Put a drop of mercury in a bowl and spin the bowl. The mercury will spread out to a concave reflective surface smoother than anything we can make with plain old glass right now..
so our bowl making technology exceeds our bowl shaped mirror technology? seems like we could just hire the bowl makers and fire the current crop of mirror makers, problem solved.
The liquid takes on a shape that minimizes its surface tension. Small imperfections in the bowl don't affect the surface tension and are smoothed over.
Any time I see someone wanting to solve a problem of software, I ask myself, "what is the best estimate of the minimum information resources needed to cover all cases of that problem?"
For the problem of diagnosing health problems in humans, I'd say that the current best estimate is the amount of training and ongoing learning needed to maintain a team of human physicians with a diverse range of specialties.
If you want to solve that problem in software, I'd expect you'd have to gather such a team and have them maintain an expert system with their knowledge. So they both have to be specialists in their field and have enough computer knowledge to understand your fancy pants AI system (preferably to the extent that they have at least a vague understanding of its internals). They have to be able to understand what they know, what the machine knows, and how to translate between the two. And if the database accumulates any spurious connections, they have to be able to correct that.
I can't really expect much success from any project with requirements like that. Multispecialists are hard to find, they command large salaries, and at some point they're going to get tired of doing data entry and want to move on at which point you're going to have to find new multispecialists to replace them. At that point you will have to train all over again.
My general feeling is that systems which assist experts are very useful (I could imagine a doctor using a diagnostic database to make sure that alternative possibilities to the most immediate diagnosis aren't overlooked), but systems which attempt to distill experts into software are, at present, doomed to failure.
This is kind of silly. The political spectra of countries with different cultures and problems are not comparable in this way.
Ah, you favour the "America is unique in the world because I say it is so" exceptionalism approach.
No, I believe that all political discourse should be considered in the context of the culture it occurs in. And I believe that all proposed political solutions should be evaluated in the context of the current situation because any attempt at moving a society to some sort of "ideal state" inevitably leads to ruin.
And the parent poster is correct - America has spent so long being "the right" that real left has been demonised (Communism and Fascism and Socialism are totally misunderstood).
The fact that in America you're either "left" or your "right" is the source of the problem. The political spectrum is not a line - it's a multi-dimensional space.
I'm well aware of this fact, but I'm also not aware of any societies where political discourse doesn't occur along a 1-dimensional subspace of that multi-dimensional space. The line along which debate is organized shifts over time, but at any given time all of the mainstream factions are collinear.
Unfortunately due to a lack of education and discussion on the topic this duality simply polarises opinion and policy. American politics has become "you're either with us or against us" and you get people tactical voting instead of really expressing their opinions.
Until the populace properly educates itself this isn't a problem that will go away. And yes, I'm looking at you for your simplification into "left" and "right".
You misunderstand the problem. "Left" and "right" in America, or their counterparts in any country, are simply masks over people's emotional responses to the problems in society. I agree that the polarization is problematic and railed against it in another post. The only real way forward is to understand what people feel, change some attitudes if possible, and seek the simplest compromise between opposing emotions.
"The founding father's never really agreed on anything."
They agreed on one thing. The Federalists praised the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our benefit. The Anti-Federalists bitched about the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our detriment. They agreed that the Constitution was law.
The problem is the Supreme Court over the past 50 years has had a nasty habit of exceeding their authority under the Constitution and involved themselves in policy making. They use foreign law and treaties not ratified by the Senate in making decisions. Over the past 70-odd years courts have found more creative ways to interpret the Constitution as a Living Document.
Try this. The Constitution asserts ours should be a Republican (i.e., representative) form of government. Under a Living Constitution, they could easily assert that their opinion is "representative" and that elections are unconstitutional.
Judicial activism is an end run around one of the founding fathers' mistakes: the constitution makes it exceptionally difficult to pass an amendment.
And of course this was by design. They were concerned that a strong central government could develop into the tyrant that Britain had been.
The trouble was, right away people wanted the federal government to do things that weren't included in the constitution but wasn't on the list of forbidden things. And thus the Necessary and Proper clause was invoked and they passed the charter of the First Bank of the United States.
Basically, it's been like that ever since. The courts have been a proxy for the amendment process for most changes to the scope of the federal government. At the end of the day, you have to realize that sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor strict constructionists and sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor the living document view and for better or worse, the reality is that this is the mechanism that we ended up using to alter the federal government rather than amendments.
And any time the courts do anything, the people who like the outcome, like the outcome, and the people who don't, bitch about it. But so far we've continued the tradition of going along with these decisions.
And if the courts do something that the majority of people do not want, eventually they'll do the same thing they do with everything that gets in their way: they'll just ignore or throw out the courts.
It's occurred to me that I migrated away from my earlier point about compromise in writing that.
Yes, the reality I described above is not conducive to compromise and falls into the category I deemed unworkable. So my suggestion to you is to seek a compromise of making the amendment process less difficult with the concession that strict constructionism be explicitly laid out in the constitution.
Both points stand. You can't stop a majority from doing what they want, but if you try, you can at least work out a compromise. The issue is that people haven't been trying that route.
"The founding father's never really agreed on anything."
They agreed on one thing. The Federalists praised the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our benefit. The Anti-Federalists bitched about the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our detriment. They agreed that the Constitution was law.
The problem is the Supreme Court over the past 50 years has had a nasty habit of exceeding their authority under the Constitution and involved themselves in policy making. They use foreign law and treaties not ratified by the Senate in making decisions. Over the past 70-odd years courts have found more creative ways to interpret the Constitution as a Living Document.
Try this. The Constitution asserts ours should be a Republican (i.e., representative) form of government. Under a Living Constitution, they could easily assert that their opinion is "representative" and that elections are unconstitutional.
