Hm, so all ebooks are sold for free then? Because the supply is basically infinite (up to the bandwidth of the internet).
Yes and no. You seem to be assuming that there's some precise formula, but supply/demand is a tendency, not a formula. Further, the cost to the publisher of sending you a copy of an ebook is not just the cost of pushing electrons around. There's also the the author's royalties and the amortized costs of running the company in general. Market pressure will push the price towards zero plus those costs, and those upstream costs which can flex (such as the royalties) will also get downward pressure.
What you're doing is equivalent to calculating the cost of your groceries based only on how much it costs to pay the cashier putting them into your bags. It doesn't matter that the groceries are tangible and the ebooks aren't. There are still upstream costs that the person giving you the stuff has to pay.
2. In several cases, workers show up drunk to work and also violate safety rules in ways that could seriously hurt or even kill other workers -- by starting a fire, for instance. When management tries to discipline or fire these workers, the union fights them tooth and nail. If I was one of these guys' coworkers, I would damn sure want them gone. How is the union protecting my interests by keeping people on the job who are risking setting the hotel on fire and possibly getting me killed?
I have a hard time believing that. If it did happen, the management should be fired for safety violations. How come the management isn't fighting tooth and nail to get them fired?
Management was fighting to fire him,. but the union was fighting for him not to be fired. I don't know who prevailed in each case (the situation was related to me several years ago), but my point was that the union was fighting the issue at all. They had gone from taking an adversarial positions when necessary to protect the interests of their membership, to taking adversarial positions being what they were always supposed to do.
My father was a union aircraft mechanic. His main concern in life was not to make a mistake that could kill a planeload of people, and he never did. He knew that as long as he followed the book -- the FAA and aircraft maintenance rules -- he would have a job until he retired. He also knew that if he was drunk on the job, he would get fired, and he didn't expect the union to protect him.
Things do vary from industry to industry, and like anything else, some unions are better than others. Also, I expect there's more of a chance for bad apples among hotel housekeeping staff than aircraft mechanics, given the barrier imposed by the level of training required.
Lobbyists fight for the rights of companies. Why shouldn't unions fight for the rights of employees?
It doesn't always work that way, and often works less that way the longer things go on. To quote Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." Or relatedly, the outlook morphs from "we do X to achieve Y" to just "we do X." In the case of labor unions, X is "oppose management via strikes, etc." and Y is "protect the rights and interests of the workers belonging to the union." I'll cite three examples from people I know, the first two at a hotel my brother worked at, the second from a friend's dad who worked at a phone company.
1. Worker requests and is approved for time off several months in advance to take his family on a vacation. Then, a week before he's scheduled to go, another more-senior worker puts in for time off at the same time. The hotel can't do without both of them at once. According to the agreement with the union, vacation time has to be prioritized in order of seniority. The management thinks this is unfair to the first guy, but the union holds them to the rules. Guy who asked for his vacation at the last minute gets what he wants, first guy who scheduled it far in advance gets screwed.
2. In several cases, workers show up drunk to work and also violate safety rules in ways that could seriously hurt or even kill other workers -- by starting a fire, for instance. When management tries to discipline or fire these workers, the union fights them tooth and nail. If I was one of these guys' coworkers, I would damn sure want them gone. How is the union protecting my interests by keeping people on the job who are risking setting the hotel on fire and possibly getting me killed?
3. Phone lineman, rather than doing his job fixing the repairs assigned to him, pretty much always parks his truck somewhere in the morning and drinks and naps all day, then comes back at quitting time. Union adamantly opposes having him disciplined or fired, siding against not just management but everyone else on the guy's crew.
Booth babes (of either sex and orientation) are a red flag that the company you are dealing with would like to grab your attention using the nether regions of your body rather than engaging your mind with a fantastic product. Easy tip off that they are more interested in flash over substance that will leave one looking foolish for having selected their product.
Look - don't buy.
I totally agree. When I went to CES back in January, there was a definite inverse correlation between how blatantly-sexual the booth babes at a given vendor were dressed, and how good that vendor's product was.
1) Those technologies and data center locations save the company money through energy costs and government subsidies.
