Indeed, in case it is unclear, the 'cost to provide insurance' == cost of payouts + costs of running the business (employees, advertising, space, etc).
I don't think that's true. I've always thought fortune 500 CEO would be really exciting and fulfilling, and yet you have to pay those guys a fortune to do the job. Maybe it sucks a lot more than I thought.
On the other side of things, it seems like 'janitor' or 'farm hand' would pretty much maximize boring/unfulfilling, and yet those guys get paid next to nothing.
In most states and in most insurance categories, the maximum profitability margins of the insurance companies are regulated, as they should be. In all such states you can rest assured that the price of buying insurance is within ~15% of the cost of providing said insurance. That price may not be distributed with maximum fairness, but that's essentially the subject of the discussion: how to improve fairness of the cost distribution.
"We don't know how much it would, but studies from cigarette taxes show that increases costs decrease consumption of even highly desirable things."
So fewer and fewer people are getting what they desire, because other anonymous people don't desire it and would like to force them into a position where they can't afford their desires! What an idiotic and indefensible notion.
You realize the exact same argument applies in the other direction, right?
IE, fewer and fewer people are getting what they desire because other anonymous people are forcing higher health care costs on them by eating too much.
The usual dividing line is between choice and genetics. Most people in the US get to make a decision about how much food goes in their mouths. They do not get a choice in what genetics they are born with. If the day comes where you can replace your defective genes with healthy ones, then it falls into the category of choice, and the argument would then be the same, people who chose to maintain unhealthier genes could reasonably be charged more.
Ouch, that got me a surprising number of Einstein loving moderators trying to silence me. Thanks to the one brave soul who gave me an interesting. Hopefully the metamods will nail the trolls and flamebait.
Sounds like you failed to inspire your students to learn, and that you also didn't know that was part of your job. In short, you sound dumber than your students.
The poor isn't the bottom 10%. The poor is the group that has significant difficulty acquiring the basic needs: water, food, shelter, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_needs And yes, there are still poor people in the US, because we have raised the bar higher than any where else in terms of the cost of acquiring food and shelter among other issues, but this does not mean that there will always be poor people.
It's terrible in the sense of these not being GDP additive jobs, because we don't value knowledge in the GDP. At least they aren't lawyers where their efforts are an actual net negative for society.
The alternative was for your parents to report the assault to the police. Usually the student in question gets transferred to another school (the one for miscreants in the area) thus costing his parents more money rather than yours.
Civil servants frequently have outrageously good retirement programs, which tends to be ignored in salary comparisons. You probably need 40% more salary private sector to match the typical retirement a civil servant will get.
The difference between Google and elsewhere is something like 25%. Some people can't see how that is going to affect their families because they have enough now and don't see the long term issues their lower earnings are going to cause for them. Again, I have to wonder if you want to lose the engineers with foresight. As one example, that salary differential will probably cover the cost of attending a private college vs a crappy state school. Are you thinking 18 years ahead when you have kids? Do you want the engineers who aren't thinking that far ahead?
Some certainly do not have families, but will later in life. Do you want the engineers who aren't thinking ahead to that more than the ones who are?
Some won't have families at all, in which case they'll have to provide entirely for their own elderly care. Will they have thought about saving for that, or will they defer until they need it and it is too late to save....
I like to hire people who think ahead. They think about what the company will need to be around for their careers to span 20 or 30 years, and not just what will keep them from getting fired this month.
The man was a mass murderer after all. Some of us don't want to create weapons of mass destruction, even if we're assured by skilled liars they will not be used to kill thousands of innocent civilians.
I'd have to say that losing the engineers with the sense of responsibility and foresight to know what they need to do to provide for their families in the long term is not going to be a good trade off to keep the engineers who love their work so much they will neglect their families to do it for fun. But who knows which is really better. In my experience, I'd rather have the former. Those are the people who really think about the things that will make you win in the long term. At my company, they're the thought leaders that are allowing us to crush our competition. But google is in a marketplace with essentially no competition, so maybe they have different needs.
That's exactly right. There are people for whom that is an acceptable trade-off, and some for whom it is not. Losing the people for whom it is not a good trade-off is not a great long term strategy for google in my opinion. Particularly since they don't have to lose those people.
