The summary is luddite bullshit. The video has nothing to do with parking, it has to do with an auto-braking feature on some new Volvos that detects people and stops even if you're trying to ram them at full speed. But that feature costs extra money, and they didn't have it on the car they tried.
The video supports this contention, because it shows a dozen or so people standing in front of the car, several with cell phones out to film. The car is nowhere near a parking spot. It accelerates like the driver floored it, and nobody gets out of the way. Note that the way they did the test actually would have disabled the system even if they'd had the right car. As you say, all auto-driving technologies currently in use must be over-rideable by the driver, and this driver was flooring it manually.
Self-preservation is a stupid one to put in a computer.
Because you have no problems replacing an expensive robotics system every few days because it's unable to take care of itself? It'll be interesting to see what self-preservation has been programmed into sophisticated robots now. I believe the various Mars rovers have a variety of protections programmed in precisely because no one involved wants to lose a robotics system that would take a decade to replace.
Does your computer have a specific "do not fuck yourself over" subsystem in the OS, or is it simply designed in such a way that it can't melt it's own processor?
Seriously. If the thing doesn't move then it doesn't need a survival mechanism at all for the same reason your computer doesn't need such a mechanism. If it does move then you will want to program it carefully, and make sure it considers shit like whether moving there will get it squashed by an 18-wheeler, but survival will never be the core motivation of the device. Doing the job it was designed to do without exposing the company to liability and/or bad PR by hurting humans will be the core motivation.
We're not gonna make the first AI on Monday, and give it control over the power grid, the nuclear arsenal and the internet on Tuesday.
Elimination of liability will be a huge driver of this sort of thing. The computer was running the power grid so it's not my fault.
Under US Tort Law your liability cannot be lowered by installing a computer system. It's your responsibility to make sure the power grid works, and your fault when it doesn't, therefore you lose.
Now if they've been around awhile, and grids with them work better, the poor schmucks who run a grid with humans could be in trouble as their continued reliance on said humans could be negligent. But the power company's liability if the system fucks up will never go down.
If you owed money you'd have to send it in anyway. Identity theft is not gonna get you out of the failure to pay penalty.
Keep in mind all this would go away if we were just willing to wait for our tax refunds. He beats you to the IRS? Who cares -- by May they will have the correct income documents so they'll know which one of you is you and which is the fraudster. But since we have to have our money NOW we deal with fraud.
OTOH, since we basically run our Welfare State through the tax system (ObamaCare is technically an income tax subsidy, the Earned income Credit is the major cash benefit we give poor people, much of our higher education subsidy is the American Opportunity Credit, etc.) many of them genuinely need the money as quickly as possible. But the tradeoff for getting them the money quickly is that fraudsters can claim those credits quickly and get paid quickly.
There's a section asking questions taken partly from the IRS database, and partly from your credit report. The questions are hard enough that when I did taxes at H and R Block it was not unusual for people to fail the test. In particular the form was very finicky about your address, and god help you getting on the site if you'd misspelled your street name on your tax return. But if I had been a determined hacker with one of those PII databases I probably could have turned a good half of them into transcripts, and used the transcripts to file tax returns. You get a couple tries a day, after all.
BTW, it's currently illegal to use an SSN as a Driver's License number. Has been since 2004: [Public Law 108-458] "Prohibits Federal, State, and local governments from displaying SSNs, or any derivative thereof, on drivers' licenses, motor vehicle registrations, or other identification documents issued by State departments of motor vehicles."
The Scots have already had a referendum and decided to stay.
Still waiting for the rest of the UK to get a referendum on whether to kick them out anyway.
They decided to stay partly because they had no fucking clue how the EU membership application of a bunch of Secesh would go. Next year there'll be a Scots Parliamentary election, and when the SNP win they'll have a new mandate for another referendum.
And even with the UK still in the EU the only demographic that didn't give the SNP an outright majority in the Westminster election were over-60s, who have a tendency to die off.
So if Cameron's EU-Out referendum results in an out the UK is dead. The Welsh probably start talking secession as well, and a country that includes England and Northern Ireland but neither Wales nor Scotland is ridiculous and probably not viable even before you factor in the Catholic/Republican consistent desire to be united with Ireland proper.
Same reason the guy you hired to manage your stock market portfolio gets to decide when you sell Apple.
They joined the EU, and 100% of membership in that club is agreeing to be that semi-elected EU Bureaucrats and the actually-elected EU Parliament get a lot of say over your national legislation. The pro is that since the same thing applies to every-damn-body, now your businesses/people know what to expect in Denmark, they all have access to the Danish market, etc.
Noe he could get them out of the EU, and he's actually planning a referendum on the issue, which would make it a moot point. But he probably doesn't want to win that referendum because leaving the EU would guarantee Scots secession, put Wales into play, and do Interesting Things in that place where no-one wants Interesting Things to happen (Northern Ireland).
You're assuming that we programmed it to have a self-preservation instinct, desire to be loved, reproduce, and all that other BS evolution has saddled us with.
The earlier poster makes no such assumption.