2) They get to spin it as good PR -- Hey Look at us all green and eco-friendly and carbon neutral!
I'm not disagreeing that they're doing potentially good things, but you're deluded if you think the motives are altruistic.
Someone wrote something about that a couple hundred years ago: "But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only... It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
vandalism? So you think some kid doing graffiti should get a harsher penalty?
Corporal punishment would be better in that case -- cheaper to administer, and probably better long-term for younger criminals rather than putting them in prison and effectively taking away valuable time from their developing years while exposing them to far worse criminals. Better for everyone if a juvenile vandal gets what Michael Fay got in Singapore in 1994. It's painful and humiliating, but it's over with quickly, and he can go back to school the next day, mindful that he better not pull that kind of crap again.
I live in downtown LA and much of the graffiti here is quite artistic and adds value to its surroundings.
That may be your opinion, but the only opinion that should legally count is that of whoever owns the wall that got spraypainted, or whatever. I certainly wasn't happy when some idiot keyed my car, or when I go into a restroom and find someone has carved their initials into the toilet seats. If you're talking about graffiti on public property like the LA river basin, put it to a vote.
The Progressive Era and the New Deal... essentially reversing the assumption from "Congress may only make laws about things the Constitution explicitly allows" to "Congress may make laws about anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid."
You're off by at least a hundred years. The precedent that "strict constructionists" overlook is the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Tom Jefferson and Jimmy Madison, ironically the original strict constructionists, tossed their own principle in the trash because they decided that buying that land (a power obviously not explicitly granted by the Constitution) was more important. Congress agreed when they forked over the money for it. RIP strict constructionism.
That's one instance, and yes there were others, but I'm talking about the preponderance of court rulings, and the expectations of such rulings implied by what laws were passed.
This power was not granted, it was simply taken by stepping over democracy's dead corps.
That would be "dead corpse." The way you're spelling it, a dead corps would be a few divisions of zombie Marines. Which, granted, would be pretty cool.
Congress is supposed to watch the watchers. The voters are supposed to watch Congress.
Actually, Congress, the President, and the Courts are supposed to watch each other (aka "separation of powers), and the voters watch Congress and the President.
The Separation of Powers part of this has broken down over the last century or so. Thanks to Teddy "Bully Pulpit" Roosevelt and the necessity of presidential leadership during the World Wars and the Cold War, Congress has gotten into the habit of deferring to the President a lot more than it used to. The Progressive Era and the New Deal (in particular, Wickard vs. Filburn) set Supreme Court precedents of deferring to Congress, essentially reversing the assumption from "Congress may only make laws about things the Constitution explicitly allows" to "Congress may make laws about anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid." And with this increase in number and especially scope of laws, Congress can't write them without leaving a huge amount of the details and oversight to the discretion of the bureaucracies implementing them -- a power it is not supposed to delegate, because it means that the executive branch (the bureaucracies) is effectively crafting legislation.
This is an example of what happens when people grant power to government to achieve something they want, without considering how that power will be used. Both the political right and left are guilty of this. Whenever the questions of "should we give government this power?" or "should we set this precedent?", people tend to think in the short term about how people who think like they do can use that power or precedent to do things that they want done. The question they usually fail to ask, and should, is "how will someone whose ideas I detest use this?" Think of someone whose ideology you loathe -- it doesn't matter who it is. Assume that someone like them will have political power someday, because they will. Now look at any question of "should the government have this power?" in terms of what that person would do with it.
To use a tech-related analogy: when the developers of an online game are working on a feature (a new item, new rule, new quest, whatever) or even major bug fix, they not only have to ask "will this be fun for the players?" They also have to ask "will this empower griefers? How about gold-farmers? Bot-users? Does it leave anything open to exploit?" And that's the type of question too many Americans have been neglecting to ask for a long time.
"This was created by the Congress, and if we've made mistakes and we've gotten outside the lane then we're going to get inside the lane. But the consequence of taking these tools away from the American people through their government would be catastrophic."
Do I even need to comment?
