...To fund proper investigative journalistic institutions, non-commercial like the BBC, that could identify, shame, and counter such efforts?
The journalistic system we have today is basically a self-standing set of dominoes - basically competing to generate attention-getting emotions - looking for any excuse to re-trigger their sequence. It isn't new - yellow journalism has an amazing and lengthy history, but increasingly tabloid coverage is the only news for most folks.
It's not a moralistic thing that's the problem here - it's informational vulnerability. Like folks growing up in a 'company town' or a cult, it becomes statistically likely that without a path to a wider source of information, that folks will be unable to break out of objectively wrong information and will become willing victims to pure exploitation.
Even here, lots of folks have given up on the idea of pursuing truth as a societal good. Down that path lies a deep stagnation and victimhood.
Yes - but the point here is that he made it his purpose to portray a legitimately evil person, at least in the classic role-playing definition of evil - where he was actively willing to harm people for his own benefit constantly and with cruelty... and he stuck to that personality the entire time.
And THAT is what the people elected. Which is especially odd, given the supposedly Christian notion the nation has for itself. Jesus' perspective on the rich, and on selfishness is basically most of the new testament.
I was that kind of nerd in class that would read the whole book at the start of the semester, then just sort of enjoy asking leading questions during the year, perhaps once or twice per class period. As long as it was a fair exploration of the topic, ~90% of teachers enjoyed the light challenge - especially the history teachers. I enjoyed finding out where I was wrong, or some detail that connected the subjects we were covering in some larger way.
There were also more religiously reactive students who would play the special-pleading game, trying to weaponize their belief lest others learn to believe in any other way. The answer there is usually increasing degrees of "you might very well be correct, and if you can find an international standards body recognized completely outside of your religious organization in [insert field], I'd suggest you contact [organization who sets school policy], and get the curriculus updated. Until then, this is what's going to be on the test."
I can't see that changing much, and if students decide to raise a stink, it would be fair for a teacher to offer to let the student test out of the class immediately, giving them the remaining homework/tests in one lump, and saving everyone a bit of time, since the student is unwilling to learn directly from the teacher.
Friends don't let friends install Microsoft Office.
Seriously - once you've got someone to open anything in MS Office, the scripting allowed in those formats means that few vulnerabilities are a very large surprise. That, and if you've ever had to work for a client that demands a large degree of Office interop or automation, you become acutely aware of how messy those formats have become over the years.
Don't get me wrong, in 'friendly' settings, it's got a nice set of features, and there's a reason that many folks allow their careers to be tied into it - but it's not a tool you want anything internet-related to connect to in any way, if you can help it. You're potentially handing over the keys to your computer when you open any of those formats from a potentially unfriendly source.
At least lock it behind a virtual system if you're going to open anything from the random internet.
When news organizations have needed to see what coverage existed on a subject in past decades at least, they'd find the guy who had access to LexisNexis and get some results from that.
At least that's what always comes up in inside-baseball discussions on news gathering stuff I've seen.
How about they start pitching a version of cable, stripped down to a few channels, each actually meaningful and with varied programming, with NO COMMERCIALS in exchange for the subscription costs... you know, like it all started out?
Hey, I said it was a crazy idea. But why is it crazy? I mean, they're mostly internet companies now anyway, so any television income could be small, and they'd be fine, as long as they cut back enough for expenses to be below income.
That proposal would be crazy, because of stockholders. The demand for increased return, increased promises, increased control, guaranteed income with increasing percentage numbers. It's what makes all US publicly traded companies turn to crap over time.
It's basically the wisdom of mutual fund managers that demand cable, and other companies act like they do. And the giant pile of investment money behind them, looking for safe, guaranteed returns, and pushing everything to serve that, and only that.
It's also why commercials suck so much too, and why so many folks like me stopped watching/subscribing to cable years ago. It really is dumbfounding to visit folks watching commercials, and see those messages celebrating the happiness of paying rent to those companies paying for airtime.
All higher level logic ends up having side effects, just in order to be convenient, and relevant the way we use analogies/language.
You'd end up with even bigger problems with flow charts, because the labels you'd add would end up confounding your expectations as you build more and more.
The only way to avoid that is using very simple concepts in your flow chart. At that points, you're just creating circuits, which are not just below regular code, but below even assembly code in terms of the layers of abstraction you have to mentally juggle in order to build any complex logical relationships.
You could follow this same path by saying "couldn't we just ask a series of yes/no questions and create programs with that?"... and eventually, you'd find you're just coding in a difficult kind of binary.
And yeah, with development, you could make rather sophisticated programs easier with either method mentioned - but to build a culture around such methodologies, you'd not only have to spend far more resources, but also ignore the very reasoning that lead us to bypass these approaches when they've come up before. And also, you ignore why those approaches always seem to lose out to building on modifications of what works most flexibly, rather than what you'd imagine is most natural.
Whelp, now there exists a new revenue stream - a stream of income that stock holders will DEMAND be exploited maximally.
That new income source: Asking for payments for premium treatment from uploaders.
