six to Monster Hunter. Certainly better than "Sharknado", but if you prefer your SF to be heavy, this ain't it.
Ringo isn't really to my taste; I'm not really into BDSM porn mixed with my SF (Ghost series), and the rest of his stuff gets really repetitive (Posleen and March to the... especially), it's almost as if he's being paid to crank out... oh, right, he is.
Ok, good to know. That roughly matches my observations, although I've only read a book or two from each of those authors so I certainly haven't made an exhaustive survey. Correia was all about big guns and cheesy one liners, but he's up front and unapologetic about it so I can respect that - do what you love, etc. Weber had some interesting ideas to go along with his occasionally gratuitous battles, so I could see myself reading him again. I did read something from Ringo's Posleen series, though, and the entirety of the plot was "big tank kills expendable alien hordes". There were a bunch of inconsistent rules about the way the technology seemed to behave, and essentially it came across as a near-future military promo video but less tasteful. Overall that left a bad taste in my mouth for the quality Baen accepts.
I just read Glory Road, which is Heinleins's one attempt at straight-out fantasy and is absolutely horrendous. It's blatantly misogynist, the protagonist is a great guy who handles disagreement with women by beating them, the plot constantly manufactures weird reasons for nudism, and there's some really preachy and shallow right-wing political diatribes at the end. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of my favorite books, but there's no question that Heinlein had a big streak of libertarian nutjob.
I haven't read a lot of Baen stuff, but the authors I have read (Larry Correia, John Ringo, David Weber) write stuff that's basically B-movie fare. Lots of wish-fulfillment violence and military fetishism. There's nothing wrong with that, but none of them had a female protagonist, and the majority of the female representation was there merely to provide a love interest or motivation for the male lead.
There's nothing wrong with novels along those lines. They are entertaining and fun (and Larry Correia at least is very open about the fact that he loves B-movies and guns and writes fiction to match). However, you wouldn't expect Sharknado to win an Oscar and based on my sampling I wouldn't expect most Baen stuff to be Hugo material.
So they mean AMD is licensing their x86-64 (or x64 or AMD64, whichever way you like to put it) technology which is not as powerful as Intel's, but is still fully current in terms of ISA.
Not sure where you're getting the idea that AMD's instruction set would be "not as powerful" considering they licensed their x86-64 tech to Intel in the first place.
But almost certainly at levels of income that will not be satisfactory to them.
Rather than manufacturing an imaginary UBI-beneficient that wants to take your lifestyle, why not look at some actual facts? I've seen UBI levels suggested at anywhere from $12k to $20k annually. Depending on where you live, that's basically college-student living, ramen dinner and a one bed apartment, shared with a roommate. And, considering that it replaces welfare, disability, and social security (the single largest line-item in the federal budget), it's actually not hard to come up with a funding/tax scheme that does the job. The big trick is to get the $100k+ earners to pay their share, as it currently stands the upper class pays less income tax, percentage wise, than the middle class does.
No, freeways are paid for by the people, not the government. When people pay taxes and things are done for the benefit of all, that's not socialism or communism. That's just government doing what the people want done. In other words, the whole reason we have a government in the first place.
Ah, ok, so then universal healthcare that's provided for the people, by the people isn't socialism then? Sounds like you would be a fan of tax-funded university education as well? Awesome!
But who is going to decide that instead of sitting home and watching TV, they're going to wait tables, or flip burgers, or enforce laws, or collect trash, or be a retail cashier?
It's not like everybody out there is going to be totally satisfied with a bare-minimum standard of living. If you want more than ramen for dinner every night and a one-bedroom apartment shared with a roommate, you'll have to work, and all those jobs will still be available. Most people would probably be happy to work a few hours a week for some discretionary income.
Research agrees with you that people are motivated by a sense of PURPOSE, but where it disagrees with you is that monetary gain provides that sense of purpose. "Drive" by Daniel Pink is a great read here - raising the monetary stakes can actually discourage motivation in many cases (based on scientific studies) and particularly for creative, intellectual tasks, which are increasingly going to be all that humans are good for. As a shortcut, the research shows that people are motivated to work largely by autonomy, opportunity to achieve mastery, and purpose (in terms of working for the greater good, or a tangible goal they want to acheive).