Part of the problem is that there is no penalty to legislators and executives for violating the Constitution. This is not a mere "mistake" as the Senator portrays it. He's breaking his oath of office and the law (the Constitution being the highest US law and a set of meta-laws). By way of comparison, let's assume that I stole someone's car, and then get caught. I am not just forced to give them their car back and call it even (or "get inside the lane" as Senator Graham puts it). The legal system punishes me for the act of stealing the car in the first place. The same sort of thing should happen when a law is ruled unconstitutional -- the Representatives and Senators who voted for it, and the President who signed it, should suffer a significant punishment. When the Communications Decency Act got overturned, it should have resulted in President Clinton, Senator Exon, and 504 other politicians spending ten years in Leavenworth breaking rocks. None of this "we'll pass it and then let the Supreme Court decide if it's constitutional" crap.
Granted, you'd have to change how Supreme Court justices are appointed, otherwise presidents and Congress would have an incentive to appoint ones who would let them get away with such things.
"There!"
"What, behind the robot?"
"It is the robot!"
"You silly sod!"
"What?"
"You got us all worked up!"
"That's no ordinary robot! That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered mechanism you ever set eyes on!"
"You git! I soiled my armor, I was so scared!"
"Look, that robot's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!"
That's cool. So Texas charges property tax on property outside of real estate, like stocks and bonds and intellectual "property"?
If you mean do they now, I don't think so. If you mean should they according to what I said before, then no. If you own a stock, you own part of a company, not part of Texas.
Yes, but in general, the heavier the vehicle, the more gas it burns. And the more it is driven, the more gas it burns. So, a per-unit tax on fuel is roughly proportional to weight times miles. You could certainly come up with a more precise measure, but this seems a good enough approximation to me, without having to actually monitor the vehicle's activity.
A general fund is not a problem anymore than insurance is a problem because it pools risks from many, and that many pay for the few.
Except that your car insurance is separate from your health insurance, both of which are separate from your home insurance, etc. And for each one, the amount you have to pay is based on the probable amount that you will receive. That is how I am saying taxes vs. government spending should work. If you have a more expensive car, you pay higher car insurance rates, and if you have more property attracting thieves, your contribution to police funding should be higher. But just because you make more money doesn't mean you should be made to pay for, say, a public pool which you may never use. That's what entrance fees are for.
OK...so for those working a minimum wage job trying to support a family, who own no property in Texas, you're fine with them not having to pay tax? Or are you going to call them freeloaders? or part of the 47%? Or maybe things aren't so black-and-white?
I'm fine with them not having to pay a direct tax for those services that are funded by the property tax. First, they will be paying it indirectly via the rent they pay to their landlord, just like they indirectly pay gas tax on items they buy that have been trucked to the store. Second, I would not propose having everything paid this way, just those services whose cost is (roughly) proportional to the value/size of your property -- police protection, for instance, since thieves obviously would rather rob rich people than poor people. The aforementioned gas tax is a better way to pay for roads, since (until electric cars become more popular) the amount of gas you burn is roughly proportional to how much wear and tear you inflict on the roads. That assumes that the gas tax goes only for the roads and doesn't, as it usually is now, get put into the general fund. That general fund is one of the basic problems, because it muddles the connection between what you pay and what you take.
BTW the low tax Texas is myth just look how much we pay property tax!
Well, as taxes go, property taxes come closer than most others to having the tax burden be proportional to how much it costs the government to provide services to you. I have moral problems with taxes per se, but if we have to have them, then having the amount of money you have to pay to Texas be proportional to how much you own of Texas is much better than an income tax or a sales tax.
"Expelling a projectile with enough force to penetrate a human being to the depth of 17 centimeters"
I hate to point this out, but my *cock* does that....and talk about unforeseen consequences.....Hope it's not the next thing they want to make illegal.
Only if you equip it with a high-capacity magazine, or modify it to fire more than one shot per pull.
In a bit of convenient timing, found this news story via Instapundit a few minutes ago, about medical use of a 3-D printer saving a baby suffering from a rare lung ailment.
With hopes dimming that Kaiba would survive, doctors tried the medical equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass. Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba’s blocked airway.
What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.