I expect that this will get rather messy - as the financial motivations will likely upturn a lot of agreements between large networks, and the viability of many valued companies.
But, this IS what contributors paid for, so this is what they get, apparently.
This is why, even though it costs more money, independent oversight of our agencies of government are important.
If you can imagine a political group that you wouldn't trust in power, imagine what you'd want in order to provide responsible checks on their worst abuses of power.
Those checks on power is what we've been getting rid of, along with a proportionally reduced healthy media.
So, now that we have a raving lunatic, a living symbol of arrogance and greed as president, and a fully loyal set of henchmen elected under him, we begin to see the unraveling of what everyone should consider important constitutional boundaries.
What's bizarre is how many folks still support both this dangerous process and the people involved. Folks who spoke exactly the opposite for so long. Constitutional limits are always important, to avoid the path to countless forms of corruption and stagnation.
I don't see how anyone other than Trump benefits from any of this either - even if the corruption stands completely unchecked. Few of the benefits would last in the environment it creates.
The difference: You don't subscribe to google. You don't pay for Google. Google shows you ads (if you aren't using tools to avoid them) to make their money, they don't get the bulk of their income from folks paying for access to services, but by advertising through those services.
Google is not a natural monopoly in the classic sense - they are widely popular, but they don't exist as an unavoidable gateway to essential services like the phone companies in the previous century.
Instead, they provide optional services through a public network, and tend to be less objectionable than the alternatives, so people use them.
I'm personally often against a LOT of the actions of corporations in the world, and even against Google's decisions sometimes - but they don't even approach Ma Bell in the terms presented here.
Don't like it? Invest your own millions into building a carrier grade infrastructure and charge YOUR customers whatever rates YOU decide
Sincerely,
Capitalism
Their pipes (in some cases), but a shared internet standard.
Don't like it, don't connect that sub-network to the internet, and don't call it part of the internet created and largely maintained with public funds..
Salutations,
Everything that allows markets and capitalism to exist and thrive.
No. Paying attention to ANYTHING else does not justify forgetting net neutrality. Net neutrality SHOULD be a positive for anyone's political stance - it just means however imperfect the companies involved in providing services, they should have to treat content as just bytes, regardless of the source. That shouldn't be controversial, nor should it be forgotten, even 'for the sake of argument'.
Important reminder: This is intended as a REPLACEMENT for other programs, like job insurance, retirement programs, family income programs, etc. It drastically reduces the need for a bulk of social services for healthy adults, and allows better specialized uses of resources for those who can't take care of themselves.
It's a LOT cheaper to identify taxpayers, prevent duplication and simply send a regular stipend, than it costs to manage all those separate programs.
Also, government IS the people, and in this case, this is the people voting for a simple program that help everyone provide for their needs, being less solidly beholden to employers for those basic needs, and working for their true desires instead.
That's the whole point of a modern government - to continuously improve and provide for the common welfare, in the classic sense. It just happens to be replacing the modern concept of welfare in this case and making everyone's life better, except for perhaps those that depended on having others feel they would starve as a consequence of not doing the will of their employer.
As a cheap-skate, before the age of reliable internet shopping, sometimes I'd go to a shop 5 times before any significant purchase.
Now, most of that browsing is done online. plenty of folks still go for the 'mall experience', but I'd say that for every truck winding down the alleys, you're avoiding a much larger number of folks routing to a set of shops, then back.
In terms of road damage, the single truck likely does slightly more wear over time (more weight at once, worse than many smaller weights), but in terms of congestion, the truck is going to be spending much less overall time on the main roads every day, than the shoppers would.
But really, are we actually going back to "is the internet bad for our shared resources" discussions?
Far too late to put that genie back in the bottle - it's granting too many important wishes to go back now.
Having tools/AI that can increasingly automate tasks is basically the fulfillment of the wish of anyone wanting things done.
Lots of people here are programmers and developers and engineers - basically the modern-day,real-life equivalent of genies, folks who can basically make anything happen, but with the cost of needing to REALLY draw out the exact desire so that the result isn't worse than the problem.
So, over time, the humble dish washer gets a bucket, then a sink, then a dish washing machine, and eventually an automatic servant that will do every classical part of the task given enough economy of scale.
The big consequence of this is that we're faced with big questions again about what we want. We have enough shared power and resources to feed everyone, to free ourselves of the most difficult, dangerous and annoying tasks of life.
On the other hand, we have our economic system. Basically, the monetary system, where folks trade services and items for various currencies, based on markets and occasionally governing bodies.
The bulk of the money is tied up in the hands of a relatively small percentage of individuals who saved large amounts of money, looking to get an optimal percentage return on that investment.
This global pool of money is essentially what makes most publicly-traded corporations act exactly like 'corporations', where image to investors is the primary goal, and actually performing as a company is secondary.
Service to this logic is basically deeply, DEEPLY embedded in psyche and even deep morality of most of the modern adult population. The idea of not spending one's waking life in service to maximizing income, either in managing a company or performing tasks for one, is deeply shameful to most.