Judicial activism is an end run around one of the founding fathers' mistakes: the constitution makes it exceptionally difficult to pass an amendment.
And of course this was by design. They were concerned that a strong central government could develop into the tyrant that Britain had been.
The trouble was, right away people wanted the federal government to do things that weren't included in the constitution but wasn't on the list of forbidden things. And thus the Necessary and Proper clause was invoked and they passed the charter of the First Bank of the United States.
Basically, it's been like that ever since. The courts have been a proxy for the amendment process for most changes to the scope of the federal government. At the end of the day, you have to realize that sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor strict constructionists and sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor the living document view and for better or worse, the reality is that this is the mechanism that we ended up using to alter the federal government rather than amendments.
And any time the courts do anything, the people who like the outcome, like the outcome, and the people who don't, bitch about it. But so far we've continued the tradition of going along with these decisions.
And if the courts do something that the majority of people do not want, eventually they'll do the same thing they do with everything that gets in their way: they'll just ignore or throw out the courts.
The real wisdom they had was in recognizing that if you have two sides debating over something that are unwilling to give in on an issue, then you need to work out some sort of compromise between the two.
Some of those compromises didn't look so wise in the late 1860's. The trouble with compromises is that sometimes the stress of maintaining them is too great for civil society, and maintaining them is more unworkable than finding decisively in one side's favor.
I've been playing out what-if scenarios in my head and I don't think the Civil War could have been avoided. I'm guessing the choices were either to come up with something to maintain the status quo on slavery or have the slave states walk out and form their own union. Under the latter option, any attempts at freeing slaves from border states would probably be interpreted as international incidents. And as the two unions expanded westward they would be competing for new territory (essentially the same as actually happened).
Basically, I think that once American slavery had become an entrenched practice, it was guaranteed to end in blows.
Also, "I think we've corrected the imbalance we've had in the past and now have our curriculum headed straight down the middle." I don't know if what they have is "straight down the middle", but to me, any correction the other way is a good thing after 140 years of liberal guidance.
Not really. Thing is, you're assuming these "liberals" that "injected their view" previously were far-left extremists. They weren't even close. In fact, by most of the world's recognition they were at best "mild conservatives" so a correction the other way would've been to push a true liberal agenda, this turn towards hardcore fundamentalism only exacerbates the problem that already existed beforehand.
In most of the world I'm categorized as a right-wing conservative, yet in the US I'd likely be labeled a "capitalism-hating socialist" for my political views. You there have Mussolini in one side and Hitler on the other, the middle ground between them is still fascism. What you need to look for is a middle ground on a *global* scale, but that lies to the left of your left, not to your right.
This is kind of silly. The political spectra of countries with different cultures and problems are not comparable in this way.
From what I understand, many who label themselves as right wing in Europe are concerned that poor immigrants will come in and leach off the system of socialized benefits. Basically, they have no problem with paying for the common interests of their countrymen, but don't want to pay for benefits for outsiders.
In America, there are is a significant portion of the population, comparable to the portion who label themselves as right-wing in Europe, don't want to pay for socialized benefits for people from different ethnic or socioeconomic groups.
It's always about the potential gains of socializing common risks that everyone faces versus the costs of the system being overburdened by people who can't contribute. Our left thinks that the cost of giving some benefits to people in a bad situation a chance to get back on their feet is a worthwhile investment, while the right thinks that this is too optimistic (plus there's some racism involved).
Most of the arguments that people actually use in political debates are just rationalizations imposed on top of emotional reactions to the underlying issues. Most of the rhetorical tropes that get pulled out in political debate don't really address the underlying issues, so when you look at other country's political debates, they seem bizarre and alien even though the motivations that underlie them are common in all countries.
It is entirely up to interpretation if allowing prayer in schools constitutes an "establishment of religion"...
Likewise your statement is open to interpretation. You probably meant "is" in a way that means "is not". Since it would be impossible to look at all the context surrounding your writing or research your ideas further we'll have to teach people to be skeptical of the meaning of your comment.
If you look at all the historical context, you'll see that issues which are controversial today were controversial at the founding of this country as well. Some states which sent delegates to the Constitutional Congress have constitutions still have text forbidding atheists from holding office.
Both sides are guilty of cherrypicking. The founding father's never really agreed on anything. The real wisdom they had was in recognizing that if you have two sides debating over something that are unwilling to give in on an issue, then you need to work out some sort of compromise between the two. What we're trying to do now, arguing over who is "right", with the implication that whoever is "right" has carte blanche to shape the country to their liking, is unworkable.
Laws don't apply to government. "No open access hotspots" unless of course a politician does it.
Or you could just think about it for five minutes and come to the conclusion that the contradictions could be resolved by not using open WiFi but instead using secured WiFi with a registration system so that any access to the system could be associated with a verified ID. Pretty straightforward really. Just show your passport or driver's license to someone at the airport, your hotel, or whatever the DMV is called in England, and they give you a WiFi login.
If you wipe out a human life everything that person could have done gets wiped out with them. Being raped is a horrible thing, but why is it so much worse than having your arms chopped off like some people in Africa, or being paralyzed by being beaten near death?
I'd say that maiming someone (i.e. leaving them in a permanently diminished state) is a crime of comparable magnitude to outright murder, but I think that trying to come up with a strict well-ordering of crimes will lead to some silly conclusions.
An example of what I would consider to be a silly conclusion is the fact that, if someone dies of their injuries months or years after an assault, whereas before they were merely in a coma, the charges are upgraded to murder. I think that where crimes are judged by their outcome, they should consider the range of outcomes that the victim faces rather than a strict coin flip alive/dead outcome. However, I recognize that that sort of nuance would introduce even more subjectivity into criminal justice which most people wouldn't care for.