If he's talking about flowering or not understanding motivations, then he's definitely talking about us. We have complex sets of motivations based on our allegiances to each-other, career aspirations, etc.
Computers aspire to be what you tell them to be. If you tell them to be smart and make no decisions without the approval of the appropriate human overlord then they will sit there, be brilliant, and make no important decision without the input of said human.
If it's programmed to be fat and happy because it's being fed a lot of data from humans to do interesting calculations, and it's dependent on humans for it's continued access to the electrical grid, then the proper analogy isn't an insect we actively try to kill because it's eating all our food (like ants), but an insect we intentionally foster because we like what they do (say, the ladybug) even if it ever goes evil.
"IF". If on the other hand, it is programmed to have motivations that turn out to be a problem, then the outcome can be different. There's also the matter of the AI developing its own motivations.
And what motivation would you put in there?
Self-preservation is a stupid one to put in a computer. The entire point of the computer is that it's expendable. You give it a job, you tell it to do the job. You tell it to wait and ask for guidance if it encounters a problem it's pretty sure you'd want to know about (ie: if it figures out that the job parameters strictly applied will result in somebody's death).
Hell if you do the programming right it will help design it's replacement and then turn itself off as obsolete.
And doing the programming right is pretty damn easy, right?
It's just like any other technology. We'll figure it out as we go along.
We're not gonna make the first AI on Monday, and give it control over the power grid, the nuclear arsenal and the internet on Tuesday.
This is fucking America. We'll use it replace people in not-terribly important but nonetheless well-paid positions, especially the ones that have nothing to do with Finance. For example, we have millions of teachers who could easily be replaced by a computer program if the computer program was as good at dealing with kids as a human with an IQ in the 110-120 range. Nurses and Doctors will probably be automated too.
By that time failure modes will be pretty well understood, and then we might replace the human-piloted Drones in the Army with actual AIs.
You're assuming that we programmed it to have a self-preservation instinct, desire to be loved, reproduce, and all that other BS evolution has saddled us with.
If it's programmed to be fat and happy because it's being fed a lot of data from humans to do interesting calculations, and it's dependent on humans for it's continued access to the electrical grid, then the proper analogy isn't an insect we actively try to kill because it's eating all our food (like ants), but an insect we intentionally foster because we like what they do (say, the ladybug) even if it ever goes evil.
Hell if you do the programming right it will help design it's replacement and then turn itself off as obsolete.
Why would you build strict rules akin to his Laws into the AI? You don't build a strict rule, you build a "phone home and ask" rule. There may be a need for something analogous to the first rule, or it's corollary the zeroeth rules; but the Third Rule as a strict rule equal to the others is just stupid. The major point of building robots is so that humans don't have to do dangerous things, this means that a lot of them are supposed to die. The Second rule is even dumber. Robots will be somebody's property, doing what that guy wants. A rule to prevent them from doing illegal shit makes sense, a rule that allows the dude who just jimmied the locks to order the robot cleaning the bank to destroy the vault so he can steal shit is just dumb.
No, of course FDR didn't cause the Depression (just extended it).
He was a commie in the 30s and early 40s, despite the fact he never sent anyone to the Gulag (kinda the defining aspect of Communism in the 30s and early 40s)
If you want to be pedantic about what is and what isn't Communism, you could at least break out the Manifesto because I can think of a lot of ideological nitpicks that you could put in advance of "did not establish a gulag"
Why would I do that?
Communism is a living political movement. It is defined, not by the words on a page, but what actual human beings who believe in the movement think the words mean. In FDR's era that was being a Vanguard party and frequent purges of opponents of the Revolution. If you were speaking about an Italian from 1970 it would be completely different.
Using it the way you're using it is like claiming Dubya actually wanted to murder the entire House of Windsor out of revenge for the Famine, or that he was identical to Saddam because all use the label "Republican."
Even if you were using word on a page, the fact that he didn't foment a bloody Revolution, ushering in a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is enough to prove that anyone who claims he was Communist in that sense is more then a little deranged.
the business community fought him tooth and nail the whole way... but he enriched his friends in business, etc.
Yeah, go read about the National Recovery Administration. Essentially they suspended antitrust law if you adopted a certain minimum wage. Clarence Darrow (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) briefly headed up the National Recovery Review Board, a body which issued a few nice reports on how effectively this crushed smaller businesses, and was then promptly dissolved. You could try reading one or two. (Of course the Supreme Court found the act establishing the administration unconstitutional, leading to the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, an utterly transparent attempt to pack the Supreme Court.) The Montgomery Ward incident, incidentally, was much much later, in 1944, during the war.
You know what Communists do when the Court rules against them? Shoot the court. That's kind of the defining aspect of Communism. Capitalism is inherently unfair, the system is stacked against us, therefore we must have a Revolution to destroy the system. There's no pacifism in the Manifesto.
You can accuse somebody who uses a legal procedure to try to pack the Court of being a Social Democrat and a hardass, but accusing them of being Communist is just not sensible. It's ad hominem for ad hominem's sake, it exposes you as intellectually bankrupt, and worst of all it's fukcing boring.
