That's hardly a moral choice, and that's simply an error. If a developer programs an app and there's a MISTAKE in it, then of course he/she's liable.
If a medical device tells the doctor that a patient's heart has stopped, accurately, the doctor has to make a moral choice about whether to restart it or not. Delivering that news to the doctor accurately CANNOT be implicated logically if the doctor decides then to kill the patient.
Nevertheless: if you expect to live in a world that works 100% of the time, I promise that you're going to be disappointed.
"Go to certain parts of this country and openly mock religion and let me know how that works out for you." Your post is less convincing if you start by disingenuously pegging the histrionic bullshit meter. There are likewise great areas of this country, including the overwhelming majority of colleges and high schools, as well as a host of government institutions and at least 80% of the media companies that dominate the public discourse in which saying the simple words "I'm a Christian" will get you (at least) labelled a kook, an idiot, or a religious nutso. If you don't call that marginalizing or trivializing, what is? Curiously, the same doesn't apply if someone says "I'm a buddhist" or "I'm hindu" or "I'm a sikh". I wonder why?
"The benefits that faith brings to individuals and societies are trivialized." "Because in most cases they are trivial in comparison to the problems organized religion brings. " Pedophile priests make the news. The absolutely revisionist nonsense that the Crusades were some sort of assault on Islam by Christendom, makes the news. Religious zealots shooting abortion doctors, makes the news. What doesn't make the news? That 350,000+ local churches feed from dozens to hundreds to thousands of people every week. They voluntarily collect food, clothing, and money to assist those people hundreds if not a thousand YEARS before it occurred to government that it might be the responsibility of the public generally and built their own organizations (compelling the funds for public assistance at the barrel of a gun, no less - how moral is that?). That most of those organizations have partner churches overseas, to which they send books, clothes, food, and $ regularly. That these organizations are the first with charity to those in need after disasters, whether it's materiel or psychological comfort. That aside from the headline-grabbing scandals, these organizations are the most massive public assistance organization ever, and have been (at least for the Christian church) been operating more or less continuously worldwide for at least the last 500 years. No, your offhand dismissal - as much as it may be gratifyingly self-validating, and in-line with the secularist conventional wisdom on the matter - really just confirms my point, that the gullible cheerfully swallow that "religion is bad, m'kay?" without considering in any real sense the durable, persistent, physical and emotional assistance religion provides - setting aside entirely as incalculable the idea that religion gives people a framework to explain how the world works. You may disagree with that framework, in fact I'm rather sure you do, but that doesn't mean that such a framework isn't comforting on a daily basis to BILLIONS of people.
Not to justify it with an appeal to nature, but I would observe that there is - as far as I'm aware - not a single extant human culture in which there is no such thing as religion of some sort. Either such a thing doesn't exist, or has been out-competed in the Darwinistic struggle between cultures over time. That alone suggests the very concept of religion is either intrinsic to humanity as much as art or music, or that in some sense it offers a competitive advantage to its practitioners on a larger scale.
So I regard your postmodern dismissal for what it's worth - a recent fad amongst a teeny, overwealthy, indolent section of humanity based on current ephemerally benign circumstances. My side of the discussion has the weight of the entirety of human history. I'll roll with that, thanks.
I don't write apps, so perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems patently unfair to hold someone writing an app for the moral choices made by someone using that tool?
I mean, are we going to hold hammer-makers responsible if someone murders someone else with a hammer? I even think it's ridiculous to hold gun manufacturers responsible for the misuse of their products.
We live in a world of empiricism, where the concepts of faith and religion are - if not outright mocked and denigrated - are under constant pressure.
The benefits that faith brings to individuals and societies are trivialized. The engines of media are actively working to tear religion* down: few films in the last 40 years (aside from those specifically built for sale to the isolated Christian demographic) have identified-Christian characters that don't prove to be motivated to evil thereby. *hypocritically, the attack is usually on the most benign and banal faiths. The most regressive, reactionary, anti-modern faiths are accorded a curiously protected status.
