I am curious about the link shortening. I didn't want to trust it, in case it was a goatse (or whatever the new goatse is), because I couldn't look at the url.
I'm assuming that we can't solve the problem with food production alone because people will continue to breed until something changes. There are plenty of ways that such a change may occur, and I won't rule out the possibility that a large-scale effort to bring resources to a country will work, but only if it is on such a large scale that it can fundamentally change the regions. It sounds like I am talking about attempts to place a bandaid on a wound, while you are talking about the kind of medical care they gave the "6 million dollar man".
And, yes, I am wrong, or short-sighted, in that I assume that we will never do it on a scale large enough to work, but I also feel that there are alternative strategies that should be coupled with such an attempt.
You are proposing that gold be treated like currency. This is not the barter system. It is not me and you trading gold because we need gold. This is us using gold as a placeholder to represent labor, which gives it additional usefulness that has nothing to do with the utility of the metal. It will be worth something because people think it's worth something...Just like cash.
I didn't bother reading your link because of the way slashdot has pretty much made it impossible to read hyperlinks on the comments.pl page, but my point is that either we are going back to the barter system, in which we only trade for the things we need (and I don't need gold), or we settle on one specific something to act as currency, and we face all the same problems that we face with paper currency. I will grant you that inflation will be limited by how much gold we can mine, but it will increase in value if it becomes the de facto currency.
And as for the fed, I would rather trust them to make a rational economic policy than to trust private enterprise (which is what would happen if we went to a gold-based economy). They would have no reason not to extract as much as possible, as quickly as possible. And if that means rapid inflation, it doesn't matter because all the new money will be theirs.
As for the fed stealing for their kings, aren't those with wealth most hurt by inflation? It means that the money your great grandfather made 80 years ago isn't worth as much as the money you made today, which means that the rich still have to work for a living, if they want to stay rich.
- how is that physically possible, when the very definition of fiat currency is currency that only has any value due to its legal status, given to it and enforced by a government?
That makes no sense, gold does not need to be pronounced to be money, it is money, that's the way I treat it, thus it is money regardless of what any government thinks or says.
If we went to a gold standard, it would experience the same problems as fiat currency. It may not be purely fiat. It is a hybrid, in that the gold can be used in electronics and jewelry, but we would still be giving it additional value by treating it exactly the same as we do fiat currency. This additional value is just as illusory as the value of a dollar bill. But, yes, I should have said "hybrid" system, because it really is just a mix between the barter system and the fiat system.
Considering how dangerous and unethical the process of mining for gold currently is, I couldn't imagine creating a system where companies are encouraged to ramp up production simply because we would rather trust in the value of shiny metal than the value of government-backed currency.
- you are worried about 'ramping up' gold production for inflation reasons,
No, actually, I am worried about the number of resources we would waste trying to extract every last gram of gold from the ground, and the number of people who would devote their lives to mining this gold*, and possibly get killed in the process.
* You can argue about whether their lives would have been better or worse for them, being exploited for a mineral that we really don't need, or simply being ignored, but it is still a risky undertaking, when we don't need the product.
but you would rather stay with fiat, which we know can be printed until they run out of trees, and then they would just add more zeros to a computer stored bank account?
Well, nice to know the level of rationality on this site.
You seem to be assuming that the fed is out to get you. Why is it "rational" to have the value of currency determined by how much shiny can be dug up, to have equipment and people dedicated to something that produces no value (digging up gold we don't need), but irrational to simply have a policy determined by someone who is an expert on the economy?
So, basically you think the only solutions for a problem that counts is one that people devloped for the express purpose of solving the problem, as opposed to a solution that was developed for other reasons that people adopted because it solved another problem?
Did people adopt automobiles because it solved the "excessive horse manure" problem? Or was that just an added bonus? Had they been given a choice between two technologies that were identical in every way, except that one dealt with the issue, and the other was cheaper, which one would they have chosen? I don't count it if the only reason they made the right choice is because the wrong choice was not an option.
Please point out a major problem that was effectively dealt with by government or industry plan that funded R&D to come up with a solution to the problem.
