I doubt it. Sounds like the senate has narrowly approved the agency's deputy administrator, Andrew Wheeler, to become the acting head. From what I can find he's a long time fossil-energy lobbyist that's completely on board with the current trajectory, but has a lot more political savvy than Pruitt.
Have you ever done any caving? Squeezing through tight passages, wondering if you're going to get stuck is just part of the fun. If those passages are underwater however, it becomes a *much* bigger challenge.
And if you also don't know how to swim, much less use SCUBA gear, then you've got a real problem on your hands. Best case scenario is probably running a rope the entire length of the underwater tunnel, and escort them out one at a time by a pair of professional cavers carrying their SCUBA gear in front of them while another team talks the kids through it via a waterproof earpiece to prevent panic.
On the plus side - being trapped in a flooded cave should give them plenty of time to practice basic diving skills in preparation.
On the negative side - if someone does panic and get firmly stuck, I wouldn't want to be the caver that has to tear apart some kid's body so that the rest can get through.
Perhaps I will. Does it address how to manage assholes seeking to game the system? Without that any such discussion is pure fantasy.
Wealth taxes seem like they may have some of the answer - they perform the same investment-promoting function as managed inflation, without burdening the lower classes to nearly the same degree. Eliminating inflation also makes it much more difficult for businesses to hide the fact that they're continuously cutting their employee's pay.
Another bit would be to tax capital gains at the same rate as other income - it's hard to even pretend to have a fair system when the investor class is paying substantially lower taxes than the working class.
When the wealthy grow their wealth by exercising their financial power to implicitly or explicitly support a system dedicated to transferring wealth upwards - they are active contributors to poverty. That is very much the case in the U.S., where real wages have been stagnant or declining for the lower 90% of the population for decades, while virtually all new wealth goes to the top 10%.
Oh, and I ascribe only those attributes to"the wealthy that are clearly visible from their own actions. There are obviously individuals in any group whom such a stereotype unjustly tarnishes, but as a group the wealthy have shown time and again throughout history that they are the enemy of the people.
Honestly, I have no interest in any piece of fluff espousing capitalism as an ideal end goal. The entire concept of capitalism is that capital is the ultimate measure of value, which means that so long as inheritance exists, unrestrained capitalism can only end in a neo-aristocracy with minimal social mobility. The only chance for any other outcome would be a political system that explicitly and completely rejects any influence of money on politics - which I don't see how is possible.
Capitalism has much to offer, but only in counterpoint to something like communism, which enshrines the economic value of the common man. Either extreme on it's own is a recipe for disaster.
I don't know. I'm fairly certain that's beyond the skill set of the vast majority of the population though, so it's irrelevant except to us tech geeks.
I don't believe only the wealthy would be interested - but that only the wealthy would be able to afford a private police force sufficiently dedicated to their job to do any good.
Yeah, but librarians are usually pretty adamant about defending your privacy. Something about generally being well-read individuals with an awareness of their traditional role as guardians of the public's access to knowledge against the thought police.
So yeah, that hot librarian may know what you read, but they'll probably put up a huge fight to protect that information from those who would abuse it. More than a few libraries have chosen to destroy their records rather than allow government authorities to access them.
They're getting sneaky though - I've seen TVs that require a wifi connection to sync with the remote control. Not clear on whether it was actually a wifi remote, or just a hoop to make consumers jump through to get that wifi connection established in the first place, but given the relative costs of IR versus wifi, it's really hard to interpret that as anything but a way to coerce cooperation with surveillance. Wouldn't be so bad if you could use the TV without the remote, but there's usually a whole lot of features not accessible except via remote.
>But someone has to categorize and classify all the other TV programs so that they can matched.
Why? Other than for completely new showsit's probably far more effective to simply say "you watch shows X, Y, and Z - a lot of other other people who watch those shows also watch W and R, you might like them too" Such pattern recognition tends to find a lot of non-obvious connections that would be overlooked by human classification, especially as it gets more sophisticated.