There's going to come a point though, when the tasks of performing the role of managing most companies is going to be >95% automation, and the remaining <5% is not going to be a reliable way of fulfilling the 'need' to let most of the population avoid the shame of being a poor return on investment, since automation will always be a better investment once it advances a little.
We're going to have to figure out what we want from ourselves. That's not a very difficult task individually, but as a group, it's going to be tumultuous.
The wealthy investors and funds will still demand return on investment, but the increasing percentage of the population unable to prove a return on investment will still have real needs, and have increasing government power.
In this conflict between shrinking (but increasingly wealthy) investor class versus growing government class, the government side would in theory win in the end, though we'd likely encounter several rounds of crazy outcomes like Donald Trump being president.
The longer-term outcome is likely still not going to be some star-trek utopia, but it won't be Somalia either. It's going to be the usual mix we see in history, with the trends extended - less average violence, occasional crazy decisions and wars, endless fads, 95% junk/5% awesome, the old afraid kids are going bad, while the kids are actually measurably smarter over time.
Our AIs are still going to be very dumb for a long time, but they will let us have slightly less absurd goals for our own lives, than figuring out how to scam some global investment class out of currency as some sacred life goal.
Until then though, we hobble along as we can, advancing what we can.
Ryan Fenton
PS: Yeah, can't avoid posting this URL: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I see they have a replacement for "don't be evil" beyond the vapid "do the right thing" as an excuse to justify occasionally allowing evil to seep through.
As long as no one can say you were aware of the evil, it is beyond reproach and punishment, and so can be joyously benefited from, even theoretically at great cost to others.
Also known as corruption, the corporate maturity process, the profession of 'corporate law', and allowing evil "for the greater good".
Life is full of choices, and the world certainly isn't ideal, and there are nearly infinite ideals - but organizing information to be intentionally blind to the systematic shortchanging of women would be firmly in the 'evil' side of anything, I'd think.
This isn't intended from a 'social justice' perspective, but from a philosophical motivation perspective - why do people with enormous resources tend to push themselves in these directions over time?
There's an enormous system of gives and takes going on - contracts and legal challenges constrain business, while investment systems provide a force in one motivating direction: greed. It's a machine to pull rights and resources from anyone not spending their life litigating everything.
Women getting systematically shortchanged is one output of such a process. Massive inequality is another. Massive political instability is a side-effect of that. Profiteering is a side-effect of that. And willful blindness feeds into it all.
That's what half of debates seem to be these days: Some massive failure or catastrophe being documented on one side, and justifications of willful blindness on the other.
Don't get me wrong: In general, the world is improving over time, and by most standards, we're more peaceful and well-off per person than we've ever been. But where we have had massive statistical issues are exactly where we're falling now: inequality leading to massive suffering, and environmental spoiling. Those are exactly the things that lead to dramatic collapses, and are exactly what we're playing political games to blind ourselves towards.
So yeah, for now, the game is rigged and folks are clearly benefiting from the rigging.
Until that can be fixed without causing even more evil, best to document evil, speak of evil, and make sure that evil is heard of. Perhaps google might even return to an era of 'Do no evil" with enough of a spotlight on their willful blindness.
If I had a team of several million people, I could build a sustainable city on Mars.
As long as I could be totally devoted tot he task, and the willpower to follow through the billions of setbacks you'd hit on the way, especially including my own ignorance.
Trump fixing H1b? It's possible, but similarly absurd to expect.
The Trump coalition isn't the team to fix H1b. They're a wrecking crew, not a construction team. They can foist individuals to make plans, but they're philosophically aligned against, say, the kind of planning that would make a national constitution or something along those lines.
Even if theoretically Trump actually meant the half-dozen things he said on H1b, and DIDN'T mean the several things he said that contradicted that, he'd still need to coordinate with a team that implements it, and a political base to enable a political climate that will make disobeying the rule a bad idea.
Trump could GET folks on board to get all that done... but at this point, he'd really need to construct everything needed from whole cloth. I somehow doubt that enforcing and enlarging H1b rules on the nation's CEOs is going to be a high priority compared to everything else he wants done in the world. It's POSSIBLE, just very unlikely, unless somehow Trump is thwarted on literally every other big thing, and yet not impeached.
H1b is a horrible system. It's virtues are nice - getting qualified folks in to do needed jobs - but that does not justify a system of modern day quasi-indentured-servitude. The way it's used it horrible too, basically used to quash local workers wage increases. Trump speaks against it, but he's exactly the wrong person to choose as a person to crusade against it - he's basically the living avatar of the idea of shortchanging workers using sketchy legal tactics.
But, we chose the entertaining choice! How could we not be entertained? Trump is the only person I can think of that would be more absurd as a president than William Shatner when in-character.
I think the problem might be the same with someone trying to make a sequel of the 1950's, without understanding it, and trying to fix that by just going completely over the top in terms of ambition, trying to make up for a completely broken budget process. It's entertaining in a sense - but sort of a sad entertainment.
The folks that supported trump did seem to do it out of a sense of ironic satisfaction rather than actually something they wanted.
Turns out though, it's not a sequel to the 1950's, it's actually a sequel to the Robber Barons, it just couldn't be marketed that way, because that's only ever been popular with a small audience.