While I am for net-neutrality, and we do need some form of regulation on the internet to keep the providers fair and clean, do not, and I repeat, do not assume that the government is pushing net neutrality for the purpose of helping you. There have been many times in the United States where our government will push something like Social Security, saying "This is to help the widows with children", which, yes, is a noble cause that many can't argue with. But look at it now, it is a system used to hook the societal leeches and give paychecks to fat-asses who are too lazy to get up and work.
I'm a bit curious who you think receives Social Security checks. You got the survivor and child benefit correct, but the only other two benefits are a retirement benefit available at age 62 (that's a reduced benefit; you don't get the unreduced benefit until age 66 or 67 depending on when you were born) and a total disability benefit which generally requires a year or two worth of paperwork to prove that your disability is severe enough to end your working life.
I think it's somewhat arguable whether or not the survivor benefit is strictly necessary in this day and age. But I'm curious how these social security benefits which you can only get at the end of your working lifetime are "a system used to hook the societal leeches and give paychecks to fat-asses who are too lazy to get up and work."
Do you think that Social Security is welfare? It isn't.
So scientists who challenge the prevailing politically-correct liberal thesis are "climate deniers" - this is the basic problem. Even the term is ridiculous. Compare it to "holocaust denier".
Cite one. Please, I beg you. Cite one scientist with a reasonable publication record who "challenge[s] the prevailing politically-correct liberal thesis". Don't just leave statements like this hanging there in the breeze - this is the Internet, and with a quick copy, paste and a href= you too can create a link to support your claim!
I bet you that whoever you cite has either a terrible publication record or almost no background in anything like climatology. If they have both of those, then I bet that their "challenges" are nothing of the sort - they probably disagree on the magnitude of global warming, not the fact of it.
I'm not aware of any statements she's made about the magnitude of global warming, but she is expressing concerns that the IPCC is being warped by political and sociological pressures within the climate science community. I can't find where she said it (somewhere among the links in the first page), but she specifically mentions concerns about pressures to publish research that conforms to the IPCC established narrative.
Except they can't pass that cost on to the consumer, because they're still competing in a highly fungible market. Exxon isn't having this problem, Shell isn't having this problem - it's just BP. Which means that if BP raises its prices, people will buy gas from companies that don't have to deal with a multi-billion dollar clean-up.
And if past Oil disasters are any indication, there are probably fines coming along as well. Along with bills related to government operations that had to deal with the spill.
BP won't get off free here.
Actually, I'm fairly sure that all of the oil companies have insurance for things like this and whenever an industry specific catastrophe occurs, the entire industry has their insurance rates go up.
I believe there is only one definition of entropy. I remember reading an interesting quotation in a physicist's blog about the entropic theory of gravity that got some buzz a few months back: "If it smells like entropy, it probably is." Now I don't have a lot of education compared to a lot of folks, but I did pretty well in information theory, and that pretty much encapsulates my intuition on the subject.
My thinking lately is that a structure is an open system with a lower entropy than its surrounding environment. The environment steadily impinges on the structure and only the consumption of free energy can slow it (see Erwin Schrodinger's What is Life?). In my reflections on the matter, I have come to the conclusion that the order of the system doesn't matter, the entropic dynamics just bubble up from the lower level.
Think of a single bacterium. In the passage of an hour, it has a chance to bump into something that will end its simple existence. Against that backdrop, there are different ways that a bacterium can protect its structure. It can expend energy to use various mechanisms to protect itself from its environment, or it can just reproduce and protect its structure by making copies.
On the next level up, cells band together to form multi-cellular lifeforms. The underlying tradeoffs between different sources of risk don't go away, they just become more diffuse. I think that ultimately, all problems of misallocation and inequitable distributions of circumstances stem from the underlying nature of the universe.
On the other side of the coin, my intution says that the concept of choice is inherently tied to the harsh principles of thermodynamics. You have it right in your last paragraph. Choice is what you carve out against the sea of loss. It's all fleeting in the long run, but it's yours. Both individuals and societies determine themselves by what they choose to protect in the face of the fact that they can't protect everything.
If someone claims to have a scheme that provides something good indefinitely, there's got to be a perpetuum mobile implicitly embedded in the scheme. And I think that's a good thing, because freebies reduce decision theoretic assessments to trivial cases.
So I guess it comes down to that I think that it's always best to talk about where you want to go next from here, given what you know now. But it seems unwise to me to make long term plans to transition humanity to some "ideal" or "inevitable" or whatever state.
So I'm willing to listen to ideas for fab labs, vitamin D, a social safety net, and any other ideas that may make life slightly more agreeable for all of the stakeholders involved. But we have to open our eyes to all of the tradeoffs involved if we're going to come up with solutions that satisfy more than a narrow majority of the population (if even that).
And to finish, I'm afraid I have to throw one more jab at basic income. It can be noted that with the circulatory system, the human body implements the concept of basic income. It must also be noted that the human body has a policy of executing traitors at the first sign of rebellion. Loss always pops up somewhere.
Bullshit. In the same way that one can create a model defining the fraction of folks exposed to a TV ad who watch it, you can create a model defining the fraction of folks with webblockers. The analogy is a good one, and Ars Technica, as usual, is full of shit.
They already have a model for that, you dumbass. That model is that the site does not get paid by advertizers for pageviews in which ads are not served.
I'm not really a free market fundamentalist. I know about externalities. I'm just a guy who argues with everyone. I don't really ever agree with anyone.
You say that most jobs are "guarding". I would characterize those jobs as paying rent to the second law of thermodynamics. Within a given span of time all structures suffer decay which can be mitigated by application of an energy budget. The early history of mankind was characterized by simply allowing the decay to accrue, but now we mitigate it more and more by application of energy.
I would characterize all problems that face mankind, including scarcity, as ultimately stemming from the inexorable accrual of thermodynamic rent. There are many ways to pay that rent, but it must be paid unfailingly.