Heinlein described a UBI-based society using essentially that rationale in "For Us, The Living" (his first book I think, not his best, but relevant to the discussion). And from that standpoint, that taxation is basically destroying money, and on the other hand government lending and social programs create money, it seems more straightforward to simply regulate the economy from that standpoint. Create money where it does the most good, destroy it as necessary to keep inflation under control, etc. YMMV with real world implementations, but it worked pretty well in the novel, at least.;)
Here's the thing - not everybody gets UBI. Or at least, everybody gets it, but a good chunk earn enough that they pay more in taxes than they receive from the UBI. I was actually interested in this a while back and ran some numbers based on real U.S. info about tax brackets and who pays what.
So, here's a hypothetical scenario: Basic income of $12,000 for all. Taxation begins for every single person on an dollar they earn beyond the UBI. 0-100k of earnings (past UBI) are taxed at 25% 100k-250k are taxed at 35% 250k+ is taxed at 40%
This UBI-based tax scheme actually saves money compared to our existing tax policy. And, the picture could actually be much more rosy (either lower the tax rates, or increase the UBI) if you account for the fact that entitlement programs (estimated at ~15% of GDP, another $2.5 tril) could be done away with at least in part, because the UBI replaces welfare, social security, disability, etc. So, while this is just a notional example, it shows that paying for it is by no means impossible.
Nobody said that paid work goes away. Having a guaranteed income that keeps you from being homeless doesn't mean you can't add to your earning by flipping burgers or shoveling sewage. Hell, get rid of minimum wage (because it's no longer necessary to insist that full-time workers have survivable wages since that's provided by UBI) and then people who aren't satisfied with bare-minimum living are in a good bargaining spot to sell their labor to the highest bidder, and employers don't have arbitrary wage limits preventing them from paying someone $2/hr to do a job if they can find someone willing to work for that. It both prevents exploitation and removes artificial barriers to free market economics.
Why does a kid stay in school or go to college in the first place? I guarantee you, if the distant prospect of future monetary gain was the only reason that today's kids were in school, most of them wouldn't be there. It's compulsory as is, this wouldn't change anything. And honestly, if it was only people who wanted to learn that went to college it would help a lot of things and address the gradual transformation of universities from centers of learning into degree mills.
Everybody who likes to point out the fact that humans "need" to work (let's call them the Idle Hands contingent) doesn't realize the fact that motivation is multifaceted, and only for the most menial types of labor does more money = more motivation. (See Daniel Pink's "Drive" for lots of discussion of this)
Honestly, welfare, disability, and social security pay already exist - if someone really wants to be a bum, they can, and either end up sleeping on a girlfriend's couch, living in Mom's basement, or going to prison if they have no other options and want 3 solid meals and a bed to stay in.
The truth of the matter is that people do work far more for social and personal reasons than just pure monetary gain. They want freedom, they want to learn, they want prestige and recognition from their peers, they want to see the world, they want to express themselves... look at stuff like Stack Exchange and all sorts of other "gamified" systems online. People will work their asses off for a virtual merit badge or to increase a progress bar on a screen.
Corey Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is an interesting look at how a post-scarcity economy based on prestige might work. We're going to have to figure out what to do with the majority of the human race when AI and robots are better and cheaper than the average untrained human. It's only a matter of time.
I don't like super averages of huge data sets. It requires that everything being averaged together be "like" elements. Going through every one of those stations and auditing the information individually is not something I think anyone does when they build these tables. They maybe discard outliers.
So, you're saying that huge datasets aren't trustworthy on account of their hugeness. And that smaller datasets are better. You're basically just speculating idly about possible sources of error, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that all temp data, period, is inadmissable to the discussion. Cherry picking fallacy and baseless speculation here. And really, even if we go along with your claims, the strongest thing you can say based on the Dutch data is that it shows a sea level rise, but doesn't correlate directly with CO2 increase. Well, check it out: Models don't predict a direct relationship between CO2 levels and sea level rise, and particularly not in the short term.