Sure - since the kitchen is in the middle of some work, I pulled out a nice large electric plug-in skillet, and turned it to 250 degrees.
Turned that on, threw in 4 slices of cheap butter-loaf bread to toast on one side.
Pushed those to the side, threw in 3 eggs alongside the bread.. As they cooked, I added some black pepper.
Also while those cooked, I put one frozen slice of off-brand uneven sliced bacon in the microwave, wrapped in paper towels for 90 seconds. I've found the microwave does a very good job with bacon in general. Skillet also does a fine job, but takes longer without helping the flavor as much as you'd think.
When the eggs looked done, put the eggs on the uncooked side of the bread, crumbled the bacon on top fo the eggs, added cucumbers, jalepeno and lettuce, put them on a plate, and closed both sandwiches.
Took maybe 5 minutes to cook and clean up, and was an order of magnitude better flavor than most out to eat meals, including being considerably cheaper.
Costs: Bread, $1 a loaf Eggs: 89 cents for a dozen Bacon: $4.50 for roughly 16 slices, I keep it frozen (wrapped in plastic to separate slices) and microwave it. Veggies: Say 50 cents per meal.
Cheese, mustard and hot sauces might add you a small percent extra, depending on preference - but still, something like $2 a meal, and quicker than fast food.
Worth a bit of practice and a few mistakes to learn to make that stuff!
I know there's been a lot of back-and-forth about Trump.
But the way most everyone in the world views him, is that he has always been, and remains the living symbol of arrogance and greed. Trump does not serve the United States of America, the USA functionally serves Trump as it stands.
Working in any position where you were spending your life promoting that would suck. It's painful enough that an otherwise wonderful nation elected that dude.
Yes, defending Ameirca is crucially important, and our nation still stands for a lot of very important principles, but when all of that sits in service to, well, Trump, it would be very difficult to not want to go off and help it some other way.
I enjoy meat myself - but accept that the meat industry is historically filled with some of the worst intentions on the face of the planet. There's a reason that one of the big counters to libertarian philosophy is historical regulation of the meat industry... if they can get away with it, you'd better believe that the industry is going to break just about every rule, custom, ethical guideline and concept of decent human interaction possible.
Meat, it ain't pretty, it's rarely pure (the fish industry is nigh-hilarious with how it labels things), but it's still an important part of our filthy culture.
Cutting a 50% mix of soy into chicken isn't shocking compared to most things - and actually matches what I remember of that particular flavor whenever I decided to try chicken again at Subway. Now that I've gotten better at cooking for myself, I find a $6 footlong to be actually a fairly expensive sandwich.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go make a nice couple of egg/bacon/veggie sandwiches. I'm sure it's not completely ethical, and likely contains some genetic engineering (ooh, scary), but for the price, it's a marvel of modern industry and flavor!
Any chance I could get, say, two of those channels for $5 a month?
There's internet-based cable packages already out there, SlingTV/PlayStation Vue are the big obvious ones, but it's not unlikely to be more crowded going forward either. They have the same granular pricing scheme, and I don't care for them either..
The big thing for me is that when I was paying for cable, I'd only really have a couple of 'veg out' channels I ever used, and would really prefer to watch entire series for the serialized content, rather then live, so got nothing out of having those channels available. Add those few remnants of what's mildly interesting in cable, and you'll secure a (lower value) longterm customer.
I won't be willing to pay $35 monthly for what I'm missing now though. I just don't get enough enjoyment out of that, dollar for dollar, than I'd get out of most anything else.
...when the author has a primary financial stake in the outcome, or a strong political motivation to push that outcome.
Not that it won't be true, but it is the very definition of bullshit. Right now, most of the prognosticators are predicting either Trump's ascension to eternal godhood, or his imminent crash into grim legend - same story there too, it's not a real prediction, but an attempt to shape the range of expected outcomes.
Same story for hundreds of years of history too - look at any newspaper archive and and the wonderful history of local yellow journalism. There's dozens of archives easily browsed with a google search, and they're hilarious and enlightening on the nature of such bullshit.
So yeah, Hollywood may just be the next buggy whip factory doomed to be unable to adapt before failure, or it may be the start of the next golden era for the studios once they absorb the remains of failed online studios - but either prediction would be wrong to make ahead of time without evidence.
I'd love to predict a future where folks learned to adopt more skepticism in their daily lives and news preferences, but I fear that one is DEFINITELY not held up by previous ages of human interest and news trends over time. That would take concentrated education, in a world drawn to distraction... and here I am on Slashdot!
Slashdot Mirror
...To fund proper investigative journalistic institutions, non-commercial like the BBC, that could identify, shame, and counter such efforts?
The journalistic system we have today is basically a self-standing set of dominoes - basically competing to generate attention-getting emotions - looking for any excuse to re-trigger their sequence. It isn't new - yellow journalism has an amazing and lengthy history, but increasingly tabloid coverage is the only news for most folks.
