How do you know you have consciousness? That's a rather pointless question without having a specific definition of consciousness. Until such time, we'd have to just go with the old "I'll know it when I see it" mandate.
That's quite my point. We have a different definition of "free will." The common definition is based on what you experience. The fundamental definition is based on us being a giant blob of quantum mechanical particles that happen to work well together.
Even if the universe was discrete and we could prove that everything that has and will ever happen was inevitable based on the initial conditions set by the big bang, your "experience" would still that you have free will, because your brain just isn't designed to comprehend the actions of every proton and electron zipping around in your brain individually. Philosophically it would be a huge deal but in terms of your day to day experience (including whether you get caught and punished for committing a crime) wouldn't be particularly impacted either way.
they can't explain how consciousness arises from physics, so they claim all the constituent parts 'have consciousness'
They also can't explain how things like magnetism arise from physics, so they claim constituent parts have 'intrinsic' charge and angular momentum (spin) which together form an intrinsic magnetic moment.
From that aspect, applying "consciousness" as a new fundamental intrinsic property of particles isn't flawed. The flawed part of the argument is applying random philosophical (and more importantly, unmeasureable) properties to particles for absolutely no reason. If they want it to be considered science rather than philosophy (or just hogwash) then they'll need to present some actual evidence not just throw out some wild hypothesis and claim they're right just because the idea sounds good to them. We associate an intrinsic charge with particles because we can measure a charge, even if we don't know fully understand why that charge exists or where it comes from.
The nature of consciousness might be an interesting topic for philosophical discussion. Its entirely irrelevant from a scientific standpoint. Both "its something we can't detect" and "its emerges from more complexity than we can understand" are useless as a basis for study.
The latter becomes less useless as we improve our understanding of complex systems (including the human brain) but we're still a very long way from being able to study consciousness in any serious scientific manner even if it does derive purely from complexity that could in principle be understood eventually.
Build a brain from scratch and see if consciousness emerges. Modern AI systems are a few orders of magnitude from being anywhere close to powerful enough to do that of course so its not practically falsifiable now or even in the near future.. but its technically falsifiable and therefore a valid scientific hypothesis.
You're not thinking fundamentally enough. The "free will" argument with regard to physics comes from the idea of a deterministic universe: If every particle's present and future is exactly determined by its history, then that also includes the particles in our brains and bodies and therefore anything we say or do can be interpreted as a result of our particles having no choice as their path was determined at the time of the big bang, and 14 billion years of banging around led us to kill that poor woman whether we wanted to or not.
The argument is purely theoretical and has zero bearing in reality -- you could just as easily argue that the judge sentencing you had no choice in doing the sentencing so you're still just as in jail (or worse) as you would have been in a truly free will universe.
Of course, the argument is also entirely invalidated by quantum mechanics -- we know for sure that a particle's history (and even its existence) is, at some level, completely random. You can still argue whether complete randomness leads to free will any more than complete determinism does ("I had no choice my brain's decision was predetermined by prior history!" becomes "I had no choice it was a purely random configuration in my brain!")
But anyway, the type of "free will" they're talking about here is not really the same concept of "free will" that for example is taken away when you enslave a person. In that case the person no longer has "free will" by most common definitions, but they still have this sort of fundamental physics-based "free will" (or not, depending on how you feel about the above argument!)
The one where stuff becomes sufficiently complicated and (insert long and bamboozling set of random examples of complicated systems and a grab bag of barely coherent ideas) and presto consciousness happens for some reason, apparently (c/f strange loops etc)?
This one. I don't know why you would dismiss this particular theory, since its by far the most well-supported of the bunch (certainly more well supported than TFA's theory of "insert magic and call it a day.")
Now you may not like the theory as it tends to imply that humans are just a pile of random chance and that everything we do is ultimately meaningless (whereas if you have a religion-type soul of some variety, the things you do in life would presumably carry on past your death in some manner.) But its hard to dismiss it when exactly that principle underlies things like evolution and chaos theory. And we're already starting to see some pretty impressive AIs at a computing level that's still a few orders of magnitude less than what our brains are capable of. The most telling AIs in my opinion aren't things like Deep Blue or Alexa.. the most telling ones are those that can do things like emulate the behavior of small insects like ants. There was one I heard about recently where they literally mapped some a worm's neurons into an AI system -- getting close to the scifi "brain download" concept (at least in theory -- that whole orders of magnitude of power bit is still a pretty significant hurdle before we try to do that for humans!)
So the question becomes: Assuming tech improves and we eventually get the ability to map billions of neurons instead of just hundreds, and then map a human brain onto those digital neurons.. will that AI be considered conscious or not? Its a serious question. My suspicion is "yes," though with some caveats (primarily, the question of whether digital emulation can ever replicate our analog brains in sufficient detail to "work" as we would expect.)
Nothing except the hundred thousand competitors who don't charge a percentage and would happily take his business.