Here's hoping that the competition helps stuff like this.
I really, really want to be for this. Not because I have anything against 3D-printed guns, I'm all for those, but because some of the things on their list are good ideas and make sense. Some of the other stuff is pure nonsense, however.
"Low-cost medical devices." Excellent idea. "Tools to help people out of poverty." Also excellent. Lots of potential in both of these to improve, and in many cases save, people's lives.
But then we get to "Designs that can reduce racial conflict." Err, what? Someone is waaay overestimating how effective their "Coexist" bumper sticker is. It would be nice if 3D printers could produce some sort of object for people to brandish at racists like crucifixes at vampires, but it's not going to happen. "Tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure." Look, I'm for reducing conflict and increasing safety and security, too, but if an object to do that hasn't been created using more-mundane fabrication methods, a 3D printer won't be able to make it, either -- and there aren't any such objects, unless (like me and apparently unlike the folks sponsoring this) you think that being armed makes you more secure.
This is being run by Michigan Tech's Department of of Material Science and Engineering, but it looks like someone from one of the squishy majors snuck in and added items to the list. I hope there are a lot medical and tool ideas submitted (pity they don't have a way to donate money to increase the prize), but I really wish they hadn't included the silly, groan-inducing stuff.
You might not think of a janitor, truck driver, factory worker, or McDonalds worker as particularly intelligent.
I did not mean to imply that opinion at all. I find that most people are more intelligent that they're given credit for -- especially more than we techies tend to give them. Hence the underlying "what will these morons do once the robots take their jobs?" tone in the discussion.
What happens when computer image processing reaches the point where the average blue-collar worker has NO talents that a robot cannot do for cheaper?
Those workers (and more importantly, the next generation of them, since this is 30 years down the line by the article's assumptions) will need to learn new skills, just like the former farm workers and their successors did. The average farm worker in 1870 didn't know how to repair machinery or type, either.
Humans have many extra costs - housing, transportation, food, bathrooms, breaks, social life, vacations, unpredictable emotions and behavior - that robots do not. Will fuzzy traits like "flexibility" be enough to compensate for all these?
Point taken, but that's what I meant by "things we haven't thought of yet." The fuzzy traits won't be enough to compensate in the cases of jobs that don't utilize those traits, but since those traits are valuable, use will be made of them, and many of the uses are things that won't occur to us now.
You or I may not find them useful, but the fact that someone is paying people to do those things indicates that they find them useful. And which would you rather do, create commercials or shovel fertilizer? Personally I'd rather deal with the figurative BS than the literal kind.
Point taken about the article's vagueness, though they did say “if not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.”
And to reiterate, I'm not saying this transition would be painless, or that it wouldn't involve major societal displacements and other changes. Going back to the agriculture example, that involved a large portion of the population moving from the countryside into the cities. Another possible basis for comparison is the collapse of the communism in Eastern Europe and the elimination, restructuring, or repurposing of all of the inefficient state-run factories, except that the automation scenario would be less sudden (the article is talking about 2045).
Back the late 1800s, agricultural work required about 3/4 of the US's population. Now it's about 3%. If, back then, you'd asked "what would happen if 96% of the farming jobs vanished?", you'd probably have gotten predictions of doom similar to this one. But what actually happened was that those people (or their descendants, rather, since this change didn't happen overnight) got employed doing other things, most of which people in the late 1800s couldn't have anticipated. The same thing will happen here. Human intelligence, creativity, and flexibility are valuable, and valuable stuff tends not to sit idle. People figure out something to do with it. There are temporary displacements and adjustments, but overall, automation doesn't idle people, it frees them up to do new things.
Note that I'm not talking about a situation where the machines are actually creatively intelligent, in contrast with something like Deep Blue being programmed ahead of time to do a highly-specific task. If we get to that point, all bets are off, but then we're venturing into singularity territory at that point, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like Gabe's dream is about to come true.
That's not the supply. An infinite number of books full of random words wouldn't have much demand.
I dunno. I mean, if the Twilight series can be a bestseller, then...
Hm, so all ebooks are sold for free then? Because the supply is basically infinite (up to the bandwidth of the internet).