I'm unconvinced that self-maintaining and intelligent robots using solar and nuclear power and made of recycled materials will be vastly more efficient than self-maintaining and intelligent humans indirectly using solar power and made of recycled materials. Both of these things have the same fundamental constraints and as such should have comparable levels of thermodynamic rent needed to maintain them.
Remember that all infrastructure has thermodynamic rent too. At present, we do not have enough resources to perfectly maintain all of our infrastructure. If we don't fundamentally change the cost of maintenance for all things, then what makes you think that will change in the future?
I don't think that a post-scarcity society is possible. There's always going to be a minimum amount of energy and resources needed to keep a person alive and while improvements in technology can reduce that cost of living, there must be a fundamental non-zero minimum. It's like compressing data. You can carve out some of the cost by identifying redundant aspects of a problem and using a single solution for repeated occurrences, but eventually you reach a point where there is no more redundant structure to eliminate.
The idea of promoting general purpose production facilities and shipping raw materials instead of shipping both raw materials and finished goods is an interesting one, but I'm not sure it's a panacea. You still have distribution costs for your goods and the only improvement is that instead of shipping raw materials from A to B and finished goods from B to C, you're now shipping from A to C. This would only be a big source of savings if the distribution network is inefficient. On top of that, a general purpose machine is going to be less efficient than a purpose built one so you're also introducing a new source of cost in the process.
So I guess the question is, is it possible to reduce the cost of living so much that it can easily be provided to everyone? Only if under this system the per capita production exceeds the cost of living. It may be possible that the voluntary work people do will exceed this minimum, but I doubt it. Note that anyone who does zero work increases the share required of the volunteers.
I'm not expecting nanotech and AI to be a huge help either. My guess is that by the time you've designed nanotech with good error correction and that can maintain itself against environmental hazards you'll just have reimplemented cells poorly. I also don't think that a human level AI will be any less temperamental than a human.
My hunch is that most biological systems are reasonably close to optimal for their purpose. As such, any reinvention of something that's already done by a biological system will probably not dramatically outperform it. However, I do believe we will continue to make progress. I don't think there will be a utopia, but I think we can make a world with a little less suffering per person.
Ultimately these problems come from thermodynamics and information theory. All structures (both physical and informational) decay over time unless energy is expended to maintain them.
This essentially means that you can never really "solve" a problem, you can only make a tradeoffs between cost of maintenance and soaking damage in the form of decay or in the form of an exposure to a risk of catastrophe. It's possible to find an agreeable tradeoff for a time, but eventually conditions shift and new problems arise forcing a shift in priorities. Ultimately you have to come to terms with maintenance as a way of life. No set of policies, methodologies, or technologies can produce satisfactory results indefinitely.
Complexity is hard; but if we want its benefits, we'll have to figure something out.
I believe that real world problems have innate costs which behave similar to the concept of Kolmogorov complexity. You can view the Kolmogorov complexity of a problem as the minimum length of a computer program which takes a description of the state of the system as input and outputs a series of procedures which completely resolve the problem down to tautologies. Or something along those lines, I haven't worked out all the details yet.
Based on this guess, my expectation is that the complexity of real world problems vastly dwarfs the complexity of most problems of academic study. Furthermore, this implies that reducing maintenance costs should be like compression. You can condense the redundant structure down (e.g. if every plant needs a specialist to visit once a year, that specialist can visit a large number of plants each year reducing the average cost), but ultimately there is a limit to how much you can compress the cost.
Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to serve as an implicit entropy source for a PRNG, at least relative to that attacker. Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to follow a Poisson distribution with lambda equal to the traffic frequency times the interval of time since the last request where the attacker was able to determine the state of the PRNG (no mean feat in itself).
EDIT FAIL!
I guess I liked that phrase so much that I just had to use it twice in a row.
Don't the packets send/received make up for the lost entropy?
I don't know very much about cryptography, but I'm thinking the same thing.
Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to serve as an implicit entropy source for a PRNG, at least relative to that attacker. Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to follow a Poisson distribution with lambda equal to the traffic frequency times the interval of time since the last request where the attacker was able to determine the state of the PRNG (no mean feat in itself).
For that attacker, the entropy rate of that Poisson process of other people's requests serve as a true entropy source. This would only be a viable attack vector if the attacker controls a large chunk of the server's traffic. I'd think that they'd be more likely to DDOS the server before managing to accomplish anything sneakier.
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Is that with or without lithium's fivefold advantage in how much of the energy actually gets to the wheels? When you recharge the lithium, all the thermodynamic inefficiencies of an Otto cycle heat engine are already paid for at the power plant. In addition, as Anonymous Coward pointed out, you don't need to lug around the heat engine itself.
After accounting for that, you still have an order of magnitude of advantage for liquid fuel.
Can you make batteries that are 10 times more energy dense? Maybe, but I'm guessing it would take more expensive materials and manufacturing technologies. You always need to consider that in saving something one place, you're always increasing a cost somewhere else. It's just a question of which cost you can live with.
I think there are fundamentally different strengths between electrical and chemical energy sources. Electrical energy is more fluid and can be transported easily and converted to mechanical forms easily, but it's a poor for storage. Chemical energy is more durable and suited for storage, but there's a heavy loss on conversion to other forms of energy.
Which is better for transportation depends on whether or not chemical's handicap at conversion to mechanical work is worse than electrical's handicap for storage.
Slashdot Mirror
Put a drop of mercury in a bowl and spin the bowl. The mercury will spread out to a concave reflective surface smoother than anything we can make with plain old glass right now..
so our bowl making technology exceeds our bowl shaped mirror technology? seems like we could just hire the bowl makers and fire the current crop of mirror makers, problem solved.