Music artists get a bum deal because any fool with an instrument can make music, and even if we want to ignore the complete crap, there's still plenty of people who make reasonably good music in their garage or local pubs yet never make it beyond that. On the other hand there are (relatively) very few publishers which is why they basically hold all of the power. If you want to get your band signed you don't get to go shop around to the publishers and demand a reasonable percentage. You have to beg them and hope they'll give you _any_ percentage.
The internet was supposed to change all of that, and to some degree it helped. But at the end of the day the publishers just have too much control. Consumers want to to go a website that has the music they want to hear right now. Its great if that website also has new music for them to explore but its not the biggest deal. So you can set up a Indiefy (or whatever name:P) site and cater specifically to unsigned bands and do your own curation to ensure the music quality is high and pay the artists a good percentage.. and you will die out fast because you don't have Lady Gaga or Ed Sheeran or whoever the latest fad of the week is. And even if you don't die out and end up becoming a big name yourself.. well, you've essentially become another publisher. And sooner or later you'll come under the same pressures to eternally increase profits that every other publisher deals with. Its an ugly cycle.
music I pay attention to has been gradually becoming simpler, louder, and more homogenous
FTFY. More music of all sorts is generated. But without the gatekeepers telling you what you should like, you have to put in the effort to search it out yourself. And frequently as you note, short-term "popular" songs are not the same as long-term "good" songs.
Of course a lot of the websites don't make it particularly easy. Their algos will certainly take into account the things you've marked as "Like" (or whatever they call it in their system,) but it also takes into account things like "most popular" (which will often be the catchy-yet-terrible styles) and "recently listened to" (whether you hit like or not -- so make sure to use the dislike button as well!) and so on. Basically you get funneled toward popular crap even if you're intentionally trying to avoid it, because by definition its popular.
But of course they do that because that's what most people want, or at least are sufficiently happy with to not complain (or stop using the service..)
If you want to find "good" music, try joining some music-related forums or discussion groups and things like that. Places where you can ask real people for real opinions. Relying on services like Spotify to do that for you is silly.. their goals simply aren't in line with yours.
The problem is that they essentially get to choose their own percentage when signing an artist, and unsurprisingly choose to benefit themselves greatly at the cost of everyone else involved. Basically anyone who gets to decide on their own wages (these guys, corporate board members, etc) is going to end up with a significantly larger fraction of the pie than they deserve. But that doesn't mean they do nothing or deserve none of the pie.
That would be $280/MWh but that's still a far shot from $14000/MWh so your point still stands.
As for other solutions in other countries I'm not really sure any are "much more cost-effective" as I don't believe any other countries have built out a battery pack system to the scale of the Australia installation. Of course the fact that Australia needed the installation (and I seem to recall it was a pretty rushed job to deal with an emergency of some sort) still kind of puts a question mark on the state of the country's power grid.
Overall though, its probably a combination of new tech that hasn't gone through its depreciation yet, plus whoever Neoen is just being greedy and charging through the teeth because they know Australia can't afford to say no. I'm not (yet) worried that this current cost per MWh is indicative of the long-term costs. Of course such a high initial cost could certainly slow down investment from other countries who might have considered such an installation, dragging out that depreciation capability.
The article doesn't make mention of whether or not those numbers are really per-sandwich, or if they take say 2 slices of bread and count the carbon for the whole loaf in the same way that the RIAA lawsuits like to assume each pirated song from an album justifies the full cost of the album so that 12 songs = $300 rather than $25 or whatever..
The problem isn't that foreign entities can review the source code. The problem is that nobody else gets to, so the foreign entities have the capacity to find bugs and simply not report them. You know, the kind of thing the NSA absolutely never ever would do because the US is so much better than anyone else..
Will it stop Youtube videos from autoplaying? I tend to have a bunch of tabs open at once and if I have to restart my browser (say, for an update...) its a horrid cacophony until I either wait them all out or manually switch to each video and pause it. Somewhere around 3/4 of the addons I use are there specifically to stop Youtube from being so obnoxiously in your face (and the other 1/4 are mostly to stop other videos/scripts/bullshit from auto-running as much as possible.)
The problem is that we conflate love and sex, and then throw religion and government into the mix as well with the whole marriage thing.
You can love someone you don't lust after, and you can lust after someone you don't love. The strongest marriages tend to be when both partners have both sets of feelings for each other.
But all of those feelings can change over time regardless of whether or not you have a ring on your finger so even the strongest marriage can break down given enough time (especially if there's external factors like money issues or family drama or whatever other bullshit involved.)
Good sequel's aren't really a problem. People often like sequels, especially if the characters were compelling and the original's story was set up to lead into a sequel. If you love something, its not surprising to want more of it. Where sequels become a problem is when they just shovel some shit at you after an original movie (that was never intended to have sequels) sells well and they're just cashing in because they can.
Prequels are a bit of a mixed bag. They can go really good or really bad. Often prequels either revolve primarily around characters that weren't in the original movie (though they typically make a cameo to show that it really is a prequel,) which removes the whole "compelling character" angle that sequels can make use of. Or they revolve around the backstory of one or two of the original's characters but that means injecting the creator's vision of how the character got to be where they are that has a potential to conflict with the fan's thoughts about the character.