Plus, it's fairly cheap to do, so they can pocket more of the profit made from spying on consumers. And lets not assume they're only spying on your TV-related habits. They're a surveillance device connected to your home network - they can also monitor all your web-browsing activity (by site if not by specific content, with https becoming more ubiquitous), and identify every piece of networked hardware you own via MAC address
Of course the police would still exist - they would simply be private police charged only with protecting and pursing the interests of their wealthy employers. Private property beyond what you can carry exists only with the threat of violence, and the wealthy aren't about to surrender their wealth.
Hey I freely admit that my leading "if" was quite dubious. And certainly after the money train is rolling in it's going to be hard to convince anyone to change things. All the more reason for a supposedly free and democratic society to avoid setting the stage for such abuse right from the beginning - whether by having real penalties for abuse that keep the institutional incentives balanced, or by avoiding the whole can of worms altogether.
No, that's the collateral, but generally speaking banks don't want to deal with the headache of actually owning the property, which is why foreclosures are generally sold at a steep discount They're not going to lend you more than they think you'll repay, unless outside of dishonest bankers gaming the system.
Indeed - make it easy for the people who don't actually want to be driving to be chauffeured by competent, predictable robots, and traffic would be far easier to navigate. Unless of course the ease of being chauffeured significantly increased the amount of time people spent traveling, and thus the number of cars on the road.
Indeed. It seems to me that if you are going to have such a system, and don't actually want to create a surveillance state or other abusive behavior, care should be taken to ensure the incentives are balanced against abuse. Such as - if you send in a false report, or actively incite lawbreaking, then *you* pay the same penalty that would have been levied against a real offender.
And those maniacs - sounds like the sort of behavior that should get reported by responsible drivers, doesn't it? Most of the behaviors you described are probably traffic violations in their own right.
It should be really easy to spot patterns - if a person reports a lot of crimes, and they're usually false claims, then the default assumption should be that they're the guilty party rather than their target. Similarly, if a person gets a lot of reports against them, and they're usually valid, then the new report is probably valid.
In a big, benevolent system you could even use such patterns to easily focus on the worst offenders - don't prosecute each report unless it's clearly serious, just have an officer review it and file it as probably valid, false, or reasonably contested. Reckless drivers will rapidly build up a lot of valid reports against them, as will reckless reporters - prosecute those, and just ignore the occasional reports as the inevitable imperfection of humanity.
They have a point though - you don't need everyone to be out to get you for it to be a problem, just plenty of asshats willing to cause legal-system trouble for people at the touch of a button. (damned kids, foreigners, etc.)
If such a thing is done, it seems to me there should be real penalties for those abusing the system as well. Ideally something that gives the legal system incentive to see justice done and punish abuse. Perhaps something like - if you falsely report a traffic crime, then *you* pay the penalty that would have been imposed on a guilty offender. Hopefully with a gray area for poor judgement by either party, where nobody gets penalized.
We need only look at DMCA take-down notices to see how easily a community-initiated legal process without real penalties for false reports can be abused.
Perhaps it's just me, or how the signs are used where I've been, but "yield" generally conveys an image of "prepare to merge with traffic" - pay attention, be ready to stop if necessary, but don't necessarily slow down significantly. Most of the problem stop signs I see are used in places where there's no reason for a full stop, but a significant slow down really is called for.
Yes it does decay, but that decay is SLOW. Nuclear fuel is NOT appreciably radioactive. The most common nuclear fuels are Uranium-235, with a half-life of 704 million years, and Plutonium-239, with a half life of 24 thousand years.
Leave a bunch of P-239 scattered around for 1000 years and the fraction of fuel remaining will be (1/2)^(1000/24000) = 0.972. So you'll lose less than 3% of your fuel to radioactive decay in a thousand years. Or less than 0.03% in a decade.
If you pack your fuel closely then you get nuclear chain reactions which accelerate the process, but the solution is simple - don't pack the fuel so closely. Maybe that means putting enough space between fuel pellets, or maybe it requires making directly useless fuel-storage bricks by mixing the fuel with a lot of inert material that can be easily separated later when you're ready to produce fuel pellets. Either way, it's not a big deal.
And of course "easy access to contraception" also means there has to be no serious cultural stigma against using it - one of those things that puts esp. Catholicism on the wrong side of solving the problem.