Finally, the acts of radicals have further poisoned the view of the general public toward religion generally.
This should surprise nobody. I believe people need faith in proportion to their misery. As long as humanity continues to generally be better off, religious affiliation will decline. But of course, I personally don't expect that will be a ceaseless climb, and people will turn back to religion again.
I've always thought that local schools that run driver's ed courses could - with today's hardware and LCD monitors - reasonably inexpensively run a 3-panel simple driving simulator. Since so much of driving has to do with time behind the wheel, and exposure to the daily surprises we all see regularly, you could probably run a nice little business building & selling these to schools, where they could require X hours of logged behind-the-wheel time just driving around.
Please, understand this categorical statement: I DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING CLOUD SERVICE.
I do not want to rely on an internet connection to generate any trivial document. I do not want even my meaningless documents stored "in the cloud", much less anything any private or commercial value. I'm uninterested in making something simple, quick, and reliable into something complicated with more points of failure, slower, and unreliable (that in the meanwhile makes me dependent on you, and paying you for the privilege).
"When I'm in class, I'll wish I was playing World of Warcraft." So would it be better if he said "When I'm in class, I wish I was playing baseball" or "fishing" or "out working on my car"? Being a 47-year old man myself, I'm not so old that I can't remember that wishing I wasn't doing whatever crappy thing I had to be doing isn't pretty much the ground-state of any adolescent.
"When I'm with a girl, I'll wish I was watching pornography, because I'll never get rejected." Meh, I think porn is a symptom, not the cause. I'd say what he's observing is a thing, but is a transient result of a (historically) momentary discontinuity between sexualism and sexual availability. We live in a society where womens' sexualization is complete: it's a (pardon the term) naked commodity, and in which its use as a lever for commercial exploitation is constant. The primal urge for sex in young men is, I suspect, unchanged from history, yet now they're like starving men walking down a street of bakeries, candy shops, and restaurants all taunting them with what they want. At the same time, REAL women (as opposed to the ones flaunting themselves for commercial gain - you don't think those girls in the Axe commercial are doing that because they really feel that way, do you?) are more empowered than ever to demand a level of respect and consideration in the relationship making the sexual negotiation ever more complex for a stupid, single-minded, priapistically-driven young man. Porn and masturbation are the only sexuality he can control, is it any wonder that sometimes he wishes it was as simple as the movies make it seem?
It's the old conundrum between offense and defense. At this time, one side has all the advantages, is it any wonder that sometimes the other side doesn't want to play as much?
The report is pretty confused: "...that's actual hard sitting-around currency, currently put into various investment vehicles..."
Either it's a - liquid cash, or b - sitting in investments.
My guess is that what they meant to say is that it's a, liquid cash, that's probably been dumped into something like staggered or rolling quarterly cd's or something so it's earning something but isn't locked away and out of reach for an unreasonable amount of time.
So functionally, liquid cash as those sorts of investment vehicles pretty much pay nothing.
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that the endemic problems with the US educational system extend somewhat broader and deeper than "we don't teach kindergartners to code".
Oh no, *change* is happening, and it's not in a direction that supports my almost-entirely-unrealistic vision of an affordable bucolic urban hipster paradise.
SOMEONE STOP IT NOW!
This part I read with almost glee: "...I admit Iâ(TM)m part of the problem. Not only did I come to Seattle for the opportunity to work at a large technology company, but it made me wealthy, as well. Iâ(TM)m not saying that Amazon shouldnâ(TM)t grow and that others shouldnâ(TM)t benefit from the opportunity, I just believe the companyâ(TM)s growing irresponsibly and beginning to have an irrevocably damaging impact on Seattleâ(TM)s character and quality of life..."
In short, you're a fucking hypocrite. I got mine, so the rest of you stop trying to do what I did because it's just so not want I want.
Yeah, well, life is change even in the land of non-chain coffee shops, horn-rimmed glasses, and experimental music.