Reboots can be OK, but they're pretty much always jarring as you have to completely give up whatever you thought about the characters and story from the original and try to convince your brain to start from scratch. For example, the jump from Tobey Maguire's Spiderman 3 to Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spiderman.. was a hell of a hit if you were expecting the latter to be Spiderman 4. Hulk (Eric Bana) -> The Incredible Hulk (Edward Norton) was even worse, as the latter (from what I've read) was made primarily because Marvel didn't think the former fit into their new "cinematic universe" vision.. and then when Hulk shows up in the Avengers, he's played by a totally different guy again (Mark Ruffalo.) Talk about fan confusion!
And finally we have remakes. These are usually the shittiest films on the market. Its very rare that a remake outdoes the original in anything other than the CGI, and that's only because our tech is better these days. Has there ever been a remake that did especially well? Well ok, lets limit it to say 80s or later (original) as there was a lot of films from the 20s and 30s that have been remade and did decent. I'm sure there's the occasional more modern example but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Audiences like originality. They just don't demand it so producers take the safe bet and go with what they know for sure will sell rather than
2. Lots of explosions
Yep. Audiences definitely want this. And lots of boobies, but that's stymied by the religious nutjobs who think guns are fun and crime is fine but nipples will cripple childhood development.
3. As little dialog and character development as possible.
Yes and no. Audiences definitely aren't as interested in dialogue-heavy shows but that's mostly because dialogue-heavy shows tend to be more artsy rather than entertaining. Artsy stuff may be "interesting" in the sense of the stories they tell, the messages they delivery and the problems they expose, but they're often not all that entertaining in the same way that robots and explosions are.
But TV sitcoms and reality shows suggest that audiences are willing to deal with heavy dialogue if its done in an entertaining form, so why is it so lightweight in movies? Goes back to the producers again. Heavy dialogue is difficult and expensive to translate, and movie producers have to consider a global market now from day one rather than as an afterthought to wring a little more profit out of a locally-successful film. Explosions are cool in all languages. Exposition is.. less so.. especially if its riddled with slang and set phrases that don't have direct translations, never mind the practical aspect of having to match the lip movements as much as possible.
Find pretty much any foreign show that has both fan-made subtitles as well as a professional dub (might have to go back a ways since as noted, most things are released with translations already and fansubs aren't nearly as common as straight rips.) Fansubs tend to be a lot more literal in their translations whereas the professional dubbing is restricted by lip syncing and other technical limitations. I recommend a fansub as the matching professional subs are pretty hit and miss -- some will tend more to the literal side and show this issue while others will be a direct transcription of the dubs and seem fine if you don't know the original language at all.. It gets really jarring if you use the subs as a poor man's close captioning over a dubbed show and they went the literal route.. you end up hearing and reading sometimes vastly different phrasing..
Uhh nobody assumes that unless they're intentionally trying to make a misleading point. For that reason, any reasonable argument about the state of "healthcare" in a country will use multiple resources and measurements -- life expectancy of course is one, but also things like infant mortality, outcome rates for cancer/heart/other common treatments and so on. And they try to compensate as best they can for the various differences in measurement between countries and reporting agencies.
And organization as large and important as the WHO doesn't just release reports based on weak and questionable data. They do their research and take as many factors as possible into account.
That's kind of the problem. We're not nails, and they're not hammers. Treating healthcare as a for-profit business means the doctors' primary motivating factor is not your health.
Obviously doctors go through a lot of school and other hassles and nobody would argue that they shouldn't be compensated fairly for their work. But there's a difference between "compensated fairly" and "causing patients unnecessary harm and suffering in the blind drive for dollars."
Only vaguely.. The USSR was a large conglomerate of many different peoples and ideas spread across an enormously vast area of geography, bordered on two sides by foreign powers, only one of which (China) was especially friendly throughout the USSR's existence.
North Korea on the other hand has only one demographic (the Korean people,) a small land area to patrol, and only one fairly short unfriendly border which is heavily mined and essentially impenetrable (by spies or whatever.)
Also, the USSR was much more open to the west even during the cold war than North Korea is -- another avenue for spies and other foreign agents to get in.
And even then, the USSR's collapse was mainly top-down rather than bottom-up. I'm sure there was some riots and whatnot here and there (there always is..) but it mostly came about through decades of economic mismanagement and then Gorbachev's attempts to unfuck things.
And then everyone just let it play out after the collapse and its worked out oh-so-well for Russia so far. A power vacuum followed by mafia control and now a dictator. The other former USSR states are a pretty hit-and-miss bunch as well (some are actually doing OK -- mostly those that had the weakest ties to the union previously.. I'm somehow doubt that's entirely coincidental..)