As I recall over half the food produced on the planet gets thrown away - we have plenty of food for everyone, there's just no profitable way to get it to the people who are going hungry. A large part of that is because a lot of them have incomes well below a dollar a day, at which point involving any developed-world economic activity costs more than can possibly be made. Heck, we often help make the problem worse by sending in free food aid, destroying local markets for locally grown food, and pushing farmers into growing more profitable crops for export rather than to food to feed their neighbors - turning a short-term crisis into a quasi-permanent shortage.
Meanwhile, Amazon's "free" shipping is nothing of the kind - you pay for shipping regardless. The only question is whether you pay the cost separately, or have it included in the price of the goods you are buying.
I like a nice unobtrusive, easy-to-ignore default ring tone for just that reason - if you're not in my contact list, or I just didn't decide you're worth interrupting my life for, I'll know there's a call coming in, and unless I'm bored you can leave a message if it's important. Friends and family get a different ring tone, since the odds are good that I'd like to talk to them. And my boss and office manager get their own, since they're unlikely to call unless it's important (not necessarily to me, but they pay for the privilege of my attention).
Heck, plenty of scientists today are still saying the world can't support the existing ~seven billion people, even with modern tech. It's not a matter of whether we can feed people today, but whether we can continue doing so indefinitely. With present practices it seems we can't. By producing food at the rate we're doing we're drawing down the ecological capital, reducing long-term productivity in exchange for immediate gains.
Artificial ecologies of course could change things - but the energy requirements will be immense for vertical ones. 1 acre of farmland on the surface receives ~4MW of solar energy. Even if you tune your artificial lighting to just the 45% of the energy spectrum used by plants you'll still need about 2MW of lighting per acre to get the same yields. So either you need nuclear power, or to cover an equivalent surface area with solar panels (assuming incredible 45% efficient solar panels). In which case the benefit of not just covering the surface with greenhouses instead becomes dubious.
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I doubt it. Sounds like the senate has narrowly approved the agency's deputy administrator, Andrew Wheeler, to become the acting head. From what I can find he's a long time fossil-energy lobbyist that's completely on board with the current trajectory, but has a lot more political savvy than Pruitt.
Have you ever done any caving? Squeezing through tight passages, wondering if you're going to get stuck is just part of the fun. If those passages are underwater however, it becomes a *much* bigger challenge.
And if you also don't know how to swim, much less use SCUBA gear, then you've got a real problem on your hands. Best case scenario is probably running a rope the entire length of the underwater tunnel, and escort them out one at a time by a pair of professional cavers carrying their SCUBA gear in front of them while another team talks the kids through it via a waterproof earpiece to prevent panic.
On the plus side - being trapped in a flooded cave should give them plenty of time to practice basic diving skills in preparation.
On the negative side - if someone does panic and get firmly stuck, I wouldn't want to be the caver that has to tear apart some kid's body so that the rest can get through.
Perhaps I will. Does it address how to manage assholes seeking to game the system? Without that any such discussion is pure fantasy.
Wealth taxes seem like they may have some of the answer - they perform the same investment-promoting function as managed inflation, without burdening the lower classes to nearly the same degree. Eliminating inflation also makes it much more difficult for businesses to hide the fact that they're continuously cutting their employee's pay.
Another bit would be to tax capital gains at the same rate as other income - it's hard to even pretend to have a fair system when the investor class is paying substantially lower taxes than the working class.
When the wealthy grow their wealth by exercising their financial power to implicitly or explicitly support a system dedicated to transferring wealth upwards - they are active contributors to poverty. That is very much the case in the U.S., where real wages have been stagnant or declining for the lower 90% of the population for decades, while virtually all new wealth goes to the top 10%.
I forget. Probably volume and channel buttons to navigate an onscreen keyboard.
You forget the de-facto First Law of Authoritarianism: Anything done by the authorities is not a crime. Unless it targets higher authorities.
Oh, and I ascribe only those attributes to"the wealthy that are clearly visible from their own actions. There are obviously individuals in any group whom such a stereotype unjustly tarnishes, but as a group the wealthy have shown time and again throughout history that they are the enemy of the people.