The government had solved the problem of coming up with an interstate highway system, creating the internet, providing electricity to areas where it was not profitable, and passing regulations to prevent further depletion of the hole in the ozone layer. They may not have hired "R&D" for those purposes, but that isn't the standard. The standard is "do they make sufficient effort". In the case of your manure analogy, they literally did nothing. They passed no regulations. They didn't hire people to come up with a better way. They just rolled the dice. Why should I give them credit for sticking their heads in the sand?
As for private industry, it isn't their job to think about the long-term implications of their actions with regard to society as a whole, and they have managed to avoid doing so fairly consistently.
Then gold would become a fiat currency. There have been situations in the past where countries have done exactly the same thing as "printing money" by mining for more metals than they needed.
The issue is that we need an abstract way of representing goods. Period. The barter system does not work. The fiat system isn't perfect. Gold is simply a hybrid between the two, in which a large indicator of our economic health is inseparably tied in with the demand for jewelry and electronics.
Considering how dangerous and unethical the process of mining for gold currently is, I couldn't imagine creating a system where companies are encouraged to ramp up production simply because we would rather trust in the value of shiny metal than the value of government-backed currency.
Can you point out *any* low incidence, high impact risks that Humanity has dealt with effectively?
Excessive horse manure. In the late 19th century, there was much discussion about how cities in America and Western Europe would be overwhelmed by the amount of horse manure being generated by the increasing commerce going on. There was a significant amount of talk that economic growth would have to stop because of reaching the limit of horse manure that could be dealt with.
Did we effectively deal with it*? Or did we just luck out and find a better technology that happened to solve this problem?
I am not a historian, so if there is an example in which either government or industry set out a plan to effectively deal with the issue by funding automobile R&D as their own version of "green energy", then so be it. But otherwise, your argument is really just an example of how we "dealt with" a risk by ignoring it, and were saved only by a lucky coincidence.
* For the sake of argument, I will trust your characterization of the scenario and assume hypothetically that horse manure was a serious environmental threat.
We compartmentalize. We don't care how our shoes are made, or how the guy two levels down the social ladder gets things done, as long as they get done. We are arguing about whether to believe evidence that the environment may change radically, and whether to prepare for that if and when it happens. Forget planning. It hurts the bottom line, and we are never looking past the current fiscal year.
The only people tasked with looking at the big picture are politicians, and they are beholden to campaign contributors who are locked into the aforementioned "fiscal year" mentality. The end result; big claims about what will get done in ten years, followed by a ten year negotiation over how much of that originally intended progress, if any, should actually take effect.
We have gotten very selective about where our concerns lie. It's a stupid plan, and I'll leave it up to you whether that makes us stupid.
As P. J. O'Rourke once pointed out that (at the time of writing), Freemont, CA has the same population density as Bangladesh, yet NGO's aren't sending swarms of people there to try and convince the residents to stop having families.
Fretting about overpopulation is just the politically correct way to be racist. Far too many of you; not enough of me.
Or maybe people don't worry about Freemont CA because most of the people in Freemont CA are not starving and can care for their children. But, for the record, I DO get annoyed by people (American or otherwise) who have several children because "makin babies is a miracle". I just don't worry about how close their neighbor lives.
So your racism claim (or PJ O'rourke's) is just another example of someone saying "that guy doesn't agree with me. Let's call him a racist or a Nazi!"
In fact, even in the story, just because someone cried wolf didn't mean the wolf wasn't there. It just meant people ignored him when the wolf DID appear... leading to disaster.
I wish I had mod points for that. Maybe there should be a story about the people who ignored warnings because it became too comforting to assume that every alarm is a false one.
e.g. will we start letting the excess die in a gutter? The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no. I don't know of a third answer (that doesn't boil down to one or the other in practical terms).
You asked a yes or no question, so it makes sense that yes and no are the only two options. The "socialism" question should be "how could we handle the problem"? We could improve economic stability in countries where warlords take what they want. It doesn't currently make sense to invest time and money in something that will probably just get stolen from you, so those countries have farmland but produce very few crops.