Where did that come from, exactly? Not to mention "work" is a pretty loose concept when we're talking about the 1% (and even success is a pretty questionable adjective for the ones who just inherited everything from daddy.)
some government guys with guns
I always thought the IRS came in with lawyers and accountants, but hey its 'Murca we're talking about so maybe they come packing too?
to go take stuff from them
Take what from them, exactly? Taxation is annoying but governments don't function without it. Its been a part of society for thousands of years. Why should a bunch of people who don't need the money anyway be the only ones who get off paying little to nothing while the rest of us have large amounts of our paychecks deducted?
you apparently don't even understand marginal tax rates
I do. I'm guessing you think I just pulled those %ages out of my ass? I didn't. That's the actual tax brackets for the "middle class" (25% up to 90k or so and 28% up to 190k or so) compared to the "upper class" (>400k.) I didn't feel it was necessary to break down all 7 tax brackets since it just gets worse from there when you start trying to consider exactly how many people at 9k/yr (ie: way, way below the poverty line) it would take to match a single billionaire's taxes, even when they only get 10% vs the billionaire's 39.5%. That's a hell of a lot of suffering people just so some rich asshat can brag to his friends that he has an extra zero in his bank balance.
Do I think those who work hard and get rich should enjoy their dues? Sure. Do I think they need to stockpile billions upon billions of dollars they can't even spend that will, sooner or later, come out of my paycheck? Absolutely not.
t's just too bad that governing philosophy ends up the same each time
Or Finland or Sweden or Switzerland or Denmark or many of other European countries. There's a gigantic difference between "the government forcefully takes over all the industry and runs it poorly" as is the case in Venezuela, compared to "the government ensures people have their basic needs met, roads are paved, bridges aren't collapsing, etc." Unfortunately for the US, idiots like you who can't (or more often, refuse to) see the difference have been running the country for a long, long time now.
Good thing that's not what the American people voted for
We'll see how good a thing it is around 2027-2028 when the sunset clauses kick in. It isn't the rich who will be ponying up. They've made sure that those sunset clauses don't affect the tax cuts that benefit them specifically.
in the last few elections
Obama didn't run on a policy of tax cuts for the rich. Trump ran on a platform of tax cuts for the middle class and then changed his mind after taking office. The American people voted for exactly the opposite of what Trump's doing. He just doesn't care, and his zealot followers are happy to live in whatever lala land he cooks up for them no matter how far out of touch with reality it is. Pretty much everyone who isn't a die-hard Trump zealot is pissed off about this tax bill, the net neutrality debacle, etc. Even those that initially supported him (without the zealotry) have turned away from him in droves, and they're slowly turning away from the republican party in general.
I suppose you'll just have to suck it up and do some work yourself, huh?
Luckily I'm Canadian, so even if I got laid off or break my leg or contract some horrible disease, I'm not totally hosed and have the opportunity to return to a reasonable lifestyle once I've recovered enough to do so.
I don't suppose you'd like to post some links? Perhaps reference some peer-reviewed papers supporting your position? Or at least an article from a well-respected science journal? Given that the models are built on historical data, I'd be quite surprised if they somehow don't line up with it. Of course the models probably don't take into account things like major meteor strikes to any great degree, meaning they'll definitely start to diverge around 65m years ago, as there's no point bothering to model an event that's (almost) entirely unpredictable, only happened a handful of times in Earth's entire history, and we couldn't avoid or prevent if it happens again. There's probably other less drastic events that aren't modeled either which would cause diversions but you know what.. the people building the models will account for that, if by no other means than simply stating "this model doesn't account for volcanic winters so it won't be entirely accurate before 1816" or whatever similar wording.
And yes, sometimes specific models are drastically wrong (because they predict something that didn't happen, or fail to predict something that did.) Those get discarded as they should. To claim that all models are wrong just because some are wrong is disingenuous at best. Most of the time even the "wrong" models are pretty close and only need a few tweaks to account for new data -- just like in any other scientific field.
And its hardly a surprising leap of logic for computer models to be in agreement with "warmists." There's a dead simple explanation for that -- the "warmists" are correct! That's why you need data to back up these claims.. you can make a model showing anything you feel like if your only concern is "make it say what I want it to say?"
Of course, perhaps you prefer to just arbitrarily state you're a physical scientist (behind an AC post no less) and throw out a baseless claim without evidence? Ahh that's the good stuff!
But even if he was conducting presidential business.. he's supposed to be the "smart money guy" type.. who apparently thinks its great to spend literally millions of taxpayer dollars every week to go golfing. You would think he could hold a few of those meetings in his office, wouldn't you?
Then again I suppose its good business to spend other peoples' money while you can..
Smoke and mirrors. Trump & friends want the American people (and more importantly, the media) to pay attention to absolutely anything aside from the Russian meddling scandal and investigation.
Uranium One is an especially good target because it not only involves Hillary Clinton (to rile folks up,) the Russians (to scare folks) and Robert Muller (to defame him,) so its a triple whammy. And even though absolutely nobody has found any actual evidence of wrongdoing in that deal, Trump zealotry is so bloody high that he immediately gets 20-30% of the population calling for inquests and calling for Muller's head based on nothing more than a few tweets and the odd Hannity insanity rant.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know you have consciousness? That's a rather pointless question without having a specific definition of consciousness. Until such time, we'd have to just go with the old "I'll know it when I see it" mandate.
I also experience it as free will.