As to terms you won't debate... I won't debate terms that you won't debate. You either debate or you don't.
I'm happy to debate it. Just refute (or respond in some way) to the simple explanation of blackbody radiation and absorption spectra that makes CO2 a greenhouse gas. Oh, and just to be clear, what you're really debating is the definition of a greenhouse gas, with a cursory google search I've found two different dictionary definitions that agree with me:
greenhouse gas noun a gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing infrared radiation, e.g., carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons.
As to your assertion that science is in fact a democracy [...] Thus it is a fallacy to say that because the consensus says X that X must be true.
Lots and lots of strawmen here. I never said that consensus proves truth. Or that science is a democracy. I'm not saying you can't debate AGW, or that you aren't allowed to disagree, or that you are provably incorrect (almost nothing in science can be "proved", at any rate). I merely said that, if you are going against the consensus of the experts, and are not yourself an expert, you are likely to be wrong. And if you are rational you should accept the fact that your opinion is most likely wrong. It is indeed a bet, and the odds are against you.
Who you are, who I am, who the consensus is, who the skeptics are... irrelevant.
Not true. Because some sources are more trustworthy than others, and we live in a world with finite time. In such a situation, we must choose to accept many facts on authority and so who is telling us something is tremendously relevant (even if that isn't irrefutable proof). I'm guessing you accept the fact that the sun is powered by fusion. And accept the fact that the earth is round. And trust that your grocery store is actually selling you pork and not diced up human flesh. Since it is a reality of human existence that you can't be an expert on everything, and can't verify every claim singlehandedly, the issue becomes which authorities we should trust. When I look at the debate around anthropogenic global warming, I see scientists and experts aligning themselves overwhelmingly on one side (as demonstrated by the IPCC, among others) and on the other side I see mainly conservative politicians and people associated with industries that have a financial incentive to keep pumping out CO2 with no repercussions. So, for people like you and I who do not have PhDs in climate science and have to accept some things on authority, what is the rational response to this situation?
If you are suggesting we should pass policy based on the minority of cases, uh, no. I could care less about "some people". I care about the majority of people. The fact that there's own counterexample is really, REALLY poor reasoning that you should act one way or another.
Nice job mischaracterizing the argument again. You spoke as though all the people getting benefit from this were people who took out student loans they never intended to pay off. It was easy to disprove that point with a single counterexample.
For the disabled, that don't have to prove they are disabled any longer. And, "disabled" and "hippy-dippy art history hipsters" are not mutually exclusive.
Why don't you actually read about what this is? They still have to prove they are disabled. This merely streamlines the process - if they have already proved it to the Social Security Administration, they don't have to duplicate the process to get loans forgiven. Would you prefer to maintain redundant bureaucratic processes? I figured you liked smaller government...
If I become disabled and lose my job, do I "deserve" to have the mortgage company repo my house?
Of course not. This is the entire thinking behind disability pay. Horrific things happen to some people, for no reason at all. Survival of the fittest is one option, where we turn a blind eye and try not to notice the disabled guy starving to death in the street. Civilized societies, though, realize that we can have empathy for the less fortunate and don't have to condemn them to homelessness or worse.
I ask why didn't he take legal action against the responsible party (his employer, the manufacturer of the chipper, the person that forced his hands into the chipper...).
Ah yes, let's sue our way to happiness! Not every tragedy is due to negligence - freak accidents happen. Do you really want our society to become even more litigious?
I agree with you on that: Unscientific educational policy is the biggest problem with the whole system. And I mean the WHOLE system. I got my degree in Physics, but with an emphasis in education, so I took several courses. The majority of educational research is a complete joke. If you look into it you'll notice many grad programs for educational research have ridiculous requirements for publication, something like 10 papers published in order to receive a master's. That absurd quantity tells you something about the quality you can expect - these are opinion pieces where the closest thing to "data" you'll get is a classroom observation or perhaps an interview with a student. And the academic rigor for teacher education is nonexistent - it's busywork, all of it, where if you have a pulse and turn in papers on time you get an A.