The liquid takes on a shape that minimizes its surface tension. Small imperfections in the bowl don't affect the surface tension and are smoothed over.
Any time I see someone wanting to solve a problem of software, I ask myself, "what is the best estimate of the minimum information resources needed to cover all cases of that problem?"
For the problem of diagnosing health problems in humans, I'd say that the current best estimate is the amount of training and ongoing learning needed to maintain a team of human physicians with a diverse range of specialties.
If you want to solve that problem in software, I'd expect you'd have to gather such a team and have them maintain an expert system with their knowledge. So they both have to be specialists in their field and have enough computer knowledge to understand your fancy pants AI system (preferably to the extent that they have at least a vague understanding of its internals). They have to be able to understand what they know, what the machine knows, and how to translate between the two. And if the database accumulates any spurious connections, they have to be able to correct that.
I can't really expect much success from any project with requirements like that. Multispecialists are hard to find, they command large salaries, and at some point they're going to get tired of doing data entry and want to move on at which point you're going to have to find new multispecialists to replace them. At that point you will have to train all over again.
My general feeling is that systems which assist experts are very useful (I could imagine a doctor using a diagnostic database to make sure that alternative possibilities to the most immediate diagnosis aren't overlooked), but systems which attempt to distill experts into software are, at present, doomed to failure.
> The founding father's
His what?
I think I have a synapse mislinked somewhere in my brain since that's the second time I've done that in the past few days.
The last one was much worse. I used the phrase "apple's to apple's" in an email to my boss.
This is kind of silly. The political spectra of countries with different cultures and problems are not comparable in this way.
Ah, you favour the "America is unique in the world because I say it is so" exceptionalism approach.
No, I believe that all political discourse should be considered in the context of the culture it occurs in. And I believe that all proposed political solutions should be evaluated in the context of the current situation because any attempt at moving a society to some sort of "ideal state" inevitably leads to ruin.
And the parent poster is correct - America has spent so long being "the right" that real left has been demonised (Communism and Fascism and Socialism are totally misunderstood).
The fact that in America you're either "left" or your "right" is the source of the problem. The political spectrum is not a line - it's a multi-dimensional space.
I'm well aware of this fact, but I'm also not aware of any societies where political discourse doesn't occur along a 1-dimensional subspace of that multi-dimensional space. The line along which debate is organized shifts over time, but at any given time all of the mainstream factions are collinear.
Unfortunately due to a lack of education and discussion on the topic this duality simply polarises opinion and policy. American politics has become "you're either with us or against us" and you get people tactical voting instead of really expressing their opinions.
Until the populace properly educates itself this isn't a problem that will go away. And yes, I'm looking at you for your simplification into "left" and "right".
You misunderstand the problem. "Left" and "right" in America, or their counterparts in any country, are simply masks over people's emotional responses to the problems in society. I agree that the polarization is problematic and railed against it in another post. The only real way forward is to understand what people feel, change some attitudes if possible, and seek the simplest compromise between opposing emotions.
"The founding father's never really agreed on anything."
They agreed on one thing. The Federalists praised the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our benefit. The Anti-Federalists bitched about the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our detriment. They agreed that the Constitution was law.
The problem is the Supreme Court over the past 50 years has had a nasty habit of exceeding their authority under the Constitution and involved themselves in policy making. They use foreign law and treaties not ratified by the Senate in making decisions. Over the past 70-odd years courts have found more creative ways to interpret the Constitution as a Living Document.
Try this. The Constitution asserts ours should be a Republican (i.e., representative) form of government. Under a Living Constitution, they could easily assert that their opinion is "representative" and that elections are unconstitutional.
Judicial activism is an end run around one of the founding fathers' mistakes: the constitution makes it exceptionally difficult to pass an amendment.
And of course this was by design. They were concerned that a strong central government could develop into the tyrant that Britain had been.
The trouble was, right away people wanted the federal government to do things that weren't included in the constitution but wasn't on the list of forbidden things. And thus the Necessary and Proper clause was invoked and they passed the charter of the First Bank of the United States.
Basically, it's been like that ever since. The courts have been a proxy for the amendment process for most changes to the scope of the federal government. At the end of the day, you have to realize that sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor strict constructionists and sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor the living document view and for better or worse, the reality is that this is the mechanism that we ended up using to alter the federal government rather than amendments.
And any time the courts do anything, the people who like the outcome, like the outcome, and the people who don't, bitch about it. But so far we've continued the tradition of going along with these decisions.
And if the courts do something that the majority of people do not want, eventually they'll do the same thing they do with everything that gets in their way: they'll just ignore or throw out the courts.
It's occurred to me that I migrated away from my earlier point about compromise in writing that.
Yes, the reality I described above is not conducive to compromise and falls into the category I deemed unworkable. So my suggestion to you is to seek a compromise of making the amendment process less difficult with the concession that strict constructionism be explicitly laid out in the constitution.
Both points stand. You can't stop a majority from doing what they want, but if you try, you can at least work out a compromise. The issue is that people haven't been trying that route.
"The founding father's never really agreed on anything."
They agreed on one thing. The Federalists praised the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our benefit. The Anti-Federalists bitched about the Constitution and said it would be interpreted as law to our detriment. They agreed that the Constitution was law.
The problem is the Supreme Court over the past 50 years has had a nasty habit of exceeding their authority under the Constitution and involved themselves in policy making. They use foreign law and treaties not ratified by the Senate in making decisions. Over the past 70-odd years courts have found more creative ways to interpret the Constitution as a Living Document.
Try this. The Constitution asserts ours should be a Republican (i.e., representative) form of government. Under a Living Constitution, they could easily assert that their opinion is "representative" and that elections are unconstitutional.
Judicial activism is an end run around one of the founding fathers' mistakes: the constitution makes it exceptionally difficult to pass an amendment.