Yes and no. You seem to be assuming that there's some precise formula, but supply/demand is a tendency, not a formula. Further, the cost to the publisher of sending you a copy of an ebook is not just the cost of pushing electrons around. There's also the the author's royalties and the amortized costs of running the company in general. Market pressure will push the price towards zero plus those costs, and those upstream costs which can flex (such as the royalties) will also get downward pressure.
What you're doing is equivalent to calculating the cost of your groceries based only on how much it costs to pay the cashier putting them into your bags. It doesn't matter that the groceries are tangible and the ebooks aren't. There are still upstream costs that the person giving you the stuff has to pay.
2. In several cases, workers show up drunk to work and also violate safety rules in ways that could seriously hurt or even kill other workers -- by starting a fire, for instance. When management tries to discipline or fire these workers, the union fights them tooth and nail. If I was one of these guys' coworkers, I would damn sure want them gone. How is the union protecting my interests by keeping people on the job who are risking setting the hotel on fire and possibly getting me killed?
I have a hard time believing that. If it did happen, the management should be fired for safety violations. How come the management isn't fighting tooth and nail to get them fired?
Management was fighting to fire him,. but the union was fighting for him not to be fired. I don't know who prevailed in each case (the situation was related to me several years ago), but my point was that the union was fighting the issue at all. They had gone from taking an adversarial positions when necessary to protect the interests of their membership, to taking adversarial positions being what they were always supposed to do.
My father was a union aircraft mechanic. His main concern in life was not to make a mistake that could kill a planeload of people, and he never did. He knew that as long as he followed the book -- the FAA and aircraft maintenance rules -- he would have a job until he retired. He also knew that if he was drunk on the job, he would get fired, and he didn't expect the union to protect him.
Things do vary from industry to industry, and like anything else, some unions are better than others. Also, I expect there's more of a chance for bad apples among hotel housekeeping staff than aircraft mechanics, given the barrier imposed by the level of training required.
Lobbyists fight for the rights of companies. Why shouldn't unions fight for the rights of employees?
It doesn't always work that way, and often works less that way the longer things go on. To quote Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, "In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." Or relatedly, the outlook morphs from "we do X to achieve Y" to just "we do X." In the case of labor unions, X is "oppose management via strikes, etc." and Y is "protect the rights and interests of the workers belonging to the union." I'll cite three examples from people I know, the first two at a hotel my brother worked at, the second from a friend's dad who worked at a phone company.
1. Worker requests and is approved for time off several months in advance to take his family on a vacation. Then, a week before he's scheduled to go, another more-senior worker puts in for time off at the same time. The hotel can't do without both of them at once. According to the agreement with the union, vacation time has to be prioritized in order of seniority. The management thinks this is unfair to the first guy, but the union holds them to the rules. Guy who asked for his vacation at the last minute gets what he wants, first guy who scheduled it far in advance gets screwed.
2. In several cases, workers show up drunk to work and also violate safety rules in ways that could seriously hurt or even kill other workers -- by starting a fire, for instance. When management tries to discipline or fire these workers, the union fights them tooth and nail. If I was one of these guys' coworkers, I would damn sure want them gone. How is the union protecting my interests by keeping people on the job who are risking setting the hotel on fire and possibly getting me killed?
3. Phone lineman, rather than doing his job fixing the repairs assigned to him, pretty much always parks his truck somewhere in the morning and drinks and naps all day, then comes back at quitting time. Union adamantly opposes having him disciplined or fired, siding against not just management but everyone else on the guy's crew.
Booth babes (of either sex and orientation) are a red flag that the company you are dealing with would like to grab your attention using the nether regions of your body rather than engaging your mind with a fantastic product. Easy tip off that they are more interested in flash over substance that will leave one looking foolish for having selected their product.
Look - don't buy.
I totally agree. When I went to CES back in January, there was a definite inverse correlation between how blatantly-sexual the booth babes at a given vendor were dressed, and how good that vendor's product was.
It's just business sense.
1) Those technologies and data center locations save the company money through energy costs and government subsidies. 2) They get to spin it as good PR -- Hey Look at us all green and eco-friendly and carbon neutral!