I think Finland is on the right track. All teachers there must have a master's degree from an extremely rigorous program - 90% of candidates wash out. The mentality is that each classroom is a mini-laboratory for exploring and refining instructional methods, whereas American classrooms often do little more than try to contain students, or possibly dress up the same old teaching methods in some form of entertainment. Finnish students spend far fewer hours in school, yet have far better test scores.
The point isn't that we need to completely emulate their system, but that we should take lessons from it to address the various failures of our own educational system. Chief among them: having quality teachers that use systematic research to improve instruction is the key. This doesn't really fit into our political narrative, though, where in the U.S. the problem is either low pay (if you are a liberal) or unions (if you are a conservative). Both are ancillary issues at best, but until we can remove some of the polarization around the topic I'm afraid the most likely outcome is to keep rehashing the old conflict while our kids continue to get a haphazard education based on buzzwords and pseudoscience.
It ignores the fact that people think differently.
It's actually the opposite - Common Core provides multiple ways to think about and approach a problem, rather than forcing every student into a one-size-fits-all approach. It focuses on building intuition about numbers, helping kids understand how math relates to real objects and quantities in the world, rather than just trying to mold kids into human calculators. And I can tell you, that's something sorely missing - there are plenty of kids that come out of the traditional method able to do algebra manipulations all day long but if you give them a real-world problem that they've never seen before they don't have any idea where to begin. Teaching them merely to memorize and copy things on the board is a waste, functional and flexible knowledge is what matters.
That's basically the same observation I've had - people who actually teach this stuff, or who understand the problems Common Core was created to address, are generally in favor of it. People who are very comfortable with the standard method see something that isn't instantly familiar and become suspicious. I tend to think building intuition about numbers will serve students far better than memorizing an efficient system for longhand arithmetic. Because honestly, nobody ever needs to do that anymore, so we ought to optimize education so that students master concepts, rather than optimizing for them to be human computers, as was more important 100 years ago.
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1) "Blindsight" by Peter Watts is the best Science Fiction book.
Haha! I don't know if I would go that far, but it certainly ranks up there on my list as well. That book changed the way I thought about reality, intelligence, and a hell of a lot of other things.
Perhaps - but even in that sense of "unreadable", would Frankenstein qualify? I'm no great enthusiast for literature - a good chunk of british classics are "unreadable" in that sense - I would put Jane Eyre in that category, for instance. There's no real plot or tension, nothing interesting happens, and it's basically just a wonderfully written pile of nothing at all.
You can't say that about the early sci-fi classics, though - there are interesting ideas and motivated, proactive characters in all of them.
You should check out Glory Road - the central premise is that the empress of the multiverse has no actual authority, adheres to a central principal of "hands off" governing, and basically just makes recommendations to subjects which they adhere to... out of the goodness of their hearts and respect for tradition?
Point is, it's Heinlein's picture of a libertarian utopia where people are left to their own devices and everything just works out. And no, I don't mean "libertarian" as an insult, but clearly "nutjob" is intended thus. There are rational libertarians as well - only some libertarians go overboard.
And, I do still regard his stuff really highly, like I said, TMIAHM is one of my favorites. Glory Road was just atrociously bad though.
"Frankenstein", while undoubtedly having a huge impact on modern society is basically unreadable by modern readers
What? Seriously? Frankenstein, along with many similarly classic works like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, War of the Worlds, are often placed in the children's section of book stores and libraries. I know that I read many classics growing up for just that reason - I saw some cool covers with aliens and monsters and submarines and got my start in sci-fi that way. If I was able to read that stuff as a kid, it's frankly absurd to call it "unreadable" for current adults.