It's not a moralistic thing that's the problem here - it's informational vulnerability. Like folks growing up in a 'company town' or a cult, it becomes statistically likely that without a path to a wider source of information, that folks will be unable to break out of objectively wrong information and will become willing victims to pure exploitation.
Even here, lots of folks have given up on the idea of pursuing truth as a societal good. Down that path lies a deep stagnation and victimhood.
Ryan Fenton
Yes - but the point here is that he made it his purpose to portray a legitimately evil person, at least in the classic role-playing definition of evil - where he was actively willing to harm people for his own benefit constantly and with cruelty... and he stuck to that personality the entire time.
And THAT is what the people elected. Which is especially odd, given the supposedly Christian notion the nation has for itself. Jesus' perspective on the rich, and on selfishness is basically most of the new testament.
I was that kind of nerd in class that would read the whole book at the start of the semester, then just sort of enjoy asking leading questions during the year, perhaps once or twice per class period. As long as it was a fair exploration of the topic, ~90% of teachers enjoyed the light challenge - especially the history teachers. I enjoyed finding out where I was wrong, or some detail that connected the subjects we were covering in some larger way.
There were also more religiously reactive students who would play the special-pleading game, trying to weaponize their belief lest others learn to believe in any other way. The answer there is usually increasing degrees of "you might very well be correct, and if you can find an international standards body recognized completely outside of your religious organization in [insert field], I'd suggest you contact [organization who sets school policy], and get the curriculus updated. Until then, this is what's going to be on the test."
I can't see that changing much, and if students decide to raise a stink, it would be fair for a teacher to offer to let the student test out of the class immediately, giving them the remaining homework/tests in one lump, and saving everyone a bit of time, since the student is unwilling to learn directly from the teacher.
Ryan Fenton
Friends don't let friends install Microsoft Office.
Seriously - once you've got someone to open anything in MS Office, the scripting allowed in those formats means that few vulnerabilities are a very large surprise. That, and if you've ever had to work for a client that demands a large degree of Office interop or automation, you become acutely aware of how messy those formats have become over the years.
Don't get me wrong, in 'friendly' settings, it's got a nice set of features, and there's a reason that many folks allow their careers to be tied into it - but it's not a tool you want anything internet-related to connect to in any way, if you can help it. You're potentially handing over the keys to your computer when you open any of those formats from a potentially unfriendly source.
At least lock it behind a virtual system if you're going to open anything from the random internet.
Ryan Fenton
When news organizations have needed to see what coverage existed on a subject in past decades at least, they'd find the guy who had access to LexisNexis and get some results from that.
At least that's what always comes up in inside-baseball discussions on news gathering stuff I've seen.
Ryan Fenton
How about they start pitching a version of cable, stripped down to a few channels, each actually meaningful and with varied programming, with NO COMMERCIALS in exchange for the subscription costs... you know, like it all started out?
Hey, I said it was a crazy idea. But why is it crazy? I mean, they're mostly internet companies now anyway, so any television income could be small, and they'd be fine, as long as they cut back enough for expenses to be below income.
That proposal would be crazy, because of stockholders. The demand for increased return, increased promises, increased control, guaranteed income with increasing percentage numbers. It's what makes all US publicly traded companies turn to crap over time.
It's basically the wisdom of mutual fund managers that demand cable, and other companies act like they do. And the giant pile of investment money behind them, looking for safe, guaranteed returns, and pushing everything to serve that, and only that.
It's also why commercials suck so much too, and why so many folks like me stopped watching/subscribing to cable years ago. It really is dumbfounding to visit folks watching commercials, and see those messages celebrating the happiness of paying rent to those companies paying for airtime.
Ryan Fenton
All higher level logic ends up having side effects, just in order to be convenient, and relevant the way we use analogies/language.
You'd end up with even bigger problems with flow charts, because the labels you'd add would end up confounding your expectations as you build more and more.
The only way to avoid that is using very simple concepts in your flow chart. At that points, you're just creating circuits, which are not just below regular code, but below even assembly code in terms of the layers of abstraction you have to mentally juggle in order to build any complex logical relationships.
You could follow this same path by saying "couldn't we just ask a series of yes/no questions and create programs with that?" ... and eventually, you'd find you're just coding in a difficult kind of binary.
And yeah, with development, you could make rather sophisticated programs easier with either method mentioned - but to build a culture around such methodologies, you'd not only have to spend far more resources, but also ignore the very reasoning that lead us to bypass these approaches when they've come up before. And also, you ignore why those approaches always seem to lose out to building on modifications of what works most flexibly, rather than what you'd imagine is most natural.
Ryan Fenton
Whelp, now there exists a new revenue stream - a stream of income that stock holders will DEMAND be exploited maximally.
That new income source: Asking for payments for premium treatment from uploaders.
I expect that this will get rather messy - as the financial motivations will likely upturn a lot of agreements between large networks, and the viability of many valued companies.
But, this IS what contributors paid for, so this is what they get, apparently.
Ryan Fenton
This is why, even though it costs more money, independent oversight of our agencies of government are important.
If you can imagine a political group that you wouldn't trust in power, imagine what you'd want in order to provide responsible checks on their worst abuses of power.