And of course this was by design. They were concerned that a strong central government could develop into the tyrant that Britain had been.
The trouble was, right away people wanted the federal government to do things that weren't included in the constitution but wasn't on the list of forbidden things. And thus the Necessary and Proper clause was invoked and they passed the charter of the First Bank of the United States.
Basically, it's been like that ever since. The courts have been a proxy for the amendment process for most changes to the scope of the federal government. At the end of the day, you have to realize that sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor strict constructionists and sometimes we have presidents and senates that favor the living document view and for better or worse, the reality is that this is the mechanism that we ended up using to alter the federal government rather than amendments.
And any time the courts do anything, the people who like the outcome, like the outcome, and the people who don't, bitch about it. But so far we've continued the tradition of going along with these decisions.
And if the courts do something that the majority of people do not want, eventually they'll do the same thing they do with everything that gets in their way: they'll just ignore or throw out the courts.
The real wisdom they had was in recognizing that if you have two sides debating over something that are unwilling to give in on an issue, then you need to work out some sort of compromise between the two.
Some of those compromises didn't look so wise in the late 1860's. The trouble with compromises is that sometimes the stress of maintaining them is too great for civil society, and maintaining them is more unworkable than finding decisively in one side's favor.
I've been playing out what-if scenarios in my head and I don't think the Civil War could have been avoided. I'm guessing the choices were either to come up with something to maintain the status quo on slavery or have the slave states walk out and form their own union. Under the latter option, any attempts at freeing slaves from border states would probably be interpreted as international incidents. And as the two unions expanded westward they would be competing for new territory (essentially the same as actually happened).
Basically, I think that once American slavery had become an entrenched practice, it was guaranteed to end in blows.
Also, "I think we've corrected the imbalance we've had in the past and now have our curriculum headed straight down the middle." I don't know if what they have is "straight down the middle", but to me, any correction the other way is a good thing after 140 years of liberal guidance.
Not really. Thing is, you're assuming these "liberals" that "injected their view" previously were far-left extremists. They weren't even close. In fact, by most of the world's recognition they were at best "mild conservatives" so a correction the other way would've been to push a true liberal agenda, this turn towards hardcore fundamentalism only exacerbates the problem that already existed beforehand.
In most of the world I'm categorized as a right-wing conservative, yet in the US I'd likely be labeled a "capitalism-hating socialist" for my political views. You there have Mussolini in one side and Hitler on the other, the middle ground between them is still fascism. What you need to look for is a middle ground on a *global* scale, but that lies to the left of your left, not to your right.
This is kind of silly. The political spectra of countries with different cultures and problems are not comparable in this way.
From what I understand, many who label themselves as right wing in Europe are concerned that poor immigrants will come in and leach off the system of socialized benefits. Basically, they have no problem with paying for the common interests of their countrymen, but don't want to pay for benefits for outsiders.
In America, there are is a significant portion of the population, comparable to the portion who label themselves as right-wing in Europe, don't want to pay for socialized benefits for people from different ethnic or socioeconomic groups.
It's always about the potential gains of socializing common risks that everyone faces versus the costs of the system being overburdened by people who can't contribute. Our left thinks that the cost of giving some benefits to people in a bad situation a chance to get back on their feet is a worthwhile investment, while the right thinks that this is too optimistic (plus there's some racism involved).
Most of the arguments that people actually use in political debates are just rationalizations imposed on top of emotional reactions to the underlying issues. Most of the rhetorical tropes that get pulled out in political debate don't really address the underlying issues, so when you look at other country's political debates, they seem bizarre and alien even though the motivations that underlie them are common in all countries.
It is entirely up to interpretation if allowing prayer in schools constitutes an "establishment of religion"...
Likewise your statement is open to interpretation. You probably meant "is" in a way that means "is not". Since it would be impossible to look at all the context surrounding your writing or research your ideas further we'll have to teach people to be skeptical of the meaning of your comment.
If you look at all the historical context, you'll see that issues which are controversial today were controversial at the founding of this country as well. Some states which sent delegates to the Constitutional Congress have constitutions still have text forbidding atheists from holding office.
Both sides are guilty of cherrypicking. The founding father's never really agreed on anything. The real wisdom they had was in recognizing that if you have two sides debating over something that are unwilling to give in on an issue, then you need to work out some sort of compromise between the two. What we're trying to do now, arguing over who is "right", with the implication that whoever is "right" has carte blanche to shape the country to their liking, is unworkable.
Laws don't apply to government. "No open access hotspots" unless of course a politician does it.
Or you could just think about it for five minutes and come to the conclusion that the contradictions could be resolved by not using open WiFi but instead using secured WiFi with a registration system so that any access to the system could be associated with a verified ID. Pretty straightforward really. Just show your passport or driver's license to someone at the airport, your hotel, or whatever the DMV is called in England, and they give you a WiFi login.
If you wipe out a human life everything that person could have done gets wiped out with them. Being raped is a horrible thing, but why is it so much worse than having your arms chopped off like some people in Africa, or being paralyzed by being beaten near death?
I'd say that maiming someone (i.e. leaving them in a permanently diminished state) is a crime of comparable magnitude to outright murder, but I think that trying to come up with a strict well-ordering of crimes will lead to some silly conclusions.
An example of what I would consider to be a silly conclusion is the fact that, if someone dies of their injuries months or years after an assault, whereas before they were merely in a coma, the charges are upgraded to murder. I think that where crimes are judged by their outcome, they should consider the range of outcomes that the victim faces rather than a strict coin flip alive/dead outcome. However, I recognize that that sort of nuance would introduce even more subjectivity into criminal justice which most people wouldn't care for.
Why is rape so much worse than murder or attempted murder?
You're asking whether it's better to be dead or traumatized.
I can't answer that, but I will say "Neither, please."