Well, mainly pointing that out because parent poster was arguing that Pi/Arduino weren't for anything that would be rolled out en masse. Whereas the MSP430 always struck me as a more industry-focused solution, with the dev kit focused more on that environment than making things easy for the kid in his garage, as with Arduino. That said, certainly atmels and pics are their ilk are ubiquitous - and the overall point is that's all you need for most IoT applications, and the Atom or anything else Intel is bringing to the table doesn't really offer anything compelling.
Even then, though, why get an Atom when you could get something like the TI MSP430? Low power, cheap eval boards, dirt cheap in bulk, and already fairly established. Intel is just putting products out there with the idea that anything with the Intel name on it will sell, but they aren't offering anything better suited to the markets they claim to be targeting. IoT is going to be big, but it's going to be stuff so cheap as to be disposable - think Amazon's buttons, stuff like that. I don't see Intel having much success there.
Most of what Intel is pushing (Edison, Galileo, etc) in terms of IoT hardware is more expensive than existing solutions (Raspberry Pi, Arduino) which is pretty antithetical to many IoT applications where what you want is low cost. So I'm a bit skeptical that they are really serious about moving into that space, or at least if they are, they need to up their game. The Pi Zero, or the recently Kickstarted C.H.I.P. ($9 all-in-one computer with wifi and li-poly charging circuit) are much more aligned with IoT applications.
To get most business cases to close, you have big problems to address with respect to cost, power, and connectivity, and from what I'm seeing Intel isn't really fielding anything competitive.
Both Ringo and Weber have had female protagonists (Ringo with a female co-author in the Cally's War series). Weber has had several in the Honor Harrington series alone, including at least two who were the major focus of a novel (the eponymous Harrington, and Michele Henke). There's also Shannon Foraker, Eloise Pritchart, Alice Truman, and many others.
Correia writes a good range of B-movie fare, at least; Grimnoir to Dead Six to Monster Hunter. Certainly better than "Sharknado", but if you prefer your SF to be heavy, this ain't it.
Ringo isn't really to my taste; I'm not really into BDSM porn mixed with my SF (Ghost series), and the rest of his stuff gets really repetitive (Posleen and March to the... especially), it's almost as if he's being paid to crank out... oh, right, he is.
Ok, good to know. That roughly matches my observations, although I've only read a book or two from each of those authors so I certainly haven't made an exhaustive survey. Correia was all about big guns and cheesy one liners, but he's up front and unapologetic about it so I can respect that - do what you love, etc. Weber had some interesting ideas to go along with his occasionally gratuitous battles, so I could see myself reading him again. I did read something from Ringo's Posleen series, though, and the entirety of the plot was "big tank kills expendable alien hordes". There were a bunch of inconsistent rules about the way the technology seemed to behave, and essentially it came across as a near-future military promo video but less tasteful. Overall that left a bad taste in my mouth for the quality Baen accepts.
I just read Glory Road, which is Heinleins's one attempt at straight-out fantasy and is absolutely horrendous. It's blatantly misogynist, the protagonist is a great guy who handles disagreement with women by beating them, the plot constantly manufactures weird reasons for nudism, and there's some really preachy and shallow right-wing political diatribes at the end. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of my favorite books, but there's no question that Heinlein had a big streak of libertarian nutjob.
I haven't read a lot of Baen stuff, but the authors I have read (Larry Correia, John Ringo, David Weber) write stuff that's basically B-movie fare. Lots of wish-fulfillment violence and military fetishism. There's nothing wrong with that, but none of them had a female protagonist, and the majority of the female representation was there merely to provide a love interest or motivation for the male lead.
There's nothing wrong with novels along those lines. They are entertaining and fun (and Larry Correia at least is very open about the fact that he loves B-movies and guns and writes fiction to match). However, you wouldn't expect Sharknado to win an Oscar and based on my sampling I wouldn't expect most Baen stuff to be Hugo material.
So they mean AMD is licensing their x86-64 (or x64 or AMD64, whichever way you like to put it) technology which is not as powerful as Intel's, but is still fully current in terms of ISA.