Those checks on power is what we've been getting rid of, along with a proportionally reduced healthy media.
So, now that we have a raving lunatic, a living symbol of arrogance and greed as president, and a fully loyal set of henchmen elected under him, we begin to see the unraveling of what everyone should consider important constitutional boundaries.
What's bizarre is how many folks still support both this dangerous process and the people involved. Folks who spoke exactly the opposite for so long. Constitutional limits are always important, to avoid the path to countless forms of corruption and stagnation.
I don't see how anyone other than Trump benefits from any of this either - even if the corruption stands completely unchecked. Few of the benefits would last in the environment it creates.
Ryan Fenton
The difference: You don't subscribe to google. You don't pay for Google. Google shows you ads (if you aren't using tools to avoid them) to make their money, they don't get the bulk of their income from folks paying for access to services, but by advertising through those services.
Google is not a natural monopoly in the classic sense - they are widely popular, but they don't exist as an unavoidable gateway to essential services like the phone companies in the previous century.
Instead, they provide optional services through a public network, and tend to be less objectionable than the alternatives, so people use them.
I'm personally often against a LOT of the actions of corporations in the world, and even against Google's decisions sometimes - but they don't even approach Ma Bell in the terms presented here.
Ryan Fenton
Their pipe, their rules.
Don't like it? Invest your own millions into building a carrier grade infrastructure and charge YOUR customers whatever rates YOU decide
Sincerely,
Capitalism
Their pipes (in some cases), but a shared internet standard.
Don't like it, don't connect that sub-network to the internet, and don't call it part of the internet created and largely maintained with public funds..
Salutations,
Everything that allows markets and capitalism to exist and thrive.
(Oh, and Ryan Fenton)
"Forget net neutrality - "
No. Paying attention to ANYTHING else does not justify forgetting net neutrality. Net neutrality SHOULD be a positive for anyone's political stance - it just means however imperfect the companies involved in providing services, they should have to treat content as just bytes, regardless of the source. That shouldn't be controversial, nor should it be forgotten, even 'for the sake of argument'.
Ryan Fenton
Important reminder: This is intended as a REPLACEMENT for other programs, like job insurance, retirement programs, family income programs, etc. It drastically reduces the need for a bulk of social services for healthy adults, and allows better specialized uses of resources for those who can't take care of themselves.
It's a LOT cheaper to identify taxpayers, prevent duplication and simply send a regular stipend, than it costs to manage all those separate programs.
Also, government IS the people, and in this case, this is the people voting for a simple program that help everyone provide for their needs, being less solidly beholden to employers for those basic needs, and working for their true desires instead.
That's the whole point of a modern government - to continuously improve and provide for the common welfare, in the classic sense. It just happens to be replacing the modern concept of welfare in this case and making everyone's life better, except for perhaps those that depended on having others feel they would starve as a consequence of not doing the will of their employer.
Ryan Fenton
It's 486, not 468. Easy mistake - but that's also one that should have been ridiculously easy with even a casual proofing.
Yeah, I'm not new here, but that's a pretty bad one for a nerd site.
Ryan Fenton
As a cheap-skate, before the age of reliable internet shopping, sometimes I'd go to a shop 5 times before any significant purchase.
Now, most of that browsing is done online. plenty of folks still go for the 'mall experience', but I'd say that for every truck winding down the alleys, you're avoiding a much larger number of folks routing to a set of shops, then back.
In terms of road damage, the single truck likely does slightly more wear over time (more weight at once, worse than many smaller weights), but in terms of congestion, the truck is going to be spending much less overall time on the main roads every day, than the shoppers would.
But really, are we actually going back to "is the internet bad for our shared resources" discussions?
Far too late to put that genie back in the bottle - it's granting too many important wishes to go back now.
Ryan Fenton
Having tools/AI that can increasingly automate tasks is basically the fulfillment of the wish of anyone wanting things done.
Lots of people here are programmers and developers and engineers - basically the modern-day,real-life equivalent of genies, folks who can basically make anything happen, but with the cost of needing to REALLY draw out the exact desire so that the result isn't worse than the problem.
So, over time, the humble dish washer gets a bucket, then a sink, then a dish washing machine, and eventually an automatic servant that will do every classical part of the task given enough economy of scale.
The big consequence of this is that we're faced with big questions again about what we want. We have enough shared power and resources to feed everyone, to free ourselves of the most difficult, dangerous and annoying tasks of life.
On the other hand, we have our economic system. Basically, the monetary system, where folks trade services and items for various currencies, based on markets and occasionally governing bodies.
The bulk of the money is tied up in the hands of a relatively small percentage of individuals who saved large amounts of money, looking to get an optimal percentage return on that investment.
This global pool of money is essentially what makes most publicly-traded corporations act exactly like 'corporations', where image to investors is the primary goal, and actually performing as a company is secondary.
Service to this logic is basically deeply, DEEPLY embedded in psyche and even deep morality of most of the modern adult population. The idea of not spending one's waking life in service to maximizing income, either in managing a company or performing tasks for one, is deeply shameful to most.