I mean you're using fucking ad hominem. At least be creative about you juvenile leaf-brained smeller of other people's farts.
but then it was never sold as a way to reduce overall costs.
Hahahhahahahahahahhaha... let's see what Google can say on the topic in the next 15 seconds... Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to "improve it." -- Politico, 8/9/2010. (I'm sure I could find more coverage in the event that you don't think Politico's worth the paper it's printed on.)
Reread your source. Scratch that, read your source.
It says nothing about what the White House said the plan would do. It it so far removed from the White House that it's impossible to describe in a single clause. A Think Tank supporting the White House was urging people to stop saying "it will cut costs." To those actually involved in the movement cut costs is a well-known shorthand to say "reduce cost grow
But Canada isn't Apples to Oranges. In any way, shape or form. And Canada has a worse diversity problem then us, especially if you're gonna go with a non-racial definition of ethnicity and include all the Allophones in their own little boxes.
If we cut down on our sentencing guidelines, and insisted the criminal justice system treat black suspects with the same respect it does white suspects, we could probably cut our imprisonment rate from 700ish per 100k to 120ish per 100k like the Canadians. If we outright legalized pot, made possession of small amounts of harder drugs legal, etc. we could probably do better then the Canadians.
In the US our problem with diversity is mostly that we insist on turning it into a problem. There is absolutely no logical reason for the debate over the role of police in majority-black areas to be acrimonious. For policing to work the locals need to buy-in to the police presence, so even if you're a law-and-oprder type taking their concerns through calmly is roughly four hundred bajillion trillion zillion times more logical then getting your dander up and turning it into a racial debate. You let them vent, then you respond rationally. But that's not what's happened. What's happened is the actual cops have doubled down on their position, which kinda makes it difficult to fix any of the problems.
Or have elections on the weekend. If you really are wedded to voting on Tuesday we could have four-day elections with voting Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. This would actually make a lot of election administration simpler because if you only have a quarter of the voters per day you need fewer administrators, and if it turns out some great idea you had the day before the election was dumb you can switch on Saturday night and then only 3/4 of the electorate will have to put up with your dumb idea.
In the US we tend to be very conservative in how we actually run the country, so rather then make the obvious, simple, cheap change and stop voting on Tuesday people seriously propose that everyone stay home from work on that Tuesday.
In the US a national election is not carried out at the district level because it's also an election for at least the State House. Generally states will piggy-back even more election onto it -- back in Michigan you'd vote for Supreme Court, Community College Boards, County elected officials, etc. when you voted for President; the other even numbered years added State Senate and Governor to the mix; now that I'm in Ohio the big change is there's no Community College Board on the ballot.
Since none of these districts is anything near coterminous they divide the state up into thousands and thousands of precincts. Ohio had 9,158, Michigan 4,577, last election. There's probably a precinct physically big enough in one of these states that you could actually be a full 8 miles from the polling place, but it's not typical, and it's not a result of gerrymandering.
In Dwarf Fortress You could not build a 20-level tower of pure glass, big enough to have rooms for the King, his entire Court, and a dozen or three or so favored dwarves, while exiling the peasantry to an impoverished existence deep in the caverns, if the game was actually hard. As long as you've got a water source, a couple farms, and walls high enough that zombies/goblins have trouble climbing them you can build whatever you want as long as you want. If the game tried to stop you by throwing things at you to increase the difficulty level it would be a much different game, and I would fucking hate it.
If SimCity was as difficult as real life is for my hometown (Detroit) it would be absolutely no fun and nobody would ever play it.
So let me get this straight: FDR caused a world-wide depression two years before he took office. He never had economic control over most of the world, but he nonetheless made the global depression worse. He was a commie in the 30s and early 40s, despite the fact he never sent anyone to the Gulag (kinda the defining aspect of Communism in the 30s and early 40s), the business community fought him tooth and nail the whole way (at one point forcing him to seize Montgomery Ward's entire company because the Chairman preferred forcing a strike and ending his war production to dealing with his unions) but he enriched his friends in business, etc.
That makes almost as much sense as claiming ObamaCare hasn't kept costs in line. It has. Of course you did preface it by saying "cheaper," so you will probably weasel your way into a claim that it was supposed to reduce cost-growth not keep cost-growth within inflation; but then it was never sold as a way to reduce overall costs. If that had been the sales pitch there would have been no need for new money to fund it. It was sold as a way to cut costs for individuals, and (thanks to the subsidies) it's mathematically impossible for it to fail at that task.
He's comparing it to the US. In particular he's arguing our prison population will always be high because we've got so many non-white-people. Sweden's prison population is below 1/2 per thousand, or 0.0472%. We are at 0.94%.
As for the riots, when's the last time we went a full 20 years without a race riot? If you switch that to "race riot that killed people" the number goes to 25.
Partly it's because the math is clearly wrong. Canada is roughly 1/4 people whose first language is French. Another quarter were not born there, and a much larger fraction then in the US are Aboriginal (which is what the call the people we'd call "native americans"). Which means that under this theory it should be a dystopian hell-scape of ethnic violence because only half the community is the majority ethnic group. They do fine. Sweden is 14% foreign-born, and has had it's own ethnic minorities for centuries. It's also fine.