Not sure where you're getting the idea that AMD's instruction set would be "not as powerful" considering they licensed their x86-64 tech to Intel in the first place.
But almost certainly at levels of income that will not be satisfactory to them.
Rather than manufacturing an imaginary UBI-beneficient that wants to take your lifestyle, why not look at some actual facts? I've seen UBI levels suggested at anywhere from $12k to $20k annually. Depending on where you live, that's basically college-student living, ramen dinner and a one bed apartment, shared with a roommate. And, considering that it replaces welfare, disability, and social security (the single largest line-item in the federal budget), it's actually not hard to come up with a funding/tax scheme that does the job. The big trick is to get the $100k+ earners to pay their share, as it currently stands the upper class pays less income tax, percentage wise, than the middle class does.
No, freeways are paid for by the people, not the government. When people pay taxes and things are done for the benefit of all, that's not socialism or communism. That's just government doing what the people want done. In other words, the whole reason we have a government in the first place.
Ah, ok, so then universal healthcare that's provided for the people, by the people isn't socialism then? Sounds like you would be a fan of tax-funded university education as well? Awesome!
But who is going to decide that instead of sitting home and watching TV, they're going to wait tables, or flip burgers, or enforce laws, or collect trash, or be a retail cashier?
It's not like everybody out there is going to be totally satisfied with a bare-minimum standard of living. If you want more than ramen for dinner every night and a one-bedroom apartment shared with a roommate, you'll have to work, and all those jobs will still be available. Most people would probably be happy to work a few hours a week for some discretionary income.
Research agrees with you that people are motivated by a sense of PURPOSE, but where it disagrees with you is that monetary gain provides that sense of purpose. "Drive" by Daniel Pink is a great read here - raising the monetary stakes can actually discourage motivation in many cases (based on scientific studies) and particularly for creative, intellectual tasks, which are increasingly going to be all that humans are good for. As a shortcut, the research shows that people are motivated to work largely by autonomy, opportunity to achieve mastery, and purpose (in terms of working for the greater good, or a tangible goal they want to acheive).
Heinlein described a UBI-based society using essentially that rationale in "For Us, The Living" (his first book I think, not his best, but relevant to the discussion). And from that standpoint, that taxation is basically destroying money, and on the other hand government lending and social programs create money, it seems more straightforward to simply regulate the economy from that standpoint. Create money where it does the most good, destroy it as necessary to keep inflation under control, etc. YMMV with real world implementations, but it worked pretty well in the novel, at least. ;)
Here's the thing - not everybody gets UBI. Or at least, everybody gets it, but a good chunk earn enough that they pay more in taxes than they receive from the UBI. I was actually interested in this a while back and ran some numbers based on real U.S. info about tax brackets and who pays what.
So, here's a hypothetical scenario:
Basic income of $12,000 for all.
Taxation begins for every single person on an dollar they earn beyond the UBI.
0-100k of earnings (past UBI) are taxed at 25%
100k-250k are taxed at 35%
250k+ is taxed at 40%
This UBI-based tax scheme actually saves money compared to our existing tax policy. And, the picture could actually be much more rosy (either lower the tax rates, or increase the UBI) if you account for the fact that entitlement programs (estimated at ~15% of GDP, another $2.5 tril) could be done away with at least in part, because the UBI replaces welfare, social security, disability, etc. So, while this is just a notional example, it shows that paying for it is by no means impossible.
Nobody said that paid work goes away. Having a guaranteed income that keeps you from being homeless doesn't mean you can't add to your earning by flipping burgers or shoveling sewage. Hell, get rid of minimum wage (because it's no longer necessary to insist that full-time workers have survivable wages since that's provided by UBI) and then people who aren't satisfied with bare-minimum living are in a good bargaining spot to sell their labor to the highest bidder, and employers don't have arbitrary wage limits preventing them from paying someone $2/hr to do a job if they can find someone willing to work for that. It both prevents exploitation and removes artificial barriers to free market economics.