There's going to come a point though, when the tasks of performing the role of managing most companies is going to be >95% automation, and the remaining <5% is not going to be a reliable way of fulfilling the 'need' to let most of the population avoid the shame of being a poor return on investment, since automation will always be a better investment once it advances a little.
We're going to have to figure out what we want from ourselves. That's not a very difficult task individually, but as a group, it's going to be tumultuous.
The wealthy investors and funds will still demand return on investment, but the increasing percentage of the population unable to prove a return on investment will still have real needs, and have increasing government power.
In this conflict between shrinking (but increasingly wealthy) investor class versus growing government class, the government side would in theory win in the end, though we'd likely encounter several rounds of crazy outcomes like Donald Trump being president.
The longer-term outcome is likely still not going to be some star-trek utopia, but it won't be Somalia either. It's going to be the usual mix we see in history, with the trends extended - less average violence, occasional crazy decisions and wars, endless fads, 95% junk/5% awesome, the old afraid kids are going bad, while the kids are actually measurably smarter over time.
Our AIs are still going to be very dumb for a long time, but they will let us have slightly less absurd goals for our own lives, than figuring out how to scam some global investment class out of currency as some sacred life goal.
Until then though, we hobble along as we can, advancing what we can.
Ryan Fenton
PS: Yeah, can't avoid posting this URL:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I see they have a replacement for "don't be evil" beyond the vapid "do the right thing" as an excuse to justify occasionally allowing evil to seep through.
It's the classic turning a blind eye motto:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
As long as no one can say you were aware of the evil, it is beyond reproach and punishment, and so can be joyously benefited from, even theoretically at great cost to others.
Also known as corruption, the corporate maturity process, the profession of 'corporate law', and allowing evil "for the greater good".
Life is full of choices, and the world certainly isn't ideal, and there are nearly infinite ideals - but organizing information to be intentionally blind to the systematic shortchanging of women would be firmly in the 'evil' side of anything, I'd think.
This isn't intended from a 'social justice' perspective, but from a philosophical motivation perspective - why do people with enormous resources tend to push themselves in these directions over time?
There's an enormous system of gives and takes going on - contracts and legal challenges constrain business, while investment systems provide a force in one motivating direction: greed. It's a machine to pull rights and resources from anyone not spending their life litigating everything.
Women getting systematically shortchanged is one output of such a process. Massive inequality is another. Massive political instability is a side-effect of that. Profiteering is a side-effect of that. And willful blindness feeds into it all.
That's what half of debates seem to be these days: Some massive failure or catastrophe being documented on one side, and justifications of willful blindness on the other.
Don't get me wrong: In general, the world is improving over time, and by most standards, we're more peaceful and well-off per person than we've ever been. But where we have had massive statistical issues are exactly where we're falling now: inequality leading to massive suffering, and environmental spoiling. Those are exactly the things that lead to dramatic collapses, and are exactly what we're playing political games to blind ourselves towards.
So yeah, for now, the game is rigged and folks are clearly benefiting from the rigging.
Until that can be fixed without causing even more evil, best to document evil, speak of evil, and make sure that evil is heard of. Perhaps google might even return to an era of 'Do no evil" with enough of a spotlight on their willful blindness.
Ryan Fenton
If I had a team of several million people, I could build a sustainable city on Mars.
As long as I could be totally devoted tot he task, and the willpower to follow through the billions of setbacks you'd hit on the way, especially including my own ignorance.
Trump fixing H1b? It's possible, but similarly absurd to expect.
The Trump coalition isn't the team to fix H1b. They're a wrecking crew, not a construction team. They can foist individuals to make plans, but they're philosophically aligned against, say, the kind of planning that would make a national constitution or something along those lines.
Even if theoretically Trump actually meant the half-dozen things he said on H1b, and DIDN'T mean the several things he said that contradicted that, he'd still need to coordinate with a team that implements it, and a political base to enable a political climate that will make disobeying the rule a bad idea.
Trump could GET folks on board to get all that done... but at this point, he'd really need to construct everything needed from whole cloth. I somehow doubt that enforcing and enlarging H1b rules on the nation's CEOs is going to be a high priority compared to everything else he wants done in the world. It's POSSIBLE, just very unlikely, unless somehow Trump is thwarted on literally every other big thing, and yet not impeached.
H1b is a horrible system. It's virtues are nice - getting qualified folks in to do needed jobs - but that does not justify a system of modern day quasi-indentured-servitude. The way it's used it horrible too, basically used to quash local workers wage increases. Trump speaks against it, but he's exactly the wrong person to choose as a person to crusade against it - he's basically the living avatar of the idea of shortchanging workers using sketchy legal tactics.
Don't expect too much from Trump on this.
Ryan Fenton
But, we chose the entertaining choice! How could we not be entertained? Trump is the only person I can think of that would be more absurd as a president than William Shatner when in-character.
I think the problem might be the same with someone trying to make a sequel of the 1950's, without understanding it, and trying to fix that by just going completely over the top in terms of ambition, trying to make up for a completely broken budget process. It's entertaining in a sense - but sort of a sad entertainment.