We can't solve the problem by throwing food at poor people, period. It cannot be done and will never work. But that doesn't mean we can't try. It, alone, cannot solve the problem, but it does not require us to oppose the catholic church, police the world, or start down a slippery slope of imperialism, so that's the plan we're going with.
I'm curious what biases this would present...If two diseases have similar symptoms, will Watson get more hits and suggest the one with the best "awareness" and funding over the one that most fits the symptoms, or the one that affects the largest percent of patients? I.E., if breast cancer research is more frequently studied*, then will Watson be more likely to suggest "breast cancer" than diseases that better fit the symptoms?
* (and I don't know if it is. Just take it as a hypothetical)
If you ever use this service, you may want to consider looking at the email, marking it unread if you don't have time for it, and only allowing the email to be marked "read" while you are working on it.
But it isn't intrinsically different. The difference is only a minor detail, and it would be absurd to think that we allow the definition of every word to change over time (as has the definition of marriage), but when the civil rights of a traditionally despised minority are involved, the definition must stand exactly as it is.
I think a better analogy would be if Henry Ford had said
Automobiles must be black. I invented them and 'black' is part of the definition. So, therefore, it should be illegal for anybody to make an automobile of any other color.
Now, if you want to propose a four-wheeled self propelled transport that happens to be red, then that is a different issue, and I may fight you on the legality of that too, but dammit, it cannot be called an automobile because black is part of the definition.
Of course, considering that he was a anti-semite, it might have been a better analogy if he had defined cars to be "vehicles Jews can't purchase" and argued that you can change the color, the number of wheels, etc, but "Christians only" is a key part of the definition that cannot and should not change, because words have meaning, dammit!
the POINT that he was announcing the approach of the British "to take away privately-owned guns" is entirely reasonable.
I found it fascinating that she was actually right in essence but so far off and/or vague in facts and so tongue tied that she managed to maker herself sound like an idiot.
However, history has shown quite clearly that sounding like an idiot is, at worst, only a minor setback in a Presidential campaign.
She is an idiot savant. This is in many ways like real-time Nostradamus. If you change a few letters, ignore some contradictions, and squint just the right way then she predicted something she had no way of knowing; history!
Here's her quote: "he who warned the British that they weren't gonna be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and, making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we're gonna be secure and we were gonna be free."
We can positively say that Palin has an awful and twisted way of telling the story... but she's definitely not completely wrong, and certainly not 100% right... perhaps she's just terrible at telling stories.
This is about as accurate as claiming that Ronald Reagan was famous for developing Alzheimer's Syndrome in Germany after telling Gorbachev to cut taxes.
So she says people are free to carry guns, that words should be well defined and mean what they are meant to mean, and that murder is wrong. Seems like a pretty good consistent stance to me.
Ok. So, can the gays have gmarriage? It's the same thing in every way, except spelling, pronunciation, and that it doesn't have this man-woman requirement.
Gotta take that a step further... iP[[ad/od]/hone]s
At that point, shouldn't it just be i* ? With the iCloud, and who knows what else, the only thing we know for sure is that they will soon be trying to trademark "begins with the letter i".
I suppose revolutionaries can often seem childish from those benefiting from the status quo.
Are these people doing the exact same things as Che Guevara, George Washington, or Mohandas Gandhi, just to name a few examples? No, not the exact same things. Most probably aren't cut out for those kinds of life. So they fight where they know they can do best.
So, if someone had read an article in a newspaper that they didn't like, and responded by spray painting graffiti on the wall of the building, would you consider that to be "revolutionary"?
When we eventually fuse computers with our brains this will be a serious issue.
So, we may one day see the day when a laws is passed requiring us to disable our eidetic memory chip when reading, watching movies, or enjoying any copyrighted work? I can almost see that happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Ms Pac-Man would be a lot easier. The burqa reduces the whole thing to a dark featureless circle that's moving around.
Wouldn't she looks like one of the ghosts?
Except the ghosts would all have the remnants of detonated bombs strapped to their chests.
I am curious about the link shortening. I didn't want to trust it, in case it was a goatse (or whatever the new goatse is), because I couldn't look at the url.