I'm not disagreeing that they're doing potentially good things, but you're deluded if you think the motives are altruistic.
Someone wrote something about that a couple hundred years ago: "But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only... It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages."
Sure if you feel like dispensing with civil rights.
How is it a violation of civil rights? It certainly is less damaging, long-term, than incarceration.
vandalism? So you think some kid doing graffiti should get a harsher penalty?
Corporal punishment would be better in that case -- cheaper to administer, and probably better long-term for younger criminals rather than putting them in prison and effectively taking away valuable time from their developing years while exposing them to far worse criminals. Better for everyone if a juvenile vandal gets what Michael Fay got in Singapore in 1994. It's painful and humiliating, but it's over with quickly, and he can go back to school the next day, mindful that he better not pull that kind of crap again.
I live in downtown LA and much of the graffiti here is quite artistic and adds value to its surroundings.
That may be your opinion, but the only opinion that should legally count is that of whoever owns the wall that got spraypainted, or whatever. I certainly wasn't happy when some idiot keyed my car, or when I go into a restroom and find someone has carved their initials into the toilet seats. If you're talking about graffiti on public property like the LA river basin, put it to a vote.
The Progressive Era and the New Deal ... essentially reversing the assumption from "Congress may only make laws about things the Constitution explicitly allows" to "Congress may make laws about anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid."
You're off by at least a hundred years. The precedent that "strict constructionists" overlook is the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Tom Jefferson and Jimmy Madison, ironically the original strict constructionists, tossed their own principle in the trash because they decided that buying that land (a power obviously not explicitly granted by the Constitution) was more important. Congress agreed when they forked over the money for it. RIP strict constructionism.
That's one instance, and yes there were others, but I'm talking about the preponderance of court rulings, and the expectations of such rulings implied by what laws were passed.
This power was not granted, it was simply taken by stepping over democracy's dead corps.
That would be "dead corpse." The way you're spelling it, a dead corps would be a few divisions of zombie Marines. Which, granted, would be pretty cool.
"Semper braaaaains! Oorah!"
Who watches the watchers?
Congress is supposed to watch the watchers. The voters are supposed to watch Congress.
Actually, Congress, the President, and the Courts are supposed to watch each other (aka "separation of powers), and the voters watch Congress and the President.
The Separation of Powers part of this has broken down over the last century or so. Thanks to Teddy "Bully Pulpit" Roosevelt and the necessity of presidential leadership during the World Wars and the Cold War, Congress has gotten into the habit of deferring to the President a lot more than it used to. The Progressive Era and the New Deal (in particular, Wickard vs. Filburn) set Supreme Court precedents of deferring to Congress, essentially reversing the assumption from "Congress may only make laws about things the Constitution explicitly allows" to "Congress may make laws about anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid." And with this increase in number and especially scope of laws, Congress can't write them without leaving a huge amount of the details and oversight to the discretion of the bureaucracies implementing them -- a power it is not supposed to delegate, because it means that the executive branch (the bureaucracies) is effectively crafting legislation.
This is an example of what happens when people grant power to government to achieve something they want, without considering how that power will be used. Both the political right and left are guilty of this. Whenever the questions of "should we give government this power?" or "should we set this precedent?", people tend to think in the short term about how people who think like they do can use that power or precedent to do things that they want done. The question they usually fail to ask, and should, is "how will someone whose ideas I detest use this?" Think of someone whose ideology you loathe -- it doesn't matter who it is. Assume that someone like them will have political power someday, because they will. Now look at any question of "should the government have this power?" in terms of what that person would do with it.
To use a tech-related analogy: when the developers of an online game are working on a feature (a new item, new rule, new quest, whatever) or even major bug fix, they not only have to ask "will this be fun for the players?" They also have to ask "will this empower griefers? How about gold-farmers? Bot-users? Does it leave anything open to exploit?" And that's the type of question too many Americans have been neglecting to ask for a long time.
let's quote Sen. Lindsey Graham
"This was created by the Congress, and if we've made mistakes and we've gotten outside the lane then we're going to get inside the lane. But the consequence of taking these tools away from the American people through their government would be catastrophic."