That's quite my point. We have a different definition of "free will." The common definition is based on what you experience. The fundamental definition is based on us being a giant blob of quantum mechanical particles that happen to work well together.
Even if the universe was discrete and we could prove that everything that has and will ever happen was inevitable based on the initial conditions set by the big bang, your "experience" would still that you have free will, because your brain just isn't designed to comprehend the actions of every proton and electron zipping around in your brain individually. Philosophically it would be a huge deal but in terms of your day to day experience (including whether you get caught and punished for committing a crime) wouldn't be particularly impacted either way.
they can't explain how consciousness arises from physics, so they claim all the constituent parts 'have consciousness'
They also can't explain how things like magnetism arise from physics, so they claim constituent parts have 'intrinsic' charge and angular momentum (spin) which together form an intrinsic magnetic moment.
From that aspect, applying "consciousness" as a new fundamental intrinsic property of particles isn't flawed. The flawed part of the argument is applying random philosophical (and more importantly, unmeasureable) properties to particles for absolutely no reason. If they want it to be considered science rather than philosophy (or just hogwash) then they'll need to present some actual evidence not just throw out some wild hypothesis and claim they're right just because the idea sounds good to them. We associate an intrinsic charge with particles because we can measure a charge, even if we don't know fully understand why that charge exists or where it comes from.
The nature of consciousness might be an interesting topic for philosophical discussion. Its entirely irrelevant from a scientific standpoint. Both "its something we can't detect" and "its emerges from more complexity than we can understand" are useless as a basis for study.
The latter becomes less useless as we improve our understanding of complex systems (including the human brain) but we're still a very long way from being able to study consciousness in any serious scientific manner even if it does derive purely from complexity that could in principle be understood eventually.
Build a brain from scratch and see if consciousness emerges. Modern AI systems are a few orders of magnitude from being anywhere close to powerful enough to do that of course so its not practically falsifiable now or even in the near future.. but its technically falsifiable and therefore a valid scientific hypothesis.
You're not thinking fundamentally enough. The "free will" argument with regard to physics comes from the idea of a deterministic universe: If every particle's present and future is exactly determined by its history, then that also includes the particles in our brains and bodies and therefore anything we say or do can be interpreted as a result of our particles having no choice as their path was determined at the time of the big bang, and 14 billion years of banging around led us to kill that poor woman whether we wanted to or not.
The argument is purely theoretical and has zero bearing in reality -- you could just as easily argue that the judge sentencing you had no choice in doing the sentencing so you're still just as in jail (or worse) as you would have been in a truly free will universe.
Of course, the argument is also entirely invalidated by quantum mechanics -- we know for sure that a particle's history (and even its existence) is, at some level, completely random. You can still argue whether complete randomness leads to free will any more than complete determinism does ("I had no choice my brain's decision was predetermined by prior history!" becomes "I had no choice it was a purely random configuration in my brain!")
But anyway, the type of "free will" they're talking about here is not really the same concept of "free will" that for example is taken away when you enslave a person. In that case the person no longer has "free will" by most common definitions, but they still have this sort of fundamental physics-based "free will" (or not, depending on how you feel about the above argument!)
The one where stuff becomes sufficiently complicated and (insert long and bamboozling set of random examples of complicated systems and a grab bag of barely coherent ideas) and presto consciousness happens for some reason, apparently (c/f strange loops etc)?
This one. I don't know why you would dismiss this particular theory, since its by far the most well-supported of the bunch (certainly more well supported than TFA's theory of "insert magic and call it a day.")
Now you may not like the theory as it tends to imply that humans are just a pile of random chance and that everything we do is ultimately meaningless (whereas if you have a religion-type soul of some variety, the things you do in life would presumably carry on past your death in some manner.) But its hard to dismiss it when exactly that principle underlies things like evolution and chaos theory. And we're already starting to see some pretty impressive AIs at a computing level that's still a few orders of magnitude less than what our brains are capable of. The most telling AIs in my opinion aren't things like Deep Blue or Alexa.. the most telling ones are those that can do things like emulate the behavior of small insects like ants. There was one I heard about recently where they literally mapped some a worm's neurons into an AI system -- getting close to the scifi "brain download" concept (at least in theory -- that whole orders of magnitude of power bit is still a pretty significant hurdle before we try to do that for humans!)
So the question becomes: Assuming tech improves and we eventually get the ability to map billions of neurons instead of just hundreds, and then map a human brain onto those digital neurons.. will that AI be considered conscious or not? Its a serious question. My suspicion is "yes," though with some caveats (primarily, the question of whether digital emulation can ever replicate our analog brains in sufficient detail to "work" as we would expect.)
Nothing except the hundred thousand competitors who don't charge a percentage and would happily take his business.
Music artists get a bum deal because any fool with an instrument can make music, and even if we want to ignore the complete crap, there's still plenty of people who make reasonably good music in their garage or local pubs yet never make it beyond that. On the other hand there are (relatively) very few publishers which is why they basically hold all of the power. If you want to get your band signed you don't get to go shop around to the publishers and demand a reasonable percentage. You have to beg them and hope they'll give you _any_ percentage.