At $89000 I would expect to get someone with maybe 3-4 years of experience, and at least one successful project under their belt. That's (as always when discussing US salaries) pre-tax. When you want net for the month, you then have to factor in various tax shelters, such as 401k retirement savings, which are pretty much mandatory if you don't want to be penniless in your golden years.
Take home on that 89000 might be $4-5k monthly after federal and state taxes plus medical insurance etc. Then pay at least $1200 out of that for a studio apartment (more if you need space for your family). A mortgage payment near (15 miles) google HQ is about $5500/mo, so you don't have a house on that salary alone... maybe if your spouse also has a high paying job or you had a large inheritance.
Google is well known for paying below industry to try to keep away non-believers. As a result, they've lost some pretty good talent. With housing prices continuing to rise on the peninsula in spite of the housing bust, everyone is being forced to bump salaries to improve employee retention.
You can't get even 10^3 out of photonic computing, so I'm unclear on how 'high energy physics' helps. Also, remember that we're talking about what kind of computer you can actually build... The equipment size for high energy physics is only going up.
Composition in 3d is exactly what I'm counting on in my estimate. But being realistic, more than 10^6 layers is hard, and 10^9 layers is really, really hard. At 10^9 layers, it takes years to build a single chip at a layer per second.
Finally, we do know that quantum computers cannot offer any significant advantage on NP-complete problems, that's been proven. If we can solve them with conventional computers, that's great, we can solve them with classical ones too. But that's software getting faster, not computers.
Go back to the original question. The question is whether or not there is an endless chain of simulations. Starting from our universe, no, it is not endless, because every successive simulation must be of a smaller, non-infinite complexity. Eventually that non-infinite complexity reaches zero, and that's the end of the chain.
It's not an infinite regression starting at _our_ universe. Our universe consists of a large but finite number of particles (to the best of our knowledge). The sub-universes we can simulate have even fewer particles. The sub-sub universes wind up with less and less particles until you reach 0.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, in case it is unclear, the 'cost to provide insurance' == cost of payouts + costs of running the business (employees, advertising, space, etc).
I don't think that's true. I've always thought fortune 500 CEO would be really exciting and fulfilling, and yet you have to pay those guys a fortune to do the job. Maybe it sucks a lot more than I thought.
On the other side of things, it seems like 'janitor' or 'farm hand' would pretty much maximize boring/unfulfilling, and yet those guys get paid next to nothing.
In most states and in most insurance categories, the maximum profitability margins of the insurance companies are regulated, as they should be. In all such states you can rest assured that the price of buying insurance is within ~15% of the cost of providing said insurance.
That price may not be distributed with maximum fairness, but that's essentially the subject of the discussion: how to improve fairness of the cost distribution.
So fewer and fewer people are getting what they desire, because other anonymous people don't desire it and would like to force them into a position where they can't afford their desires! What an idiotic and indefensible notion.
You realize the exact same argument applies in the other direction, right?IE, fewer and fewer people are getting what they desire because other anonymous people are forcing higher health care costs on them by eating too much.
The usual dividing line is between choice and genetics. Most people in the US get to make a decision about how much food goes in their mouths. They do not get a choice in what genetics they are born with. If the day comes where you can replace your defective genes with healthy ones, then it falls into the category of choice, and the argument would then be the same, people who chose to maintain unhealthier genes could reasonably be charged more.
There's a reason real estate prices are higher in silicon valley. It's better real estate.
Ouch, that got me a surprising number of Einstein loving moderators trying to silence me. Thanks to the one brave soul who gave me an interesting. Hopefully the metamods will nail the trolls and flamebait.
I just tried, and everything seems +++ NO CARRIER.
Sounds like you failed to inspire your students to learn, and that you also didn't know that was part of your job. In short, you sound dumber than your students.
The poor isn't the bottom 10%. The poor is the group that has significant difficulty acquiring the basic needs: water, food, shelter, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_needs
And yes, there are still poor people in the US, because we have raised the bar higher than any where else in terms of the cost of acquiring food and shelter among other issues, but this does not mean that there will always be poor people.
It's terrible in the sense of these not being GDP additive jobs, because we don't value knowledge in the GDP. At least they aren't lawyers where their efforts are an actual net negative for society.