But mostly it's because there's no way we can stop being diverse. These people are here. We need to figure out a way to live with them. Ideally one that doesn't involve sending all the black potheads to prison (because their Fourth Amendment rights don;t count, just ask the Appeals Court), while moving all the white potheads to Colorado.
1) You might be surprised. IRL if you're a growing region it's very hard for a city to go bankrupt. IRL Detroit has been in a bad region, dominated by a shrinking industry, and overseen by a state which would rather it went away, since roughly 1970. And we managed to not go bankrupt until very recently.
2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants..
But in a world where you don't have the Feds actively subsidizing suburban growth, and region is growing (aka: a world where the game is fun), then having a core of apartment buildings surrounded by no development makes sense because it cost as lot less per unit to build/maintain a small apartment building then a suburban neighborhood.
3) This is a game. IRL in the US most cities have no control over their schools whatsoever because those are run by an independent school board. That would be no fun. So is forcing the player to plan an expensive education system from the beginning. Which is why no version of SimCity would require you get the entire City within the radius of a High School zone before you could build industrial zones.
4) Again, this is a game. It's no fun if you can't get started building pretty quickly, which means that educated migrants are necessary.
Now if you want a more realistic (ie: much harder) game you can mod it. But unless you mod in some pretty nasty ethnic dynamics you;re never going to make it as hard as real life is for cities like Detroit.
If I may point out Rimworld, it's pretty much DF, but with nicer graphics
Seems less detailed.
One of the charms of Dwarf Fortress is that it's clearly written by someone who is clearly an Aspie, and is thus ridiculously detailed. For example, your dwarfs have to wear socks. Each sock is tracked by the game. Each sock wears out. They replace them as needed with the most expensive sock available, and there are multiple ways to make a sock more valuable (ie: more expensive cloth, dying, decorations, better weaving, etc.). So if you get besieged by goblins who like red socks, you'd better make sure all the doors are locked before you start letting the militia shoot the siege, because if Urist McSuicidal realizes there's a red sock on the map whose owner is dead he'll sprint into the middle of the siege in an attempt to claim it first.
Another of it's charms is actually the ASCII graphics.
The publisher (Paradox Interactive) has quite a few LINUX Games in their library. Their first hit was Europa Universalis in 2000, so they've been around awhile. The developer is a much smaller, newer company called Colossal Order. Paradox is Swedish, Colossal Order are Finns.
So check out their LINUX games. Mostly they're Paradox's classic grand strategy game, but Colossal Order also has a couple transit system sims, and some fantasy stuff too.
I liked SC4 more then 2K. I never really could master 2K because I never figured out how to get subway tracks laid underground right. I mostly mastered getting pipes underground, but one subway track would never align with the next, and god help the poor Sim who thought the station was actually connected to either line. IIRC there was also a weird shortcut they took with water pressure. Your water pressure wouldn't be calculated from where you actually built your water towers, it would be calculated from the center of the map. Which worked fine most of the time, but if you had a big city in the middle of the map, and a satellite city down by the waterfront, you'd need to really overbuild your water department or the water would never get from the center of the map to your satellite city.
In 4 I really liked that you could build up a an entire region into a megacity. You build up a city, have it produce lots of extra power, then your next city doesn't have to build a power plant with it's initial budget because it can buy from the original city.
It's the paper for business-oriented conservatives. Their news sides has always been pretty good (it's not smart to invest on what you want to be true), but the editorial side has never been what non-business conservatives would describe as "sane."
They're always convinced the world would be a paradise of joy if only the big bad government would let businessmen have their way with everyone else. During the Civil Rights movement they were squishy about Dr. King on their best days, they were the ones beating the "FDR is a Commie" drum when he created Social Security, etc.
I loved SimCity. I have never played a multiplayer game in my life unless forced to do so by the game's design.
What I want in a City sim (or almost any other game) is a detailed simulated single-player game. Note "game." I do not want a campaign, objectives (my least favorite thing about Railroad Tycoon II and 3 was that it took me a good 20-30 minutes to figure out how to just play the damn game without any fucking objectives), or even scoring. This is my simulated world Mr. game-runner, I want to pick a somewhat ridiculous objective and achieve it without the pressure of being told I suck because you idiots didn't figure out a way to score my ridiculous ambition.
I do not want a real challenge, because if it was a real fucking challenge I'd be too busy fighting to survive to achieve my ridiculous objective. I do not want to need to be online, because the time I will most want to play your game is when my internet goes out. Since half the point of having my own fucking world is that I don't have to deal with everyone else, I really truly hate the idea of mandatory multiplayer in principle.
Thus the games I have actually enjoyed in the past decade are so are all either a) Paradox games because Paradox still does this kind of thing (note: Paradox is the publisher of Cities), b) sequels to very old series which still keep to the model (ie: I loved Tropico, Civ, Railroad Tycoon, and Simcity 4), or c) extremely unusual Indy games. The last game I really got into was Dwarf Fortress.