Oh, there are some things you can immediately get most academics to agree on: - Republicans are evil; Dick Cheney is the embodiment of Satan* - white people are to blame for most of the bad things, ever - more government is good - everyone needs more education
*that would be a secular Satan, of course, since they also agree that religion is something mainly for stupid people.
"...Some fairly modern tribes, such as country clubs and gentlemen's clubs, are now legally constrained in their ability to exclude members they feel uncomfortable with...." Unless, of course, they are formed by/for 'protected' classes of individuals - then discrimination is perfectly acceptable.
"...long after it outlasted its useful protective purpose..." Nah, I'd still say that there is a distinct value to tribalism, it's just that value is perceived to be less by the modern cultural imperative toward almost compulsive extroversion.
Personally, if I was a cop, I'd be ASKING to wear a body camera 24/7 now.
But then again, I'm not a cop because I know it's a crazy hard job and that I'd probably just wind up shooting someone for being "1000th person to lie to my face today".
And I'll say it again here as I've said in other places, there should be a "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: clause in the law, whereby anyone with authority over something is punished at a category-higher severity than a normal person, when the crime relates to that thing. When a person accepts authority over something, part of that SHOULD BE a higher-than-normal level of responsibility as well. So for example, a parent would be punished automatically more severely for beating their custodial child, than Joe Citizen would be punished for punching Jim Citizen. A nurse stealing from his patients would be punished more severely than someone just stealing from a random other person. And, in this context, police abusing their authority as officers to extort (for example) would be punished more severely than an unrelated person.
But then again, this will never pass because of course it would logically apply to Congressmen as well.
The US trucking industry has been in a crisis for at least 3 years. The regulatory changes brought about in this administration (for example EPA/state regs that mandate new eco-friendly trucks far faster than normal replacement rates or new DOT rulings that took away around 20% of a driver's available hours per week, ie income) are only the icing on the cake. Simply: the old drivers are all quitting because of the hassles and continuing low pay, while few new drivers are joining the industry. Companies can't find drivers. I know 1Q14 3000+ trucking companies closed (most were Bill & Mary trucking, ie small individual owner-operators, but many were substantial firms) and that was the 7th quarter in a ROW that had happened. Intermodal investment is simply too slow to respond to the waves of need in the trucking freight market.
Enter the self-driving car.
*Certainly* the autodriver will not be able to "handle" a rig in the context of a terminal; there are just too bloody many variables to see that happening soon. But for the bulk of long-haul miles? I can certainly see a sort of 'local pilotage' system developing where trucks are driven by a human to a terminal on the outskirts of a metro area. From that point the human gets out and the autodriver takes it to a similar terminal at the destination city, where a local 'pilot' gets in and handles the truck from there.
The compelling commercial shortage of drivers and the financial rewards (no rest hours, no drug issues, perfect recordkeeping, & - I suspect - better overall safety results lowering insurance costs, etc) all will push the larger freight firms to aggressively pursue this.
The elaborate charade is all about convincing Congress that the negotiation is so complex that the president NEEDS fast-track authority to get this whole deal done.
Trade agreements aren't "secret" - they're generally pretty public things, as the trade-limiting quotas or punitive/protectionist tariffs are IMMEDIATELY published for the public record, so that the commercial community can deal with them....meaning that "if Vietnam [wanted to know] what the American bottom-line with Japan was" (to use the OP's example) they only have to wait 30 seconds after the deal is agreed.
You might think, "well, ok, so there's a competitive negotiating value to keeping your cards close to your chest until the negotiation is finished"...except the question begged here is that the last word in TPP is PARTNERSHIP. *Durable* partnerships are not forged from secretive poly-partner networks of agreements that would be spoiled by the bright light of day; I'm pretty sure we learned that in 1914 when Bismarck's successors failed to keep all those balls in the air quite spectacularly.
Durable generational trade agreements like GATT 1947 are formed from open discussions of mutual interest, and finding points where both/all sides can agree, or can at least agree to compromise.