So, lemme get this straight: You have to design to be an Engineer?
I better go inform all those Doctorates in my department they're not Engineers...
Do they solve practical problems?
While I am for net-neutrality, and we do need some form of regulation on the internet to keep the providers fair and clean, do not, and I repeat, do not assume that the government is pushing net neutrality for the purpose of helping you. There have been many times in the United States where our government will push something like Social Security, saying "This is to help the widows with children", which, yes, is a noble cause that many can't argue with. But look at it now, it is a system used to hook the societal leeches and give paychecks to fat-asses who are too lazy to get up and work.
I'm a bit curious who you think receives Social Security checks. You got the survivor and child benefit correct, but the only other two benefits are a retirement benefit available at age 62 (that's a reduced benefit; you don't get the unreduced benefit until age 66 or 67 depending on when you were born) and a total disability benefit which generally requires a year or two worth of paperwork to prove that your disability is severe enough to end your working life.
I think it's somewhat arguable whether or not the survivor benefit is strictly necessary in this day and age. But I'm curious how these social security benefits which you can only get at the end of your working lifetime are "a system used to hook the societal leeches and give paychecks to fat-asses who are too lazy to get up and work."
Do you think that Social Security is welfare? It isn't.
Cite one. Please, I beg you. Cite one scientist with a reasonable publication record who "challenge[s] the prevailing politically-correct liberal thesis". Don't just leave statements like this hanging there in the breeze - this is the Internet, and with a quick copy, paste and a href= you too can create a link to support your claim!
I bet you that whoever you cite has either a terrible publication record or almost no background in anything like climatology. If they have both of those, then I bet that their "challenges" are nothing of the sort - they probably disagree on the magnitude of global warming, not the fact of it.
Take a look at this:
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/04/23/an-inconvenient-provocateur/
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/climate/towards_rebuilding_trust.html
I'm not aware of any statements she's made about the magnitude of global warming, but she is expressing concerns that the IPCC is being warped by political and sociological pressures within the climate science community. I can't find where she said it (somewhere among the links in the first page), but she specifically mentions concerns about pressures to publish research that conforms to the IPCC established narrative.
Here's her CV:
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currycv.html
Except they can't pass that cost on to the consumer, because they're still competing in a highly fungible market. Exxon isn't having this problem, Shell isn't having this problem - it's just BP. Which means that if BP raises its prices, people will buy gas from companies that don't have to deal with a multi-billion dollar clean-up.
And if past Oil disasters are any indication, there are probably fines coming along as well. Along with bills related to government operations that had to deal with the spill.
BP won't get off free here.
Actually, I'm fairly sure that all of the oil companies have insurance for things like this and whenever an industry specific catastrophe occurs, the entire industry has their insurance rates go up.
Sorry for taking so long to reply.
I believe there is only one definition of entropy. I remember reading an interesting quotation in a physicist's blog about the entropic theory of gravity that got some buzz a few months back: "If it smells like entropy, it probably is." Now I don't have a lot of education compared to a lot of folks, but I did pretty well in information theory, and that pretty much encapsulates my intuition on the subject.
My thinking lately is that a structure is an open system with a lower entropy than its surrounding environment. The environment steadily impinges on the structure and only the consumption of free energy can slow it (see Erwin Schrodinger's What is Life?). In my reflections on the matter, I have come to the conclusion that the order of the system doesn't matter, the entropic dynamics just bubble up from the lower level.
Think of a single bacterium. In the passage of an hour, it has a chance to bump into something that will end its simple existence. Against that backdrop, there are different ways that a bacterium can protect its structure. It can expend energy to use various mechanisms to protect itself from its environment, or it can just reproduce and protect its structure by making copies.
On the next level up, cells band together to form multi-cellular lifeforms. The underlying tradeoffs between different sources of risk don't go away, they just become more diffuse. I think that ultimately, all problems of misallocation and inequitable distributions of circumstances stem from the underlying nature of the universe.
On the other side of the coin, my intution says that the concept of choice is inherently tied to the harsh principles of thermodynamics. You have it right in your last paragraph. Choice is what you carve out against the sea of loss. It's all fleeting in the long run, but it's yours. Both individuals and societies determine themselves by what they choose to protect in the face of the fact that they can't protect everything.
If someone claims to have a scheme that provides something good indefinitely, there's got to be a perpetuum mobile implicitly embedded in the scheme. And I think that's a good thing, because freebies reduce decision theoretic assessments to trivial cases.
So I guess it comes down to that I think that it's always best to talk about where you want to go next from here, given what you know now. But it seems unwise to me to make long term plans to transition humanity to some "ideal" or "inevitable" or whatever state.
So I'm willing to listen to ideas for fab labs, vitamin D, a social safety net, and any other ideas that may make life slightly more agreeable for all of the stakeholders involved. But we have to open our eyes to all of the tradeoffs involved if we're going to come up with solutions that satisfy more than a narrow majority of the population (if even that).
And to finish, I'm afraid I have to throw one more jab at basic income. It can be noted that with the circulatory system, the human body implements the concept of basic income. It must also be noted that the human body has a policy of executing traitors at the first sign of rebellion. Loss always pops up somewhere.
Bullshit. In the same way that one can create a model defining the fraction of folks exposed to a TV ad who watch it, you can create a model defining the fraction of folks with webblockers. The analogy is a good one, and Ars Technica, as usual, is full of shit.
They already have a model for that, you dumbass. That model is that the site does not get paid by advertizers for pageviews in which ads are not served.
I'm not really a free market fundamentalist. I know about externalities. I'm just a guy who argues with everyone. I don't really ever agree with anyone.
You say that most jobs are "guarding". I would characterize those jobs as paying rent to the second law of thermodynamics. Within a given span of time all structures suffer decay which can be mitigated by application of an energy budget. The early history of mankind was characterized by simply allowing the decay to accrue, but now we mitigate it more and more by application of energy.