The folks that supported trump did seem to do it out of a sense of ironic satisfaction rather than actually something they wanted.
Turns out though, it's not a sequel to the 1950's, it's actually a sequel to the Robber Barons, it just couldn't be marketed that way, because that's only ever been popular with a small audience.
Ryan Fenton
Sure - since the kitchen is in the middle of some work, I pulled out a nice large electric plug-in skillet, and turned it to 250 degrees.
Turned that on, threw in 4 slices of cheap butter-loaf bread to toast on one side.
Pushed those to the side, threw in 3 eggs alongside the bread.. As they cooked, I added some black pepper.
Also while those cooked, I put one frozen slice of off-brand uneven sliced bacon in the microwave, wrapped in paper towels for 90 seconds. I've found the microwave does a very good job with bacon in general. Skillet also does a fine job, but takes longer without helping the flavor as much as you'd think.
When the eggs looked done, put the eggs on the uncooked side of the bread, crumbled the bacon on top fo the eggs, added cucumbers, jalepeno and lettuce, put them on a plate, and closed both sandwiches.
Took maybe 5 minutes to cook and clean up, and was an order of magnitude better flavor than most out to eat meals, including being considerably cheaper.
Costs:
Bread, $1 a loaf
Eggs: 89 cents for a dozen
Bacon: $4.50 for roughly 16 slices, I keep it frozen (wrapped in plastic to separate slices) and microwave it.
Veggies: Say 50 cents per meal.
Cheese, mustard and hot sauces might add you a small percent extra, depending on preference - but still, something like $2 a meal, and quicker than fast food.
Worth a bit of practice and a few mistakes to learn to make that stuff!
Ryan Fenton
I know there's been a lot of back-and-forth about Trump.
But the way most everyone in the world views him, is that he has always been, and remains the living symbol of arrogance and greed. Trump does not serve the United States of America, the USA functionally serves Trump as it stands.
Working in any position where you were spending your life promoting that would suck. It's painful enough that an otherwise wonderful nation elected that dude.
Yes, defending Ameirca is crucially important, and our nation still stands for a lot of very important principles, but when all of that sits in service to, well, Trump, it would be very difficult to not want to go off and help it some other way.
I empathize with the folks making those choices.
Ryan Fenton
I enjoy meat myself - but accept that the meat industry is historically filled with some of the worst intentions on the face of the planet. There's a reason that one of the big counters to libertarian philosophy is historical regulation of the meat industry... if they can get away with it, you'd better believe that the industry is going to break just about every rule, custom, ethical guideline and concept of decent human interaction possible.
Meat, it ain't pretty, it's rarely pure (the fish industry is nigh-hilarious with how it labels things), but it's still an important part of our filthy culture.
Cutting a 50% mix of soy into chicken isn't shocking compared to most things - and actually matches what I remember of that particular flavor whenever I decided to try chicken again at Subway. Now that I've gotten better at cooking for myself, I find a $6 footlong to be actually a fairly expensive sandwich.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go make a nice couple of egg/bacon/veggie sandwiches. I'm sure it's not completely ethical, and likely contains some genetic engineering (ooh, scary), but for the price, it's a marvel of modern industry and flavor!
Ryan Fenton
Any chance I could get, say, two of those channels for $5 a month?
There's internet-based cable packages already out there, SlingTV/PlayStation Vue are the big obvious ones, but it's not unlikely to be more crowded going forward either. They have the same granular pricing scheme, and I don't care for them either..
The big thing for me is that when I was paying for cable, I'd only really have a couple of 'veg out' channels I ever used, and would really prefer to watch entire series for the serialized content, rather then live, so got nothing out of having those channels available. Add those few remnants of what's mildly interesting in cable, and you'll secure a (lower value) longterm customer.
I won't be willing to pay $35 monthly for what I'm missing now though. I just don't get enough enjoyment out of that, dollar for dollar, than I'd get out of most anything else.
Ryan Fenton
I'm going to guess that AI has been picking the stories for Slashdot for the past couple of days.
Ryan Fenton
...when the author has a primary financial stake in the outcome, or a strong political motivation to push that outcome.
Not that it won't be true, but it is the very definition of bullshit. Right now, most of the prognosticators are predicting either Trump's ascension to eternal godhood, or his imminent crash into grim legend - same story there too, it's not a real prediction, but an attempt to shape the range of expected outcomes.
Same story for hundreds of years of history too - look at any newspaper archive and and the wonderful history of local yellow journalism. There's dozens of archives easily browsed with a google search, and they're hilarious and enlightening on the nature of such bullshit.
So yeah, Hollywood may just be the next buggy whip factory doomed to be unable to adapt before failure, or it may be the start of the next golden era for the studios once they absorb the remains of failed online studios - but either prediction would be wrong to make ahead of time without evidence.
I'd love to predict a future where folks learned to adopt more skepticism in their daily lives and news preferences, but I fear that one is DEFINITELY not held up by previous ages of human interest and news trends over time. That would take concentrated education, in a world drawn to distraction... and here I am on Slashdot!
Ryan Fenton