Do I even need to comment?
Part of the problem is that there is no penalty to legislators and executives for violating the Constitution. This is not a mere "mistake" as the Senator portrays it. He's breaking his oath of office and the law (the Constitution being the highest US law and a set of meta-laws). By way of comparison, let's assume that I stole someone's car, and then get caught. I am not just forced to give them their car back and call it even (or "get inside the lane" as Senator Graham puts it). The legal system punishes me for the act of stealing the car in the first place. The same sort of thing should happen when a law is ruled unconstitutional -- the Representatives and Senators who voted for it, and the President who signed it, should suffer a significant punishment. When the Communications Decency Act got overturned, it should have resulted in President Clinton, Senator Exon, and 504 other politicians spending ten years in Leavenworth breaking rocks. None of this "we'll pass it and then let the Supreme Court decide if it's constitutional" crap.
Granted, you'd have to change how Supreme Court justices are appointed, otherwise presidents and Congress would have an incentive to appoint ones who would let them get away with such things.
"There!"
"What, behind the robot?"
"It is the robot!"
"You silly sod!"
"What?"
"You got us all worked up!"
"That's no ordinary robot! That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered mechanism you ever set eyes on!"
"You git! I soiled my armor, I was so scared!"
"Look, that robot's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer!"
That's cool. So Texas charges property tax on property outside of real estate, like stocks and bonds and intellectual "property"?
If you mean do they now, I don't think so. If you mean should they according to what I said before, then no. If you own a stock, you own part of a company, not part of Texas.
Wear and tear on roads is more related to the pressure the vehicle places on the road. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating
Yes, but in general, the heavier the vehicle, the more gas it burns. And the more it is driven, the more gas it burns. So, a per-unit tax on fuel is roughly proportional to weight times miles. You could certainly come up with a more precise measure, but this seems a good enough approximation to me, without having to actually monitor the vehicle's activity.
A general fund is not a problem anymore than insurance is a problem because it pools risks from many, and that many pay for the few.
Except that your car insurance is separate from your health insurance, both of which are separate from your home insurance, etc. And for each one, the amount you have to pay is based on the probable amount that you will receive. That is how I am saying taxes vs. government spending should work. If you have a more expensive car, you pay higher car insurance rates, and if you have more property attracting thieves, your contribution to police funding should be higher. But just because you make more money doesn't mean you should be made to pay for, say, a public pool which you may never use. That's what entrance fees are for.
OK...so for those working a minimum wage job trying to support a family, who own no property in Texas, you're fine with them not having to pay tax? Or are you going to call them freeloaders? or part of the 47%? Or maybe things aren't so black-and-white?
I'm fine with them not having to pay a direct tax for those services that are funded by the property tax. First, they will be paying it indirectly via the rent they pay to their landlord, just like they indirectly pay gas tax on items they buy that have been trucked to the store. Second, I would not propose having everything paid this way, just those services whose cost is (roughly) proportional to the value/size of your property -- police protection, for instance, since thieves obviously would rather rob rich people than poor people. The aforementioned gas tax is a better way to pay for roads, since (until electric cars become more popular) the amount of gas you burn is roughly proportional to how much wear and tear you inflict on the roads. That assumes that the gas tax goes only for the roads and doesn't, as it usually is now, get put into the general fund. That general fund is one of the basic problems, because it muddles the connection between what you pay and what you take.
BTW the low tax Texas is myth just look how much we pay property tax!
Well, as taxes go, property taxes come closer than most others to having the tax burden be proportional to how much it costs the government to provide services to you. I have moral problems with taxes per se, but if we have to have them, then having the amount of money you have to pay to Texas be proportional to how much you own of Texas is much better than an income tax or a sales tax.
"Expelling a projectile with enough force to penetrate a human being to the depth of 17 centimeters"
I hate to point this out, but my *cock* does that....and talk about unforeseen consequences.....Hope it's not the next thing they want to make illegal.
Only if you equip it with a high-capacity magazine, or modify it to fire more than one shot per pull.