Why does a kid stay in school or go to college in the first place? I guarantee you, if the distant prospect of future monetary gain was the only reason that today's kids were in school, most of them wouldn't be there. It's compulsory as is, this wouldn't change anything. And honestly, if it was only people who wanted to learn that went to college it would help a lot of things and address the gradual transformation of universities from centers of learning into degree mills.
Everybody who likes to point out the fact that humans "need" to work (let's call them the Idle Hands contingent) doesn't realize the fact that motivation is multifaceted, and only for the most menial types of labor does more money = more motivation. (See Daniel Pink's "Drive" for lots of discussion of this)
Honestly, welfare, disability, and social security pay already exist - if someone really wants to be a bum, they can, and either end up sleeping on a girlfriend's couch, living in Mom's basement, or going to prison if they have no other options and want 3 solid meals and a bed to stay in.
The truth of the matter is that people do work far more for social and personal reasons than just pure monetary gain. They want freedom, they want to learn, they want prestige and recognition from their peers, they want to see the world, they want to express themselves... look at stuff like Stack Exchange and all sorts of other "gamified" systems online. People will work their asses off for a virtual merit badge or to increase a progress bar on a screen.
Corey Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is an interesting look at how a post-scarcity economy based on prestige might work. We're going to have to figure out what to do with the majority of the human race when AI and robots are better and cheaper than the average untrained human. It's only a matter of time.
I don't like super averages of huge data sets. It requires that everything being averaged together be "like" elements. Going through every one of those stations and auditing the information individually is not something I think anyone does when they build these tables. They maybe discard outliers.
So, you're saying that huge datasets aren't trustworthy on account of their hugeness. And that smaller datasets are better. You're basically just speculating idly about possible sources of error, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that all temp data, period, is inadmissable to the discussion. Cherry picking fallacy and baseless speculation here. And really, even if we go along with your claims, the strongest thing you can say based on the Dutch data is that it shows a sea level rise, but doesn't correlate directly with CO2 increase. Well, check it out: Models don't predict a direct relationship between CO2 levels and sea level rise, and particularly not in the short term.
As to terms you won't debate... I won't debate terms that you won't debate. You either debate or you don't.
I'm happy to debate it. Just refute (or respond in some way) to the simple explanation of blackbody radiation and absorption spectra that makes CO2 a greenhouse gas. Oh, and just to be clear, what you're really debating is the definition of a greenhouse gas, with a cursory google search I've found two different dictionary definitions that agree with me:
greenhouse gas
noun
a gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing infrared radiation, e.g., carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons.
As to your assertion that science is in fact a democracy [...] Thus it is a fallacy to say that because the consensus says X that X must be true.
Lots and lots of strawmen here. I never said that consensus proves truth. Or that science is a democracy. I'm not saying you can't debate AGW, or that you aren't allowed to disagree, or that you are provably incorrect (almost nothing in science can be "proved", at any rate). I merely said that, if you are going against the consensus of the experts, and are not yourself an expert, you are likely to be wrong. And if you are rational you should accept the fact that your opinion is most likely wrong. It is indeed a bet, and the odds are against you.
Who you are, who I am, who the consensus is, who the skeptics are... irrelevant.
Not true. Because some sources are more trustworthy than others, and we live in a world with finite time. In such a situation, we must choose to accept many facts on authority and so who is telling us something is tremendously relevant (even if that isn't irrefutable proof). I'm guessing you accept the fact that the sun is powered by fusion. And accept the fact that the earth is round. And trust that your grocery store is actually selling you pork and not diced up human flesh. Since it is a reality of human existence that you can't be an expert on everything, and can't verify every claim singlehandedly, the issue becomes which authorities we should trust. When I look at the debate around anthropogenic global warming, I see scientists and experts aligning themselves overwhelmingly on one side (as demonstrated by the IPCC, among others) and on the other side I see mainly conservative politicians and people associated with industries that have a financial incentive to keep pumping out CO2 with no repercussions. So, for people like you and I who do not have PhDs in climate science and have to accept some things on authority, what is the rational response to this situation?