The internet was supposed to change all of that, and to some degree it helped. But at the end of the day the publishers just have too much control. Consumers want to to go a website that has the music they want to hear right now. Its great if that website also has new music for them to explore but its not the biggest deal. So you can set up a Indiefy (or whatever name:P) site and cater specifically to unsigned bands and do your own curation to ensure the music quality is high and pay the artists a good percentage.. and you will die out fast because you don't have Lady Gaga or Ed Sheeran or whoever the latest fad of the week is. And even if you don't die out and end up becoming a big name yourself.. well, you've essentially become another publisher. And sooner or later you'll come under the same pressures to eternally increase profits that every other publisher deals with. Its an ugly cycle.
music I pay attention to has been gradually becoming simpler, louder, and more homogenous
FTFY. More music of all sorts is generated. But without the gatekeepers telling you what you should like, you have to put in the effort to search it out yourself. And frequently as you note, short-term "popular" songs are not the same as long-term "good" songs.
Of course a lot of the websites don't make it particularly easy. Their algos will certainly take into account the things you've marked as "Like" (or whatever they call it in their system,) but it also takes into account things like "most popular" (which will often be the catchy-yet-terrible styles) and "recently listened to" (whether you hit like or not -- so make sure to use the dislike button as well!) and so on. Basically you get funneled toward popular crap even if you're intentionally trying to avoid it, because by definition its popular.
But of course they do that because that's what most people want, or at least are sufficiently happy with to not complain (or stop using the service..)
If you want to find "good" music, try joining some music-related forums or discussion groups and things like that. Places where you can ask real people for real opinions. Relying on services like Spotify to do that for you is silly.. their goals simply aren't in line with yours.
Publishers do an important job in the process.
The problem is that they essentially get to choose their own percentage when signing an artist, and unsurprisingly choose to benefit themselves greatly at the cost of everyone else involved. Basically anyone who gets to decide on their own wages (these guys, corporate board members, etc) is going to end up with a significantly larger fraction of the pie than they deserve. But that doesn't mean they do nothing or deserve none of the pie.
That would be $280/MWh but that's still a far shot from $14000/MWh so your point still stands.
As for other solutions in other countries I'm not really sure any are "much more cost-effective" as I don't believe any other countries have built out a battery pack system to the scale of the Australia installation. Of course the fact that Australia needed the installation (and I seem to recall it was a pretty rushed job to deal with an emergency of some sort) still kind of puts a question mark on the state of the country's power grid.
Overall though, its probably a combination of new tech that hasn't gone through its depreciation yet, plus whoever Neoen is just being greedy and charging through the teeth because they know Australia can't afford to say no. I'm not (yet) worried that this current cost per MWh is indicative of the long-term costs. Of course such a high initial cost could certainly slow down investment from other countries who might have considered such an installation, dragging out that depreciation capability.
The article doesn't make mention of whether or not those numbers are really per-sandwich, or if they take say 2 slices of bread and count the carbon for the whole loaf in the same way that the RIAA lawsuits like to assume each pirated song from an album justifies the full cost of the album so that 12 songs = $300 rather than $25 or whatever..
The problem isn't that foreign entities can review the source code. The problem is that nobody else gets to, so the foreign entities have the capacity to find bugs and simply not report them. You know, the kind of thing the NSA absolutely never ever would do because the US is so much better than anyone else..
Will it stop Youtube videos from autoplaying? I tend to have a bunch of tabs open at once and if I have to restart my browser (say, for an update...) its a horrid cacophony until I either wait them all out or manually switch to each video and pause it. Somewhere around 3/4 of the addons I use are there specifically to stop Youtube from being so obnoxiously in your face (and the other 1/4 are mostly to stop other videos/scripts/bullshit from auto-running as much as possible.)
You're an idiot.
The problem is that we conflate love and sex, and then throw religion and government into the mix as well with the whole marriage thing.
You can love someone you don't lust after, and you can lust after someone you don't love. The strongest marriages tend to be when both partners have both sets of feelings for each other.
But all of those feelings can change over time regardless of whether or not you have a ring on your finger so even the strongest marriage can break down given enough time (especially if there's external factors like money issues or family drama or whatever other bullshit involved.)
Good sequel's aren't really a problem. People often like sequels, especially if the characters were compelling and the original's story was set up to lead into a sequel. If you love something, its not surprising to want more of it. Where sequels become a problem is when they just shovel some shit at you after an original movie (that was never intended to have sequels) sells well and they're just cashing in because they can.
Prequels are a bit of a mixed bag. They can go really good or really bad. Often prequels either revolve primarily around characters that weren't in the original movie (though they typically make a cameo to show that it really is a prequel,) which removes the whole "compelling character" angle that sequels can make use of. Or they revolve around the backstory of one or two of the original's characters but that means injecting the creator's vision of how the character got to be where they are that has a potential to conflict with the fan's thoughts about the character.