In a bit of convenient timing, found this news story via Instapundit a few minutes ago, about medical use of a 3-D printer saving a baby suffering from a rare lung ailment.
With hopes dimming that Kaiba would survive, doctors tried the medical equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass. Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba’s blocked airway.
What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.
Here's hoping that the competition helps stuff like this.
I really, really want to be for this. Not because I have anything against 3D-printed guns, I'm all for those, but because some of the things on their list are good ideas and make sense. Some of the other stuff is pure nonsense, however.
"Low-cost medical devices." Excellent idea. "Tools to help people out of poverty." Also excellent. Lots of potential in both of these to improve, and in many cases save, people's lives.
But then we get to "Designs that can reduce racial conflict." Err, what? Someone is waaay overestimating how effective their "Coexist" bumper sticker is. It would be nice if 3D printers could produce some sort of object for people to brandish at racists like crucifixes at vampires, but it's not going to happen. "Tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure." Look, I'm for reducing conflict and increasing safety and security, too, but if an object to do that hasn't been created using more-mundane fabrication methods, a 3D printer won't be able to make it, either -- and there aren't any such objects, unless (like me and apparently unlike the folks sponsoring this) you think that being armed makes you more secure.
This is being run by Michigan Tech's Department of of Material Science and Engineering, but it looks like someone from one of the squishy majors snuck in and added items to the list. I hope there are a lot medical and tool ideas submitted (pity they don't have a way to donate money to increase the prize), but I really wish they hadn't included the silly, groan-inducing stuff.
You might not think of a janitor, truck driver, factory worker, or McDonalds worker as particularly intelligent.
I did not mean to imply that opinion at all. I find that most people are more intelligent that they're given credit for -- especially more than we techies tend to give them. Hence the underlying "what will these morons do once the robots take their jobs?" tone in the discussion.
What happens when computer image processing reaches the point where the average blue-collar worker has NO talents that a robot cannot do for cheaper?
Those workers (and more importantly, the next generation of them, since this is 30 years down the line by the article's assumptions) will need to learn new skills, just like the former farm workers and their successors did. The average farm worker in 1870 didn't know how to repair machinery or type, either.
Humans have many extra costs - housing, transportation, food, bathrooms, breaks, social life, vacations, unpredictable emotions and behavior - that robots do not. Will fuzzy traits like "flexibility" be enough to compensate for all these?
Point taken, but that's what I meant by "things we haven't thought of yet." The fuzzy traits won't be enough to compensate in the cases of jobs that don't utilize those traits, but since those traits are valuable, use will be made of them, and many of the uses are things that won't occur to us now.
You or I may not find them useful, but the fact that someone is paying people to do those things indicates that they find them useful. And which would you rather do, create commercials or shovel fertilizer? Personally I'd rather deal with the figurative BS than the literal kind.
Point taken about the article's vagueness, though they did say “if not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.”
And to reiterate, I'm not saying this transition would be painless, or that it wouldn't involve major societal displacements and other changes. Going back to the agriculture example, that involved a large portion of the population moving from the countryside into the cities. Another possible basis for comparison is the collapse of the communism in Eastern Europe and the elimination, restructuring, or repurposing of all of the inefficient state-run factories, except that the automation scenario would be less sudden (the article is talking about 2045).
Back the late 1800s, agricultural work required about 3/4 of the US's population. Now it's about 3%. If, back then, you'd asked "what would happen if 96% of the farming jobs vanished?", you'd probably have gotten predictions of doom similar to this one. But what actually happened was that those people (or their descendants, rather, since this change didn't happen overnight) got employed doing other things, most of which people in the late 1800s couldn't have anticipated. The same thing will happen here. Human intelligence, creativity, and flexibility are valuable, and valuable stuff tends not to sit idle. People figure out something to do with it. There are temporary displacements and adjustments, but overall, automation doesn't idle people, it frees them up to do new things.
Note that I'm not talking about a situation where the machines are actually creatively intelligent, in contrast with something like Deep Blue being programmed ahead of time to do a highly-specific task. If we get to that point, all bets are off, but then we're venturing into singularity territory at that point, anyway.