I'm assuming that we can't solve the problem with food production alone because people will continue to breed until something changes. There are plenty of ways that such a change may occur, and I won't rule out the possibility that a large-scale effort to bring resources to a country will work, but only if it is on such a large scale that it can fundamentally change the regions. It sounds like I am talking about attempts to place a bandaid on a wound, while you are talking about the kind of medical care they gave the "6 million dollar man".
And, yes, I am wrong, or short-sighted, in that I assume that we will never do it on a scale large enough to work, but I also feel that there are alternative strategies that should be coupled with such an attempt.
You are proposing that gold be treated like currency. This is not the barter system. It is not me and you trading gold because we need gold. This is us using gold as a placeholder to represent labor, which gives it additional usefulness that has nothing to do with the utility of the metal. It will be worth something because people think it's worth something...Just like cash.
I didn't bother reading your link because of the way slashdot has pretty much made it impossible to read hyperlinks on the comments.pl page, but my point is that either we are going back to the barter system, in which we only trade for the things we need (and I don't need gold), or we settle on one specific something to act as currency, and we face all the same problems that we face with paper currency. I will grant you that inflation will be limited by how much gold we can mine, but it will increase in value if it becomes the de facto currency.
And as for the fed, I would rather trust them to make a rational economic policy than to trust private enterprise (which is what would happen if we went to a gold-based economy). They would have no reason not to extract as much as possible, as quickly as possible. And if that means rapid inflation, it doesn't matter because all the new money will be theirs.
As for the fed stealing for their kings, aren't those with wealth most hurt by inflation? It means that the money your great grandfather made 80 years ago isn't worth as much as the money you made today, which means that the rich still have to work for a living, if they want to stay rich.
Wingdings or Comicsans I imagine.
Printed by wingdings, in comic sans.
Then gold would become a fiat currency.
- how is that physically possible, when the very definition of fiat currency is currency that only has any value due to its legal status, given to it and enforced by a government?
That makes no sense, gold does not need to be pronounced to be money, it is money, that's the way I treat it, thus it is money regardless of what any government thinks or says.
If we went to a gold standard, it would experience the same problems as fiat currency. It may not be purely fiat. It is a hybrid, in that the gold can be used in electronics and jewelry, but we would still be giving it additional value by treating it exactly the same as we do fiat currency. This additional value is just as illusory as the value of a dollar bill. But, yes, I should have said "hybrid" system, because it really is just a mix between the barter system and the fiat system.
Considering how dangerous and unethical the process of mining for gold currently is, I couldn't imagine creating a system where companies are encouraged to ramp up production simply because we would rather trust in the value of shiny metal than the value of government-backed currency.
- you are worried about 'ramping up' gold production for inflation reasons,
No, actually, I am worried about the number of resources we would waste trying to extract every last gram of gold from the ground, and the number of people who would devote their lives to mining this gold*, and possibly get killed in the process.
* You can argue about whether their lives would have been better or worse for them, being exploited for a mineral that we really don't need, or simply being ignored, but it is still a risky undertaking, when we don't need the product.
but you would rather stay with fiat, which we know can be printed until they run out of trees, and then they would just add more zeros to a computer stored bank account?
Well, nice to know the level of rationality on this site.
You seem to be assuming that the fed is out to get you. Why is it "rational" to have the value of currency determined by how much shiny can be dug up, to have equipment and people dedicated to something that produces no value (digging up gold we don't need), but irrational to simply have a policy determined by someone who is an expert on the economy?
So, basically you think the only solutions for a problem that counts is one that people devloped for the express purpose of solving the problem, as opposed to a solution that was developed for other reasons that people adopted because it solved another problem?
Did people adopt automobiles because it solved the "excessive horse manure" problem? Or was that just an added bonus? Had they been given a choice between two technologies that were identical in every way, except that one dealt with the issue, and the other was cheaper, which one would they have chosen? I don't count it if the only reason they made the right choice is because the wrong choice was not an option.
Please point out a major problem that was effectively dealt with by government or industry plan that funded R&D to come up with a solution to the problem.