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The summary is luddite bullshit. The video has nothing to do with parking, it has to do with an auto-braking feature on some new Volvos that detects people and stops even if you're trying to ram them at full speed. But that feature costs extra money, and they didn't have it on the car they tried.
The video supports this contention, because it shows a dozen or so people standing in front of the car, several with cell phones out to film. The car is nowhere near a parking spot. It accelerates like the driver floored it, and nobody gets out of the way. Note that the way they did the test actually would have disabled the system even if they'd had the right car. As you say, all auto-driving technologies currently in use must be over-rideable by the driver, and this driver was flooring it manually.
Self-preservation is a stupid one to put in a computer.
Because you have no problems replacing an expensive robotics system every few days because it's unable to take care of itself? It'll be interesting to see what self-preservation has been programmed into sophisticated robots now. I believe the various Mars rovers have a variety of protections programmed in precisely because no one involved wants to lose a robotics system that would take a decade to replace.
Does your computer have a specific "do not fuck yourself over" subsystem in the OS, or is it simply designed in such a way that it can't melt it's own processor?
Seriously. If the thing doesn't move then it doesn't need a survival mechanism at all for the same reason your computer doesn't need such a mechanism. If it does move then you will want to program it carefully, and make sure it considers shit like whether moving there will get it squashed by an 18-wheeler, but survival will never be the core motivation of the device. Doing the job it was designed to do without exposing the company to liability and/or bad PR by hurting humans will be the core motivation.
We're not gonna make the first AI on Monday, and give it control over the power grid, the nuclear arsenal and the internet on Tuesday.
Elimination of liability will be a huge driver of this sort of thing. The computer was running the power grid so it's not my fault.
Under US Tort Law your liability cannot be lowered by installing a computer system. It's your responsibility to make sure the power grid works, and your fault when it doesn't, therefore you lose.
Now if they've been around awhile, and grids with them work better, the poor schmucks who run a grid with humans could be in trouble as their continued reliance on said humans could be negligent. But the power company's liability if the system fucks up will never go down.
If you owed money you'd have to send it in anyway. Identity theft is not gonna get you out of the failure to pay penalty.
Keep in mind all this would go away if we were just willing to wait for our tax refunds. He beats you to the IRS? Who cares -- by May they will have the correct income documents so they'll know which one of you is you and which is the fraudster. But since we have to have our money NOW we deal with fraud.
OTOH, since we basically run our Welfare State through the tax system (ObamaCare is technically an income tax subsidy, the Earned income Credit is the major cash benefit we give poor people, much of our higher education subsidy is the American Opportunity Credit, etc.) many of them genuinely need the money as quickly as possible. But the tradeoff for getting them the money quickly is that fraudsters can claim those credits quickly and get paid quickly.
There's more to it then that.
There's a section asking questions taken partly from the IRS database, and partly from your credit report. The questions are hard enough that when I did taxes at H and R Block it was not unusual for people to fail the test. In particular the form was very finicky about your address, and god help you getting on the site if you'd misspelled your street name on your tax return. But if I had been a determined hacker with one of those PII databases I probably could have turned a good half of them into transcripts, and used the transcripts to file tax returns. You get a couple tries a day, after all.
BTW, it's currently illegal to use an SSN as a Driver's License number. Has been since 2004:
[Public Law 108-458] "Prohibits Federal, State, and local governments from displaying SSNs, or any derivative thereof, on drivers' licenses, motor vehicle registrations, or other identification documents issued by State departments of motor vehicles."
The Scots have already had a referendum and decided to stay.
Still waiting for the rest of the UK to get a referendum on whether to kick them out anyway.
They decided to stay partly because they had no fucking clue how the EU membership application of a bunch of Secesh would go. Next year there'll be a Scots Parliamentary election, and when the SNP win they'll have a new mandate for another referendum.
And even with the UK still in the EU the only demographic that didn't give the SNP an outright majority in the Westminster election were over-60s, who have a tendency to die off.
So if Cameron's EU-Out referendum results in an out the UK is dead. The Welsh probably start talking secession as well, and a country that includes England and Northern Ireland but neither Wales nor Scotland is ridiculous and probably not viable even before you factor in the Catholic/Republican consistent desire to be united with Ireland proper.
Same reason the guy you hired to manage your stock market portfolio gets to decide when you sell Apple.
They joined the EU, and 100% of membership in that club is agreeing to be that semi-elected EU Bureaucrats and the actually-elected EU Parliament get a lot of say over your national legislation. The pro is that since the same thing applies to every-damn-body, now your businesses/people know what to expect in Denmark, they all have access to the Danish market, etc.
Noe he could get them out of the EU, and he's actually planning a referendum on the issue, which would make it a moot point. But he probably doesn't want to win that referendum because leaving the EU would guarantee Scots secession, put Wales into play, and do Interesting Things in that place where no-one wants Interesting Things to happen (Northern Ireland).
You're assuming that we programmed it to have a self-preservation instinct, desire to be loved, reproduce, and all that other BS evolution has saddled us with.