If you are suggesting we should pass policy based on the minority of cases, uh, no. I could care less about "some people". I care about the majority of people. The fact that there's own counterexample is really, REALLY poor reasoning that you should act one way or another.
Nice job mischaracterizing the argument again. You spoke as though all the people getting benefit from this were people who took out student loans they never intended to pay off. It was easy to disprove that point with a single counterexample.
For the disabled, that don't have to prove they are disabled any longer. And, "disabled" and "hippy-dippy art history hipsters" are not mutually exclusive.
Why don't you actually read about what this is? They still have to prove they are disabled. This merely streamlines the process - if they have already proved it to the Social Security Administration, they don't have to duplicate the process to get loans forgiven. Would you prefer to maintain redundant bureaucratic processes? I figured you liked smaller government...
If I become disabled and lose my job, do I "deserve" to have the mortgage company repo my house?
Of course not. This is the entire thinking behind disability pay. Horrific things happen to some people, for no reason at all. Survival of the fittest is one option, where we turn a blind eye and try not to notice the disabled guy starving to death in the street. Civilized societies, though, realize that we can have empathy for the less fortunate and don't have to condemn them to homelessness or worse.
I ask why didn't he take legal action against the responsible party (his employer, the manufacturer of the chipper, the person that forced his hands into the chipper ...).
Ah yes, let's sue our way to happiness! Not every tragedy is due to negligence - freak accidents happen. Do you really want our society to become even more litigious?
I agree with you on that: Unscientific educational policy is the biggest problem with the whole system. And I mean the WHOLE system. I got my degree in Physics, but with an emphasis in education, so I took several courses. The majority of educational research is a complete joke. If you look into it you'll notice many grad programs for educational research have ridiculous requirements for publication, something like 10 papers published in order to receive a master's. That absurd quantity tells you something about the quality you can expect - these are opinion pieces where the closest thing to "data" you'll get is a classroom observation or perhaps an interview with a student. And the academic rigor for teacher education is nonexistent - it's busywork, all of it, where if you have a pulse and turn in papers on time you get an A.
I think Finland is on the right track. All teachers there must have a master's degree from an extremely rigorous program - 90% of candidates wash out. The mentality is that each classroom is a mini-laboratory for exploring and refining instructional methods, whereas American classrooms often do little more than try to contain students, or possibly dress up the same old teaching methods in some form of entertainment. Finnish students spend far fewer hours in school, yet have far better test scores.
The point isn't that we need to completely emulate their system, but that we should take lessons from it to address the various failures of our own educational system. Chief among them: having quality teachers that use systematic research to improve instruction is the key. This doesn't really fit into our political narrative, though, where in the U.S. the problem is either low pay (if you are a liberal) or unions (if you are a conservative). Both are ancillary issues at best, but until we can remove some of the polarization around the topic I'm afraid the most likely outcome is to keep rehashing the old conflict while our kids continue to get a haphazard education based on buzzwords and pseudoscience.
It ignores the fact that people think differently.
It's actually the opposite - Common Core provides multiple ways to think about and approach a problem, rather than forcing every student into a one-size-fits-all approach. It focuses on building intuition about numbers, helping kids understand how math relates to real objects and quantities in the world, rather than just trying to mold kids into human calculators. And I can tell you, that's something sorely missing - there are plenty of kids that come out of the traditional method able to do algebra manipulations all day long but if you give them a real-world problem that they've never seen before they don't have any idea where to begin. Teaching them merely to memorize and copy things on the board is a waste, functional and flexible knowledge is what matters.
That's basically the same observation I've had - people who actually teach this stuff, or who understand the problems Common Core was created to address, are generally in favor of it. People who are very comfortable with the standard method see something that isn't instantly familiar and become suspicious. I tend to think building intuition about numbers will serve students far better than memorizing an efficient system for longhand arithmetic. Because honestly, nobody ever needs to do that anymore, so we ought to optimize education so that students master concepts, rather than optimizing for them to be human computers, as was more important 100 years ago.