So in short, this whole thing is bullshit. The current administration has already fucked up the ability of the US to leverage its most powerful peacetime strength - its market - to advance serious geopolitical goals around the Pacific Rim.
As much as I appreciate and generally agree with your point, I'd remind you of something Bjorn Lomborg - no stranger to controversy - pointed out: if you want to talk about a disease, you talk to a doctor, no question. If you want to talk about climate, you talk to a climatologist, again, no question.
But if you're making a value judgement - deciding which of those things is more important, or which you need to spend limited dollars fixing - NEITHER the doctor nor the climatologist is appropriate. That is rightly the realm of politics, insofar as politicians are the avenue by which the public's will is exercised.
According to data published by the Social Security Administration, the name Hillary is the most severely poisoned baby name in history. Hillary had been steadily climbing the baby name charts since the 1960s, when it first graced the Top 1000, becoming the 136th most common name for baby girls in 1992. But the name sharply reversed course in 1993, smashing several longstanding records (Ebeneezer, Adolph) for name contamination in its plunge from the Top 1000 girl names last year.
I'd only add one point further: as much as Ike's prescient warning about the military-industrial complex is quoted ad nauseum, what is much less-often quoted is his comments immediately following that bit...
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.
I'd beg to differ, as there was a long and fruitful conversation on quora about exactly this. I read through at least the first 20 replies, and they're quite good.*
Not to mention that the idea that scientists are strongly liberal is supported by ample statistical evidence (one example at http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c... - Paul Krugman is hardly the mouthpiece of the GOP).
*let me be clear, I love science and hard science fiction, I think creationism is mythological poppycock, and yet I am a *staunch* conservative. So go figure.
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That's hardly a moral choice, and that's simply an error. If a developer programs an app and there's a MISTAKE in it, then of course he/she's liable.
If a medical device tells the doctor that a patient's heart has stopped, accurately, the doctor has to make a moral choice about whether to restart it or not. Delivering that news to the doctor accurately CANNOT be implicated logically if the doctor decides then to kill the patient.
Nevertheless: if you expect to live in a world that works 100% of the time, I promise that you're going to be disappointed.
"Go to certain parts of this country and openly mock religion and let me know how that works out for you."
Your post is less convincing if you start by disingenuously pegging the histrionic bullshit meter.
There are likewise great areas of this country, including the overwhelming majority of colleges and high schools, as well as a host of government institutions and at least 80% of the media companies that dominate the public discourse in which saying the simple words "I'm a Christian" will get you (at least) labelled a kook, an idiot, or a religious nutso.
If you don't call that marginalizing or trivializing, what is?
Curiously, the same doesn't apply if someone says "I'm a buddhist" or "I'm hindu" or "I'm a sikh". I wonder why?
"The benefits that faith brings to individuals and societies are trivialized."
"Because in most cases they are trivial in comparison to the problems organized religion brings. "
Pedophile priests make the news.
The absolutely revisionist nonsense that the Crusades were some sort of assault on Islam by Christendom, makes the news.
Religious zealots shooting abortion doctors, makes the news.
What doesn't make the news? That 350,000+ local churches feed from dozens to hundreds to thousands of people every week. They voluntarily collect food, clothing, and money to assist those people hundreds if not a thousand YEARS before it occurred to government that it might be the responsibility of the public generally and built their own organizations (compelling the funds for public assistance at the barrel of a gun, no less - how moral is that?). That most of those organizations have partner churches overseas, to which they send books, clothes, food, and $ regularly. That these organizations are the first with charity to those in need after disasters, whether it's materiel or psychological comfort. That aside from the headline-grabbing scandals, these organizations are the most massive public assistance organization ever, and have been (at least for the Christian church) been operating more or less continuously worldwide for at least the last 500 years.