Reboots can be OK, but they're pretty much always jarring as you have to completely give up whatever you thought about the characters and story from the original and try to convince your brain to start from scratch. For example, the jump from Tobey Maguire's Spiderman 3 to Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spiderman.. was a hell of a hit if you were expecting the latter to be Spiderman 4. Hulk (Eric Bana) -> The Incredible Hulk (Edward Norton) was even worse, as the latter (from what I've read) was made primarily because Marvel didn't think the former fit into their new "cinematic universe" vision.. and then when Hulk shows up in the Avengers, he's played by a totally different guy again (Mark Ruffalo.) Talk about fan confusion!
And finally we have remakes. These are usually the shittiest films on the market. Its very rare that a remake outdoes the original in anything other than the CGI, and that's only because our tech is better these days. Has there ever been a remake that did especially well? Well ok, lets limit it to say 80s or later (original) as there was a lot of films from the 20s and 30s that have been remade and did decent. I'm sure there's the occasional more modern example but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
1. No originality
Audiences like originality. They just don't demand it so producers take the safe bet and go with what they know for sure will sell rather than
2. Lots of explosions
Yep. Audiences definitely want this. And lots of boobies, but that's stymied by the religious nutjobs who think guns are fun and crime is fine but nipples will cripple childhood development.
3. As little dialog and character development as possible.
Yes and no. Audiences definitely aren't as interested in dialogue-heavy shows but that's mostly because dialogue-heavy shows tend to be more artsy rather than entertaining. Artsy stuff may be "interesting" in the sense of the stories they tell, the messages they delivery and the problems they expose, but they're often not all that entertaining in the same way that robots and explosions are.
But TV sitcoms and reality shows suggest that audiences are willing to deal with heavy dialogue if its done in an entertaining form, so why is it so lightweight in movies? Goes back to the producers again. Heavy dialogue is difficult and expensive to translate, and movie producers have to consider a global market now from day one rather than as an afterthought to wring a little more profit out of a locally-successful film. Explosions are cool in all languages. Exposition is.. less so.. especially if its riddled with slang and set phrases that don't have direct translations, never mind the practical aspect of having to match the lip movements as much as possible.
Find pretty much any foreign show that has both fan-made subtitles as well as a professional dub (might have to go back a ways since as noted, most things are released with translations already and fansubs aren't nearly as common as straight rips.) Fansubs tend to be a lot more literal in their translations whereas the professional dubbing is restricted by lip syncing and other technical limitations. I recommend a fansub as the matching professional subs are pretty hit and miss -- some will tend more to the literal side and show this issue while others will be a direct transcription of the dubs and seem fine if you don't know the original language at all.. It gets really jarring if you use the subs as a poor man's close captioning over a dubbed show and they went the literal route.. you end up hearing and reading sometimes vastly different phrasing..
Being able to sell for $0 because its subsidized by your other products is a pretty good "execution" to be sure..
Uhh nobody assumes that unless they're intentionally trying to make a misleading point. For that reason, any reasonable argument about the state of "healthcare" in a country will use multiple resources and measurements -- life expectancy of course is one, but also things like infant mortality, outcome rates for cancer/heart/other common treatments and so on. And they try to compensate as best they can for the various differences in measurement between countries and reporting agencies.
And organization as large and important as the WHO doesn't just release reports based on weak and questionable data. They do their research and take as many factors as possible into account.
That's kind of the problem. We're not nails, and they're not hammers. Treating healthcare as a for-profit business means the doctors' primary motivating factor is not your health.
Obviously doctors go through a lot of school and other hassles and nobody would argue that they shouldn't be compensated fairly for their work. But there's a difference between "compensated fairly" and "causing patients unnecessary harm and suffering in the blind drive for dollars."
Only vaguely.. The USSR was a large conglomerate of many different peoples and ideas spread across an enormously vast area of geography, bordered on two sides by foreign powers, only one of which (China) was especially friendly throughout the USSR's existence.
North Korea on the other hand has only one demographic (the Korean people,) a small land area to patrol, and only one fairly short unfriendly border which is heavily mined and essentially impenetrable (by spies or whatever.)
Also, the USSR was much more open to the west even during the cold war than North Korea is -- another avenue for spies and other foreign agents to get in.
And even then, the USSR's collapse was mainly top-down rather than bottom-up. I'm sure there was some riots and whatnot here and there (there always is..) but it mostly came about through decades of economic mismanagement and then Gorbachev's attempts to unfuck things.