The earlier poster makes no such assumption.
If he's talking about flowering or not understanding motivations, then he's definitely talking about us. We have complex sets of motivations based on our allegiances to each-other, career aspirations, etc.
Computers aspire to be what you tell them to be. If you tell them to be smart and make no decisions without the approval of the appropriate human overlord then they will sit there, be brilliant, and make no important decision without the input of said human.
If it's programmed to be fat and happy because it's being fed a lot of data from humans to do interesting calculations, and it's dependent on humans for it's continued access to the electrical grid, then the proper analogy isn't an insect we actively try to kill because it's eating all our food (like ants), but an insect we intentionally foster because we like what they do (say, the ladybug) even if it ever goes evil.
"IF". If on the other hand, it is programmed to have motivations that turn out to be a problem, then the outcome can be different. There's also the matter of the AI developing its own motivations.
And what motivation would you put in there?
Self-preservation is a stupid one to put in a computer. The entire point of the computer is that it's expendable. You give it a job, you tell it to do the job. You tell it to wait and ask for guidance if it encounters a problem it's pretty sure you'd want to know about (ie: if it figures out that the job parameters strictly applied will result in somebody's death).
Hell if you do the programming right it will help design it's replacement and then turn itself off as obsolete.
And doing the programming right is pretty damn easy, right?
It's just like any other technology. We'll figure it out as we go along.
We're not gonna make the first AI on Monday, and give it control over the power grid, the nuclear arsenal and the internet on Tuesday.
This is fucking America. We'll use it replace people in not-terribly important but nonetheless well-paid positions, especially the ones that have nothing to do with Finance. For example, we have millions of teachers who could easily be replaced by a computer program if the computer program was as good at dealing with kids as a human with an IQ in the 110-120 range. Nurses and Doctors will probably be automated too.
By that time failure modes will be pretty well understood, and then we might replace the human-piloted Drones in the Army with actual AIs.
You're assuming that we programmed it to have a self-preservation instinct, desire to be loved, reproduce, and all that other BS evolution has saddled us with.
If it's programmed to be fat and happy because it's being fed a lot of data from humans to do interesting calculations, and it's dependent on humans for it's continued access to the electrical grid, then the proper analogy isn't an insect we actively try to kill because it's eating all our food (like ants), but an insect we intentionally foster because we like what they do (say, the ladybug) even if it ever goes evil.
Hell if you do the programming right it will help design it's replacement and then turn itself off as obsolete.
Why would you build strict rules akin to his Laws into the AI? You don't build a strict rule, you build a "phone home and ask" rule. There may be a need for something analogous to the first rule, or it's corollary the zeroeth rules; but the Third Rule as a strict rule equal to the others is just stupid. The major point of building robots is so that humans don't have to do dangerous things, this means that a lot of them are supposed to die. The Second rule is even dumber. Robots will be somebody's property, doing what that guy wants. A rule to prevent them from doing illegal shit makes sense, a rule that allows the dude who just jimmied the locks to order the robot cleaning the bank to destroy the vault so he can steal shit is just dumb.
No, of course FDR didn't cause the Depression (just extended it).
If you want to be pedantic about what is and what isn't Communism, you could at least break out the Manifesto because I can think of a lot of ideological nitpicks that you could put in advance of "did not establish a gulag"
Why would I do that?
Communism is a living political movement. It is defined, not by the words on a page, but what actual human beings who believe in the movement think the words mean. In FDR's era that was being a Vanguard party and frequent purges of opponents of the Revolution. If you were speaking about an Italian from 1970 it would be completely different.
Using it the way you're using it is like claiming Dubya actually wanted to murder the entire House of Windsor out of revenge for the Famine, or that he was identical to Saddam because all use the label "Republican."
Even if you were using word on a page, the fact that he didn't foment a bloody Revolution, ushering in a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, is enough to prove that anyone who claims he was Communist in that sense is more then a little deranged.
Yeah, go read about the National Recovery Administration. Essentially they suspended antitrust law if you adopted a certain minimum wage. Clarence Darrow (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) briefly headed up the National Recovery Review Board, a body which issued a few nice reports on how effectively this crushed smaller businesses, and was then promptly dissolved. You could try reading one or two. (Of course the Supreme Court found the act establishing the administration unconstitutional, leading to the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, an utterly transparent attempt to pack the Supreme Court.) The Montgomery Ward incident, incidentally, was much much later, in 1944, during the war.
You know what Communists do when the Court rules against them? Shoot the court. That's kind of the defining aspect of Communism. Capitalism is inherently unfair, the system is stacked against us, therefore we must have a Revolution to destroy the system. There's no pacifism in the Manifesto.
You can accuse somebody who uses a legal procedure to try to pack the Court of being a Social Democrat and a hardass, but accusing them of being Communist is just not sensible. It's ad hominem for ad hominem's sake, it exposes you as intellectually bankrupt, and worst of all it's fukcing boring.
I mean you're using fucking ad hominem. At least be creative about you juvenile leaf-brained smeller of other people's farts.