No, your offhand dismissal - as much as it may be gratifyingly self-validating, and in-line with the secularist conventional wisdom on the matter - really just confirms my point, that the gullible cheerfully swallow that "religion is bad, m'kay?" without considering in any real sense the durable, persistent, physical and emotional assistance religion provides - setting aside entirely as incalculable the idea that religion gives people a framework to explain how the world works. You may disagree with that framework, in fact I'm rather sure you do, but that doesn't mean that such a framework isn't comforting on a daily basis to BILLIONS of people.
Not to justify it with an appeal to nature, but I would observe that there is - as far as I'm aware - not a single extant human culture in which there is no such thing as religion of some sort. Either such a thing doesn't exist, or has been out-competed in the Darwinistic struggle between cultures over time. That alone suggests the very concept of religion is either intrinsic to humanity as much as art or music, or that in some sense it offers a competitive advantage to its practitioners on a larger scale.
So I regard your postmodern dismissal for what it's worth - a recent fad amongst a teeny, overwealthy, indolent section of humanity based on current ephemerally benign circumstances. My side of the discussion has the weight of the entirety of human history. I'll roll with that, thanks.
I don't write apps, so perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems patently unfair to hold someone writing an app for the moral choices made by someone using that tool?
I mean, are we going to hold hammer-makers responsible if someone murders someone else with a hammer?
I even think it's ridiculous to hold gun manufacturers responsible for the misuse of their products.
Dammit, nobody appreciates frescoes anymore.
And what about blacksmiths? Marginalised, trivialized and pushed to the curb as if people have better ways to do things?
Deeply unfair.
We live in a world of empiricism, where the concepts of faith and religion are - if not outright mocked and denigrated - are under constant pressure.
The benefits that faith brings to individuals and societies are trivialized. The engines of media are actively working to tear religion* down: few films in the last 40 years (aside from those specifically built for sale to the isolated Christian demographic) have identified-Christian characters that don't prove to be motivated to evil thereby.
*hypocritically, the attack is usually on the most benign and banal faiths. The most regressive, reactionary, anti-modern faiths are accorded a curiously protected status.
Finally, the acts of radicals have further poisoned the view of the general public toward religion generally.
This should surprise nobody.
I believe people need faith in proportion to their misery. As long as humanity continues to generally be better off, religious affiliation will decline. But of course, I personally don't expect that will be a ceaseless climb, and people will turn back to religion again.
I'm going to worry about this right after I get done with my "halt the rising waters" campaign to stop the tides.
I've always thought that local schools that run driver's ed courses could - with today's hardware and LCD monitors - reasonably inexpensively run a 3-panel simple driving simulator. Since so much of driving has to do with time behind the wheel, and exposure to the daily surprises we all see regularly, you could probably run a nice little business building & selling these to schools, where they could require X hours of logged behind-the-wheel time just driving around.
Please, understand this categorical statement: I DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING CLOUD SERVICE.
I do not want to rely on an internet connection to generate any trivial document.
I do not want even my meaningless documents stored "in the cloud", much less anything any private or commercial value.
I'm uninterested in making something simple, quick, and reliable into something complicated with more points of failure, slower, and unreliable (that in the meanwhile makes me dependent on you, and paying you for the privilege).
So no, stop asking.
"When I'm in class, I'll wish I was playing World of Warcraft."
So would it be better if he said "When I'm in class, I wish I was playing baseball" or "fishing" or "out working on my car"?
Being a 47-year old man myself, I'm not so old that I can't remember that wishing I wasn't doing whatever crappy thing I had to be doing isn't pretty much the ground-state of any adolescent.
"When I'm with a girl, I'll wish I was watching pornography, because I'll never get rejected."
Meh, I think porn is a symptom, not the cause. I'd say what he's observing is a thing, but is a transient result of a (historically) momentary discontinuity between sexualism and sexual availability.