The alternative was for your parents to report the assault to the police. Usually the student in question gets transferred to another school (the one for miscreants in the area) thus costing his parents more money rather than yours.
Most studies are government funded. For some odd reason, it is hard to get a politically incorrect study funded.
Civil servants frequently have outrageously good retirement programs, which tends to be ignored in salary comparisons. You probably need 40% more salary private sector to match the typical retirement a civil servant will get.
The difference between Google and elsewhere is something like 25%. Some people can't see how that is going to affect their families because they have enough now and don't see the long term issues their lower earnings are going to cause for them. Again, I have to wonder if you want to lose the engineers with foresight. As one example, that salary differential will probably cover the cost of attending a private college vs a crappy state school. Are you thinking 18 years ahead when you have kids? Do you want the engineers who aren't thinking that far ahead?
....
Some certainly do not have families, but will later in life. Do you want the engineers who aren't thinking ahead to that more than the ones who are?
Some won't have families at all, in which case they'll have to provide entirely for their own elderly care. Will they have thought about saving for that, or will they defer until they need it and it is too late to save
I like to hire people who think ahead. They think about what the company will need to be around for their careers to span 20 or 30 years, and not just what will keep them from getting fired this month.
The man was a mass murderer after all. Some of us don't want to create weapons of mass destruction, even if we're assured by skilled liars they will not be used to kill thousands of innocent civilians.
I'd have to say that losing the engineers with the sense of responsibility and foresight to know what they need to do to provide for their families in the long term is not going to be a good trade off to keep the engineers who love their work so much they will neglect their families to do it for fun. But who knows which is really better. In my experience, I'd rather have the former. Those are the people who really think about the things that will make you win in the long term. At my company, they're the thought leaders that are allowing us to crush our competition. But google is in a marketplace with essentially no competition, so maybe they have different needs.
That's exactly right. There are people for whom that is an acceptable trade-off, and some for whom it is not. Losing the people for whom it is not a good trade-off is not a great long term strategy for google in my opinion. Particularly since they don't have to lose those people.
To put the numbers in perspective:
... maybe if your spouse also has a high paying job or you had a large inheritance.
At $89000 I would expect to get someone with maybe 3-4 years of experience, and at least one successful project under their belt. That's (as always when discussing US salaries) pre-tax. When you want net for the month, you then have to factor in various tax shelters, such as 401k retirement savings, which are pretty much mandatory if you don't want to be penniless in your golden years.
Take home on that 89000 might be $4-5k monthly after federal and state taxes plus medical insurance etc. Then pay at least $1200 out of that for a studio apartment (more if you need space for your family). A mortgage payment near (15 miles) google HQ is about $5500/mo, so you don't have a house on that salary alone
Google is well known for paying below industry to try to keep away non-believers. As a result, they've lost some pretty good talent. With housing prices continuing to rise on the peninsula in spite of the housing bust, everyone is being forced to bump salaries to improve employee retention.
And yet, there is a non-infinite integer so large it cannot be expressed in the universe.
You can't get even 10^3 out of photonic computing, so I'm unclear on how 'high energy physics' helps. Also, remember that we're talking about what kind of computer you can actually build ... The equipment size for high energy physics is only going up.
Composition in 3d is exactly what I'm counting on in my estimate. But being realistic, more than 10^6 layers is hard, and 10^9 layers is really, really hard. At 10^9 layers, it takes years to build a single chip at a layer per second.
Finally, we do know that quantum computers cannot offer any significant advantage on NP-complete problems, that's been proven. If we can solve them with conventional computers, that's great, we can solve them with classical ones too. But that's software getting faster, not computers.
Only if the most complex computer which can be built in the outermost universe is finite, which it is in the proposed case of the original question.
Go back to the original question. The question is whether or not there is an endless chain of simulations. Starting from our universe, no, it is not endless, because every successive simulation must be of a smaller, non-infinite complexity. Eventually that non-infinite complexity reaches zero, and that's the end of the chain.
It's not an infinite regression starting at _our_ universe. Our universe consists of a large but finite number of particles (to the best of our knowledge). The sub-universes we can simulate have even fewer particles. The sub-sub universes wind up with less and less particles until you reach 0.