And then everyone just let it play out after the collapse and its worked out oh-so-well for Russia so far. A power vacuum followed by mafia control and now a dictator. The other former USSR states are a pretty hit-and-miss bunch as well (some are actually doing OK -- mostly those that had the weakest ties to the union previously.. I'm somehow doubt that's entirely coincidental..)
you're jealous of other people's work and success
Where did that come from, exactly? Not to mention "work" is a pretty loose concept when we're talking about the 1% (and even success is a pretty questionable adjective for the ones who just inherited everything from daddy.)
some government guys with guns
I always thought the IRS came in with lawyers and accountants, but hey its 'Murca we're talking about so maybe they come packing too?
to go take stuff from them
Take what from them, exactly? Taxation is annoying but governments don't function without it. Its been a part of society for thousands of years. Why should a bunch of people who don't need the money anyway be the only ones who get off paying little to nothing while the rest of us have large amounts of our paychecks deducted?
you apparently don't even understand marginal tax rates
I do. I'm guessing you think I just pulled those %ages out of my ass? I didn't. That's the actual tax brackets for the "middle class" (25% up to 90k or so and 28% up to 190k or so) compared to the "upper class" (>400k.) I didn't feel it was necessary to break down all 7 tax brackets since it just gets worse from there when you start trying to consider exactly how many people at 9k/yr (ie: way, way below the poverty line) it would take to match a single billionaire's taxes, even when they only get 10% vs the billionaire's 39.5%. That's a hell of a lot of suffering people just so some rich asshat can brag to his friends that he has an extra zero in his bank balance.
Do I think those who work hard and get rich should enjoy their dues? Sure. Do I think they need to stockpile billions upon billions of dollars they can't even spend that will, sooner or later, come out of my paycheck? Absolutely not.
t's just too bad that governing philosophy ends up the same each time
Or Finland or Sweden or Switzerland or Denmark or many of other European countries. There's a gigantic difference between "the government forcefully takes over all the industry and runs it poorly" as is the case in Venezuela, compared to "the government ensures people have their basic needs met, roads are paved, bridges aren't collapsing, etc." Unfortunately for the US, idiots like you who can't (or more often, refuse to) see the difference have been running the country for a long, long time now.
Good thing that's not what the American people voted for
We'll see how good a thing it is around 2027-2028 when the sunset clauses kick in. It isn't the rich who will be ponying up. They've made sure that those sunset clauses don't affect the tax cuts that benefit them specifically.
in the last few elections
Obama didn't run on a policy of tax cuts for the rich. Trump ran on a platform of tax cuts for the middle class and then changed his mind after taking office.
The American people voted for exactly the opposite of what Trump's doing. He just doesn't care, and his zealot followers are happy to live in whatever lala land he cooks up for them no matter how far out of touch with reality it is. Pretty much everyone who isn't a die-hard Trump zealot is pissed off about this tax bill, the net neutrality debacle, etc. Even those that initially supported him (without the zealotry) have turned away from him in droves, and they're slowly turning away from the republican party in general.
I suppose you'll just have to suck it up and do some work yourself, huh?
Luckily I'm Canadian, so even if I got laid off or break my leg or contract some horrible disease, I'm not totally hosed and have the opportunity to return to a reasonable lifestyle once I've recovered enough to do so.
I don't suppose you'd like to post some links? Perhaps reference some peer-reviewed papers supporting your position? Or at least an article from a well-respected science journal? Given that the models are built on historical data, I'd be quite surprised if they somehow don't line up with it. Of course the models probably don't take into account things like major meteor strikes to any great degree, meaning they'll definitely start to diverge around 65m years ago, as there's no point bothering to model an event that's (almost) entirely unpredictable, only happened a handful of times in Earth's entire history, and we couldn't avoid or prevent if it happens again. There's probably other less drastic events that aren't modeled either which would cause diversions but you know what.. the people building the models will account for that, if by no other means than simply stating "this model doesn't account for volcanic winters so it won't be entirely accurate before 1816" or whatever similar wording.
And yes, sometimes specific models are drastically wrong (because they predict something that didn't happen, or fail to predict something that did.) Those get discarded as they should. To claim that all models are wrong just because some are wrong is disingenuous at best. Most of the time even the "wrong" models are pretty close and only need a few tweaks to account for new data -- just like in any other scientific field.
And its hardly a surprising leap of logic for computer models to be in agreement with "warmists." There's a dead simple explanation for that -- the "warmists" are correct! That's why you need data to back up these claims.. you can make a model showing anything you feel like if your only concern is "make it say what I want it to say?"
Of course, perhaps you prefer to just arbitrarily state you're a physical scientist (behind an AC post no less) and throw out a baseless claim without evidence? Ahh that's the good stuff!
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2017/02/donald-trump-rory-mcilroy-golf-florida
There's a few. Of course that's a sports page so they only list sports people they know about, but its not a great start if you're trying to suggest that he's doing business while golfing.
But even if he was conducting presidential business.. he's supposed to be the "smart money guy" type.. who apparently thinks its great to spend literally millions of taxpayer dollars every week to go golfing. You would think he could hold a few of those meetings in his office, wouldn't you?
Then again I suppose its good business to spend other peoples' money while you can..
Smoke and mirrors. Trump & friends want the American people (and more importantly, the media) to pay attention to absolutely anything aside from the Russian meddling scandal and investigation.
Uranium One is an especially good target because it not only involves Hillary Clinton (to rile folks up,) the Russians (to scare folks) and Robert Muller (to defame him,) so its a triple whammy. And even though absolutely nobody has found any actual evidence of wrongdoing in that deal, Trump zealotry is so bloody high that he immediately gets 20-30% of the population calling for inquests and calling for Muller's head based on nothing more than a few tweets and the odd Hannity insanity rant.