I would characterize all problems that face mankind, including scarcity, as ultimately stemming from the inexorable accrual of thermodynamic rent. There are many ways to pay that rent, but it must be paid unfailingly.
I'm unconvinced that self-maintaining and intelligent robots using solar and nuclear power and made of recycled materials will be vastly more efficient than self-maintaining and intelligent humans indirectly using solar power and made of recycled materials. Both of these things have the same fundamental constraints and as such should have comparable levels of thermodynamic rent needed to maintain them.
Remember that all infrastructure has thermodynamic rent too. At present, we do not have enough resources to perfectly maintain all of our infrastructure. If we don't fundamentally change the cost of maintenance for all things, then what makes you think that will change in the future?
I don't think that a post-scarcity society is possible. There's always going to be a minimum amount of energy and resources needed to keep a person alive and while improvements in technology can reduce that cost of living, there must be a fundamental non-zero minimum. It's like compressing data. You can carve out some of the cost by identifying redundant aspects of a problem and using a single solution for repeated occurrences, but eventually you reach a point where there is no more redundant structure to eliminate.
The idea of promoting general purpose production facilities and shipping raw materials instead of shipping both raw materials and finished goods is an interesting one, but I'm not sure it's a panacea. You still have distribution costs for your goods and the only improvement is that instead of shipping raw materials from A to B and finished goods from B to C, you're now shipping from A to C. This would only be a big source of savings if the distribution network is inefficient. On top of that, a general purpose machine is going to be less efficient than a purpose built one so you're also introducing a new source of cost in the process.
So I guess the question is, is it possible to reduce the cost of living so much that it can easily be provided to everyone? Only if under this system the per capita production exceeds the cost of living. It may be possible that the voluntary work people do will exceed this minimum, but I doubt it. Note that anyone who does zero work increases the share required of the volunteers.
I'm not expecting nanotech and AI to be a huge help either. My guess is that by the time you've designed nanotech with good error correction and that can maintain itself against environmental hazards you'll just have reimplemented cells poorly. I also don't think that a human level AI will be any less temperamental than a human.
My hunch is that most biological systems are reasonably close to optimal for their purpose. As such, any reinvention of something that's already done by a biological system will probably not dramatically outperform it. However, I do believe we will continue to make progress. I don't think there will be a utopia, but I think we can make a world with a little less suffering per person.
This is going to do wonders for their resale value when the market turns around.
Ultimately these problems come from thermodynamics and information theory. All structures (both physical and informational) decay over time unless energy is expended to maintain them.
This essentially means that you can never really "solve" a problem, you can only make a tradeoffs between cost of maintenance and soaking damage in the form of decay or in the form of an exposure to a risk of catastrophe. It's possible to find an agreeable tradeoff for a time, but eventually conditions shift and new problems arise forcing a shift in priorities. Ultimately you have to come to terms with maintenance as a way of life. No set of policies, methodologies, or technologies can produce satisfactory results indefinitely.
I believe that real world problems have innate costs which behave similar to the concept of Kolmogorov complexity. You can view the Kolmogorov complexity of a problem as the minimum length of a computer program which takes a description of the state of the system as input and outputs a series of procedures which completely resolve the problem down to tautologies. Or something along those lines, I haven't worked out all the details yet.
Based on this guess, my expectation is that the complexity of real world problems vastly dwarfs the complexity of most problems of academic study. Furthermore, this implies that reducing maintenance costs should be like compression. You can condense the redundant structure down (e.g. if every plant needs a specialist to visit once a year, that specialist can visit a large number of plants each year reducing the average cost), but ultimately there is a limit to how much you can compress the cost.
Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to serve as an implicit entropy source for a PRNG, at least relative to that attacker. Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to follow a Poisson distribution with lambda equal to the traffic frequency times the interval of time since the last request where the attacker was able to determine the state of the PRNG (no mean feat in itself).
EDIT FAIL!
I guess I liked that phrase so much that I just had to use it twice in a row.
Don't the packets send/received make up for the lost entropy?
I don't know very much about cryptography, but I'm thinking the same thing.
Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to serve as an implicit entropy source for a PRNG, at least relative to that attacker. Intuitively, I'd expect the number of requests not controlled by the attacker to follow a Poisson distribution with lambda equal to the traffic frequency times the interval of time since the last request where the attacker was able to determine the state of the PRNG (no mean feat in itself).
For that attacker, the entropy rate of that Poisson process of other people's requests serve as a true entropy source. This would only be a viable attack vector if the attacker controls a large chunk of the server's traffic. I'd think that they'd be more likely to DDOS the server before managing to accomplish anything sneakier.
Energy density of lithium batteries: 1 megajoule/kg
Energy density of gasoline: 45 megajoules/kg
Is that with or without lithium's fivefold advantage in how much of the energy actually gets to the wheels? When you recharge the lithium, all the thermodynamic inefficiencies of an Otto cycle heat engine are already paid for at the power plant. In addition, as Anonymous Coward pointed out, you don't need to lug around the heat engine itself.
After accounting for that, you still have an order of magnitude of advantage for liquid fuel.
Can you make batteries that are 10 times more energy dense? Maybe, but I'm guessing it would take more expensive materials and manufacturing technologies. You always need to consider that in saving something one place, you're always increasing a cost somewhere else. It's just a question of which cost you can live with.
I think there are fundamentally different strengths between electrical and chemical energy sources. Electrical energy is more fluid and can be transported easily and converted to mechanical forms easily, but it's a poor for storage. Chemical energy is more durable and suited for storage, but there's a heavy loss on conversion to other forms of energy.
Which is better for transportation depends on whether or not chemical's handicap at conversion to mechanical work is worse than electrical's handicap for storage.