We live in a society where womens' sexualization is complete: it's a (pardon the term) naked commodity, and in which its use as a lever for commercial exploitation is constant. The primal urge for sex in young men is, I suspect, unchanged from history, yet now they're like starving men walking down a street of bakeries, candy shops, and restaurants all taunting them with what they want. At the same time, REAL women (as opposed to the ones flaunting themselves for commercial gain - you don't think those girls in the Axe commercial are doing that because they really feel that way, do you?) are more empowered than ever to demand a level of respect and consideration in the relationship making the sexual negotiation ever more complex for a stupid, single-minded, priapistically-driven young man. Porn and masturbation are the only sexuality he can control, is it any wonder that sometimes he wishes it was as simple as the movies make it seem?
It's the old conundrum between offense and defense. At this time, one side has all the advantages, is it any wonder that sometimes the other side doesn't want to play as much?
The report is pretty confused: "...that's actual hard sitting-around currency, currently put into various investment vehicles..."
Either it's a - liquid cash, or b - sitting in investments.
My guess is that what they meant to say is that it's a, liquid cash, that's probably been dumped into something like staggered or rolling quarterly cd's or something so it's earning something but isn't locked away and out of reach for an unreasonable amount of time.
So functionally, liquid cash as those sorts of investment vehicles pretty much pay nothing.
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that the endemic problems with the US educational system extend somewhat broader and deeper than "we don't teach kindergartners to code".
Oh no, *change* is happening, and it's not in a direction that supports my almost-entirely-unrealistic vision of an affordable bucolic urban hipster paradise.
SOMEONE STOP IT NOW!
This part I read with almost glee:
"...I admit Iâ(TM)m part of the problem. Not only did I come to Seattle for the opportunity to work at a large technology company, but it made me wealthy, as well. Iâ(TM)m not saying that Amazon shouldnâ(TM)t grow and that others shouldnâ(TM)t benefit from the opportunity, I just believe the companyâ(TM)s growing irresponsibly and beginning to have an irrevocably damaging impact on Seattleâ(TM)s character and quality of life..."
In short, you're a fucking hypocrite. I got mine, so the rest of you stop trying to do what I did because it's just so not want I want.
Yeah, well, life is change even in the land of non-chain coffee shops, horn-rimmed glasses, and experimental music.
Oh, there are some things you can immediately get most academics to agree on:
- Republicans are evil; Dick Cheney is the embodiment of Satan*
- white people are to blame for most of the bad things, ever
- more government is good
- everyone needs more education
*that would be a secular Satan, of course, since they also agree that religion is something mainly for stupid people.
Except that cash-for-clunkers was a COMPLETE failure:
First as an economic program, it was a joke: http://hotair.com/archives/201...
Second, even in terms of the environment, it was a joke: http://jalopnik.com/5973474/su...
Literally, EVERYONE said "this is a really stupid idea, why would ANYONE buy one of those?" ...and now they say "Aw shucks, we didn't realize?"
I hope their stock drops further just because of their arrogance or their stupidity, you pick one.
"...Some fairly modern tribes, such as country clubs and gentlemen's clubs, are now legally constrained in their ability to exclude members they feel uncomfortable with. ..."
Unless, of course, they are formed by/for 'protected' classes of individuals - then discrimination is perfectly acceptable.
"...long after it outlasted its useful protective purpose ..."
Nah, I'd still say that there is a distinct value to tribalism, it's just that value is perceived to be less by the modern cultural imperative toward almost compulsive extroversion.
Personally, if I was a cop, I'd be ASKING to wear a body camera 24/7 now.
But then again, I'm not a cop because I know it's a crazy hard job and that I'd probably just wind up shooting someone for being "1000th person to lie to my face today".
And I'll say it again here as I've said in other places, there should be a "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?: clause in the law, whereby anyone with authority over something is punished at a category-higher severity than a normal person, when the crime relates to that thing. When a person accepts authority over something, part of that SHOULD BE a higher-than-normal level of responsibility as well.
So for example, a parent would be punished automatically more severely for beating their custodial child, than Joe Citizen would be punished for punching Jim Citizen. A nurse stealing from his patients would be punished more severely than someone just stealing from a random other person. And, in this context, police abusing their authority as officers to extort (for example) would be punished more severely than an unrelated person.