The government had solved the problem of coming up with an interstate highway system, creating the internet, providing electricity to areas where it was not profitable, and passing regulations to prevent further depletion of the hole in the ozone layer. They may not have hired "R&D" for those purposes, but that isn't the standard. The standard is "do they make sufficient effort". In the case of your manure analogy, they literally did nothing. They passed no regulations. They didn't hire people to come up with a better way. They just rolled the dice. Why should I give them credit for sticking their heads in the sand?
As for private industry, it isn't their job to think about the long-term implications of their actions with regard to society as a whole, and they have managed to avoid doing so fairly consistently.
Then gold would become a fiat currency. There have been situations in the past where countries have done exactly the same thing as "printing money" by mining for more metals than they needed.
The issue is that we need an abstract way of representing goods. Period. The barter system does not work. The fiat system isn't perfect. Gold is simply a hybrid between the two, in which a large indicator of our economic health is inseparably tied in with the demand for jewelry and electronics.
Considering how dangerous and unethical the process of mining for gold currently is, I couldn't imagine creating a system where companies are encouraged to ramp up production simply because we would rather trust in the value of shiny metal than the value of government-backed currency.
Can you point out *any* low incidence, high impact risks that Humanity has dealt with effectively?
Excessive horse manure. In the late 19th century, there was much discussion about how cities in America and Western Europe would be overwhelmed by the amount of horse manure being generated by the increasing commerce going on. There was a significant amount of talk that economic growth would have to stop because of reaching the limit of horse manure that could be dealt with.
Did we effectively deal with it*? Or did we just luck out and find a better technology that happened to solve this problem?
I am not a historian, so if there is an example in which either government or industry set out a plan to effectively deal with the issue by funding automobile R&D as their own version of "green energy", then so be it. But otherwise, your argument is really just an example of how we "dealt with" a risk by ignoring it, and were saved only by a lucky coincidence.
* For the sake of argument, I will trust your characterization of the scenario and assume hypothetically that horse manure was a serious environmental threat.
We compartmentalize. We don't care how our shoes are made, or how the guy two levels down the social ladder gets things done, as long as they get done. We are arguing about whether to believe evidence that the environment may change radically, and whether to prepare for that if and when it happens. Forget planning. It hurts the bottom line, and we are never looking past the current fiscal year.
The only people tasked with looking at the big picture are politicians, and they are beholden to campaign contributors who are locked into the aforementioned "fiscal year" mentality. The end result; big claims about what will get done in ten years, followed by a ten year negotiation over how much of that originally intended progress, if any, should actually take effect.
We have gotten very selective about where our concerns lie. It's a stupid plan, and I'll leave it up to you whether that makes us stupid.
As P. J. O'Rourke once pointed out that (at the time of writing), Freemont, CA has the same population density as Bangladesh, yet NGO's aren't sending swarms of people there to try and convince the residents to stop having families.
Fretting about overpopulation is just the politically correct way to be racist. Far too many of you; not enough of me.
Or maybe people don't worry about Freemont CA because most of the people in Freemont CA are not starving and can care for their children. But, for the record, I DO get annoyed by people (American or otherwise) who have several children because "makin babies is a miracle". I just don't worry about how close their neighbor lives.
So your racism claim (or PJ O'rourke's) is just another example of someone saying "that guy doesn't agree with me. Let's call him a racist or a Nazi!"
In fact, even in the story, just because someone cried wolf didn't mean the wolf wasn't there. It just meant people ignored him when the wolf DID appear... leading to disaster.
I wish I had mod points for that. Maybe there should be a story about the people who ignored warnings because it became too comforting to assume that every alarm is a false one.
e.g. will we start letting the excess die in a gutter? The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no. I don't know of a third answer (that doesn't boil down to one or the other in practical terms).
You asked a yes or no question, so it makes sense that yes and no are the only two options. The "socialism" question should be "how could we handle the problem"? We could improve economic stability in countries where warlords take what they want. It doesn't currently make sense to invest time and money in something that will probably just get stolen from you, so those countries have farmland but produce very few crops.
Or we could distribute condoms and tell the third world "no, this isn't an evil conspiracy to give you aids."