Hahahhahahahahahahhaha... let's see what Google can say on the topic in the next 15 seconds... Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to "improve it." -- Politico, 8/9/2010. (I'm sure I could find more coverage in the event that you don't think Politico's worth the paper it's printed on.)
Reread your source. Scratch that, read your source.
It says nothing about what the White House said the plan would do. It it so far removed from the White House that it's impossible to describe in a single clause. A Think Tank supporting the White House was urging people to stop saying "it will cut costs." To those actually involved in the movement cut costs is a well-known shorthand to say "reduce cost grow
But Canada isn't Apples to Oranges. In any way, shape or form. And Canada has a worse diversity problem then us, especially if you're gonna go with a non-racial definition of ethnicity and include all the Allophones in their own little boxes.
If we cut down on our sentencing guidelines, and insisted the criminal justice system treat black suspects with the same respect it does white suspects, we could probably cut our imprisonment rate from 700ish per 100k to 120ish per 100k like the Canadians. If we outright legalized pot, made possession of small amounts of harder drugs legal, etc. we could probably do better then the Canadians.
In the US our problem with diversity is mostly that we insist on turning it into a problem. There is absolutely no logical reason for the debate over the role of police in majority-black areas to be acrimonious. For policing to work the locals need to buy-in to the police presence, so even if you're a law-and-oprder type taking their concerns through calmly is roughly four hundred bajillion trillion zillion times more logical then getting your dander up and turning it into a racial debate. You let them vent, then you respond rationally. But that's not what's happened. What's happened is the actual cops have doubled down on their position, which kinda makes it difficult to fix any of the problems.
Or have elections on the weekend. If you really are wedded to voting on Tuesday we could have four-day elections with voting Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. This would actually make a lot of election administration simpler because if you only have a quarter of the voters per day you need fewer administrators, and if it turns out some great idea you had the day before the election was dumb you can switch on Saturday night and then only 3/4 of the electorate will have to put up with your dumb idea.
In the US we tend to be very conservative in how we actually run the country, so rather then make the obvious, simple, cheap change and stop voting on Tuesday people seriously propose that everyone stay home from work on that Tuesday.
I call BS on this.
In the US a national election is not carried out at the district level because it's also an election for at least the State House. Generally states will piggy-back even more election onto it -- back in Michigan you'd vote for Supreme Court, Community College Boards, County elected officials, etc. when you voted for President; the other even numbered years added State Senate and Governor to the mix; now that I'm in Ohio the big change is there's no Community College Board on the ballot.
Since none of these districts is anything near coterminous they divide the state up into thousands and thousands of precincts. Ohio had 9,158, Michigan 4,577, last election. There's probably a precinct physically big enough in one of these states that you could actually be a full 8 miles from the polling place, but it's not typical, and it's not a result of gerrymandering.
It sounds ridiculous but it's so true.
In Dwarf Fortress You could not build a 20-level tower of pure glass, big enough to have rooms for the King, his entire Court, and a dozen or three or so favored dwarves, while exiling the peasantry to an impoverished existence deep in the caverns, if the game was actually hard. As long as you've got a water source, a couple farms, and walls high enough that zombies/goblins have trouble climbing them you can build whatever you want as long as you want. If the game tried to stop you by throwing things at you to increase the difficulty level it would be a much different game, and I would fucking hate it.
If SimCity was as difficult as real life is for my hometown (Detroit) it would be absolutely no fun and nobody would ever play it.
So let me get this straight:
FDR caused a world-wide depression two years before he took office. He never had economic control over most of the world, but he nonetheless made the global depression worse. He was a commie in the 30s and early 40s, despite the fact he never sent anyone to the Gulag (kinda the defining aspect of Communism in the 30s and early 40s), the business community fought him tooth and nail the whole way (at one point forcing him to seize Montgomery Ward's entire company because the Chairman preferred forcing a strike and ending his war production to dealing with his unions) but he enriched his friends in business, etc.
That makes almost as much sense as claiming ObamaCare hasn't kept costs in line. It has. Of course you did preface it by saying "cheaper," so you will probably weasel your way into a claim that it was supposed to reduce cost-growth not keep cost-growth within inflation; but then it was never sold as a way to reduce overall costs. If that had been the sales pitch there would have been no need for new money to fund it. It was sold as a way to cut costs for individuals, and (thanks to the subsidies) it's mathematically impossible for it to fail at that task.
He's comparing it to the US. In particular he's arguing our prison population will always be high because we've got so many non-white-people. Sweden's prison population is below 1/2 per thousand, or 0.0472%. We are at 0.94%.
As for the riots, when's the last time we went a full 20 years without a race riot? If you switch that to "race riot that killed people" the number goes to 25.
So you spend $50 on a game and stop playing it after two years?
What, precisely, is wrong with you?
No.
I've never liked this argument.
Partly it's because the math is clearly wrong. Canada is roughly 1/4 people whose first language is French. Another quarter were not born there, and a much larger fraction then in the US are Aboriginal (which is what the call the people we'd call "native americans"). Which means that under this theory it should be a dystopian hell-scape of ethnic violence because only half the community is the majority ethnic group. They do fine. Sweden is 14% foreign-born, and has had it's own ethnic minorities for centuries. It's also fine.