But then again, this will never pass because of course it would logically apply to Congressmen as well.
The US trucking industry has been in a crisis for at least 3 years.
The regulatory changes brought about in this administration (for example EPA/state regs that mandate new eco-friendly trucks far faster than normal replacement rates or new DOT rulings that took away around 20% of a driver's available hours per week, ie income) are only the icing on the cake. Simply: the old drivers are all quitting because of the hassles and continuing low pay, while few new drivers are joining the industry. Companies can't find drivers. I know 1Q14 3000+ trucking companies closed (most were Bill & Mary trucking, ie small individual owner-operators, but many were substantial firms) and that was the 7th quarter in a ROW that had happened. Intermodal investment is simply too slow to respond to the waves of need in the trucking freight market.
Enter the self-driving car.
*Certainly* the autodriver will not be able to "handle" a rig in the context of a terminal; there are just too bloody many variables to see that happening soon. But for the bulk of long-haul miles? I can certainly see a sort of 'local pilotage' system developing where trucks are driven by a human to a terminal on the outskirts of a metro area. From that point the human gets out and the autodriver takes it to a similar terminal at the destination city, where a local 'pilot' gets in and handles the truck from there.
The compelling commercial shortage of drivers and the financial rewards (no rest hours, no drug issues, perfect recordkeeping, & - I suspect - better overall safety results lowering insurance costs, etc) all will push the larger freight firms to aggressively pursue this.
The elaborate charade is all about convincing Congress that the negotiation is so complex that the president NEEDS fast-track authority to get this whole deal done.
Trade agreements aren't "secret" - they're generally pretty public things, as the trade-limiting quotas or punitive/protectionist tariffs are IMMEDIATELY published for the public record, so that the commercial community can deal with them....meaning that "if Vietnam [wanted to know] what the American bottom-line with Japan was" (to use the OP's example) they only have to wait 30 seconds after the deal is agreed.
You might think, "well, ok, so there's a competitive negotiating value to keeping your cards close to your chest until the negotiation is finished"...except the question begged here is that the last word in TPP is PARTNERSHIP. *Durable* partnerships are not forged from secretive poly-partner networks of agreements that would be spoiled by the bright light of day; I'm pretty sure we learned that in 1914 when Bismarck's successors failed to keep all those balls in the air quite spectacularly.
Durable generational trade agreements like GATT 1947 are formed from open discussions of mutual interest, and finding points where both/all sides can agree, or can at least agree to compromise.
So in short, this whole thing is bullshit. The current administration has already fucked up the ability of the US to leverage its most powerful peacetime strength - its market - to advance serious geopolitical goals around the Pacific Rim.
As much as I appreciate and generally agree with your point, I'd remind you of something Bjorn Lomborg - no stranger to controversy - pointed out: if you want to talk about a disease, you talk to a doctor, no question. If you want to talk about climate, you talk to a climatologist, again, no question.
But if you're making a value judgement - deciding which of those things is more important, or which you need to spend limited dollars fixing - NEITHER the doctor nor the climatologist is appropriate. That is rightly the realm of politics, insofar as politicians are the avenue by which the public's will is exercised.
Well, by that logic then this is relevant too:
http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com...
I'd only add one point further: as much as Ike's prescient warning about the military-industrial complex is quoted ad nauseum, what is much less-often quoted is his comments immediately following that bit...
I'd beg to differ, as there was a long and fruitful conversation on quora about exactly this.
I read through at least the first 20 replies, and they're quite good.*
http://www.quora.com/Why-do-sc...
Not to mention that the idea that scientists are strongly liberal is supported by ample statistical evidence (one example at http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c... - Paul Krugman is hardly the mouthpiece of the GOP).
*let me be clear, I love science and hard science fiction, I think creationism is mythological poppycock, and yet I am a *staunch* conservative. So go figure.
I fail to see how laying off Congress and shipping their jobs to India would result in any possible lower value than we have in that body today?
One might point out that makes 2 massively egotistical women on the campaign trail, then?