We can't solve the problem by throwing food at poor people, period. It cannot be done and will never work. But that doesn't mean we can't try. It, alone, cannot solve the problem, but it does not require us to oppose the catholic church, police the world, or start down a slippery slope of imperialism, so that's the plan we're going with.
From TFA, it seems like he is patenting the business model used to exploit such powers almost as much as the powers itself.
Of course, maybe I am misunderstanding it. The mix of law, religion, business, and plain-old-fashioned crazy is giving this a cthulu-like quality.
I'm curious what biases this would present...If two diseases have similar symptoms, will Watson get more hits and suggest the one with the best "awareness" and funding over the one that most fits the symptoms, or the one that affects the largest percent of patients? I.E., if breast cancer research is more frequently studied*, then will Watson be more likely to suggest "breast cancer" than diseases that better fit the symptoms?
* (and I don't know if it is. Just take it as a hypothetical)
If you ever use this service, you may want to consider looking at the email, marking it unread if you don't have time for it, and only allowing the email to be marked "read" while you are working on it.
But it isn't intrinsically different. The difference is only a minor detail, and it would be absurd to think that we allow the definition of every word to change over time (as has the definition of marriage), but when the civil rights of a traditionally despised minority are involved, the definition must stand exactly as it is.
I think a better analogy would be if Henry Ford had said
Automobiles must be black. I invented them and 'black' is part of the definition. So, therefore, it should be illegal for anybody to make an automobile of any other color.
Now, if you want to propose a four-wheeled self propelled transport that happens to be red, then that is a different issue, and I may fight you on the legality of that too, but dammit, it cannot be called an automobile because black is part of the definition.
Of course, considering that he was a anti-semite, it might have been a better analogy if he had defined cars to be "vehicles Jews can't purchase" and argued that you can change the color, the number of wheels, etc, but "Christians only" is a key part of the definition that cannot and should not change, because words have meaning, dammit!
the POINT that he was announcing the approach of the British "to take away privately-owned guns" is entirely reasonable.
I found it fascinating that she was actually right in essence but so far off and/or vague in facts and so tongue tied that she managed to maker herself sound like an idiot.
However, history has shown quite clearly that sounding like an idiot is, at worst, only a minor setback in a Presidential campaign.
She is an idiot savant. This is in many ways like real-time Nostradamus. If you change a few letters, ignore some contradictions, and squint just the right way then she predicted something she had no way of knowing; history!
Why do you think he has E.D.?
Best comment all day! Thank you sir.
Here's her quote:
"he who warned the British that they weren't gonna be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and, making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we're gonna be secure and we were gonna be free."
We can positively say that Palin has an awful and twisted way of telling the story... but she's definitely not completely wrong, and certainly not 100% right... perhaps she's just terrible at telling stories.
This is about as accurate as claiming that Ronald Reagan was famous for developing Alzheimer's Syndrome in Germany after telling Gorbachev to cut taxes.
So she says people are free to carry guns, that words should be well defined and mean what they are meant to mean, and that murder is wrong. Seems like a pretty good consistent stance to me.
Ok. So, can the gays have gmarriage? It's the same thing in every way, except spelling, pronunciation, and that it doesn't have this man-woman requirement.
Gotta take that a step further...
iP[[ad/od]/hone]s
At that point, shouldn't it just be i* ? With the iCloud, and who knows what else, the only thing we know for sure is that they will soon be trying to trademark "begins with the letter i".
childish antics
I suppose revolutionaries can often seem childish from those benefiting from the status quo.
Are these people doing the exact same things as Che Guevara, George Washington, or Mohandas Gandhi, just to name a few examples? No, not the exact same things. Most probably aren't cut out for those kinds of life. So they fight where they know they can do best.
So, if someone had read an article in a newspaper that they didn't like, and responded by spray painting graffiti on the wall of the building, would you consider that to be "revolutionary"?
Fox? They do a good enough job of defecating themselves.
FTFY
I thought that was just Glenn Beck..
When we eventually fuse computers with our brains this will be a serious issue.
So, we may one day see the day when a laws is passed requiring us to disable our eidetic memory chip when reading, watching movies, or enjoying any copyrighted work? I can almost see that happening.