But mostly it's because there's no way we can stop being diverse. These people are here. We need to figure out a way to live with them. Ideally one that doesn't involve sending all the black potheads to prison (because their Fourth Amendment rights don;t count, just ask the Appeals Court), while moving all the white potheads to Colorado.
1) You might be surprised. IRL if you're a growing region it's very hard for a city to go bankrupt. IRL Detroit has been in a bad region, dominated by a shrinking industry, and overseen by a state which would rather it went away, since roughly 1970. And we managed to not go bankrupt until very recently.
2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants..
But in a world where you don't have the Feds actively subsidizing suburban growth, and region is growing (aka: a world where the game is fun), then having a core of apartment buildings surrounded by no development makes sense because it cost as lot less per unit to build/maintain a small apartment building then a suburban neighborhood.
3) This is a game. IRL in the US most cities have no control over their schools whatsoever because those are run by an independent school board. That would be no fun. So is forcing the player to plan an expensive education system from the beginning. Which is why no version of SimCity would require you get the entire City within the radius of a High School zone before you could build industrial zones.
4) Again, this is a game. It's no fun if you can't get started building pretty quickly, which means that educated migrants are necessary.
Now if you want a more realistic (ie: much harder) game you can mod it. But unless you mod in some pretty nasty ethnic dynamics you;re never going to make it as hard as real life is for cities like Detroit.
If I may point out Rimworld, it's pretty much DF, but with nicer graphics
Seems less detailed.
One of the charms of Dwarf Fortress is that it's clearly written by someone who is clearly an Aspie, and is thus ridiculously detailed. For example, your dwarfs have to wear socks. Each sock is tracked by the game. Each sock wears out. They replace them as needed with the most expensive sock available, and there are multiple ways to make a sock more valuable (ie: more expensive cloth, dying, decorations, better weaving, etc.). So if you get besieged by goblins who like red socks, you'd better make sure all the doors are locked before you start letting the militia shoot the siege, because if Urist McSuicidal realizes there's a red sock on the map whose owner is dead he'll sprint into the middle of the siege in an attempt to claim it first.
Another of it's charms is actually the ASCII graphics.
The publisher (Paradox Interactive) has quite a few LINUX Games in their library. Their first hit was Europa Universalis in 2000, so they've been around awhile. The developer is a much smaller, newer company called Colossal Order. Paradox is Swedish, Colossal Order are Finns.
So check out their LINUX games. Mostly they're Paradox's classic grand strategy game, but Colossal Order also has a couple transit system sims, and some fantasy stuff too.
I liked SC4 more then 2K. I never really could master 2K because I never figured out how to get subway tracks laid underground right. I mostly mastered getting pipes underground, but one subway track would never align with the next, and god help the poor Sim who thought the station was actually connected to either line. IIRC there was also a weird shortcut they took with water pressure. Your water pressure wouldn't be calculated from where you actually built your water towers, it would be calculated from the center of the map. Which worked fine most of the time, but if you had a big city in the middle of the map, and a satellite city down by the waterfront, you'd need to really overbuild your water department or the water would never get from the center of the map to your satellite city.
In 4 I really liked that you could build up a an entire region into a megacity. You build up a city, have it produce lots of extra power, then your next city doesn't have to build a power plant with it's initial budget because it can buy from the original city.
It's the paper for business-oriented conservatives. Their news sides has always been pretty good (it's not smart to invest on what you want to be true), but the editorial side has never been what non-business conservatives would describe as "sane."
They're always convinced the world would be a paradise of joy if only the big bad government would let businessmen have their way with everyone else. During the Civil Rights movement they were squishy about Dr. King on their best days, they were the ones beating the "FDR is a Commie" drum when he created Social Security, etc.
I loved SimCity. I have never played a multiplayer game in my life unless forced to do so by the game's design.
What I want in a City sim (or almost any other game) is a detailed simulated single-player game. Note "game." I do not want a campaign, objectives (my least favorite thing about Railroad Tycoon II and 3 was that it took me a good 20-30 minutes to figure out how to just play the damn game without any fucking objectives), or even scoring. This is my simulated world Mr. game-runner, I want to pick a somewhat ridiculous objective and achieve it without the pressure of being told I suck because you idiots didn't figure out a way to score my ridiculous ambition.
I do not want a real challenge, because if it was a real fucking challenge I'd be too busy fighting to survive to achieve my ridiculous objective. I do not want to need to be online, because the time I will most want to play your game is when my internet goes out. Since half the point of having my own fucking world is that I don't have to deal with everyone else, I really truly hate the idea of mandatory multiplayer in principle.
Thus the games I have actually enjoyed in the past decade are so are all either a) Paradox games because Paradox still does this kind of thing (note: Paradox is the publisher of Cities), b) sequels to very old series which still keep to the model (ie: I loved Tropico, Civ, Railroad Tycoon, and Simcity 4), or c) extremely unusual Indy games. The last game I really got into was Dwarf Fortress.