Honestly, I have no interest in any piece of fluff espousing capitalism as an ideal end goal. The entire concept of capitalism is that capital is the ultimate measure of value, which means that so long as inheritance exists, unrestrained capitalism can only end in a neo-aristocracy with minimal social mobility. The only chance for any other outcome would be a political system that explicitly and completely rejects any influence of money on politics - which I don't see how is possible.
Capitalism has much to offer, but only in counterpoint to something like communism, which enshrines the economic value of the common man. Either extreme on it's own is a recipe for disaster.
I don't know. I'm fairly certain that's beyond the skill set of the vast majority of the population though, so it's irrelevant except to us tech geeks.
Never heard of it.
I don't believe only the wealthy would be interested - but that only the wealthy would be able to afford a private police force sufficiently dedicated to their job to do any good.
Yeah, but librarians are usually pretty adamant about defending your privacy. Something about generally being well-read individuals with an awareness of their traditional role as guardians of the public's access to knowledge against the thought police.
So yeah, that hot librarian may know what you read, but they'll probably put up a huge fight to protect that information from those who would abuse it. More than a few libraries have chosen to destroy their records rather than allow government authorities to access them.
They're getting sneaky though - I've seen TVs that require a wifi connection to sync with the remote control. Not clear on whether it was actually a wifi remote, or just a hoop to make consumers jump through to get that wifi connection established in the first place, but given the relative costs of IR versus wifi, it's really hard to interpret that as anything but a way to coerce cooperation with surveillance. Wouldn't be so bad if you could use the TV without the remote, but there's usually a whole lot of features not accessible except via remote.
>But someone has to categorize and classify all the other TV programs so that they can matched.
Why? Other than for completely new showsit's probably far more effective to simply say "you watch shows X, Y, and Z - a lot of other other people who watch those shows also watch W and R, you might like them too" Such pattern recognition tends to find a lot of non-obvious connections that would be overlooked by human classification, especially as it gets more sophisticated.
Plus, it's fairly cheap to do, so they can pocket more of the profit made from spying on consumers. And lets not assume they're only spying on your TV-related habits. They're a surveillance device connected to your home network - they can also monitor all your web-browsing activity (by site if not by specific content, with https becoming more ubiquitous), and identify every piece of networked hardware you own via MAC address
Of course the police would still exist - they would simply be private police charged only with protecting and pursing the interests of their wealthy employers. Private property beyond what you can carry exists only with the threat of violence, and the wealthy aren't about to surrender their wealth.
Hey I freely admit that my leading "if" was quite dubious. And certainly after the money train is rolling in it's going to be hard to convince anyone to change things. All the more reason for a supposedly free and democratic society to avoid setting the stage for such abuse right from the beginning - whether by having real penalties for abuse that keep the institutional incentives balanced, or by avoiding the whole can of worms altogether.
No, that's the collateral, but generally speaking banks don't want to deal with the headache of actually owning the property, which is why foreclosures are generally sold at a steep discount They're not going to lend you more than they think you'll repay, unless outside of dishonest bankers gaming the system.
Indeed - make it easy for the people who don't actually want to be driving to be chauffeured by competent, predictable robots, and traffic would be far easier to navigate. Unless of course the ease of being chauffeured significantly increased the amount of time people spent traveling, and thus the number of cars on the road.
Indeed. It seems to me that if you are going to have such a system, and don't actually want to create a surveillance state or other abusive behavior, care should be taken to ensure the incentives are balanced against abuse. Such as - if you send in a false report, or actively incite lawbreaking, then *you* pay the same penalty that would have been levied against a real offender.
And those maniacs - sounds like the sort of behavior that should get reported by responsible drivers, doesn't it? Most of the behaviors you described are probably traffic violations in their own right.
It should be really easy to spot patterns - if a person reports a lot of crimes, and they're usually false claims, then the default assumption should be that they're the guilty party rather than their target. Similarly, if a person gets a lot of reports against them, and they're usually valid, then the new report is probably valid.
In a big, benevolent system you could even use such patterns to easily focus on the worst offenders - don't prosecute each report unless it's clearly serious, just have an officer review it and file it as probably valid, false, or reasonably contested. Reckless drivers will rapidly build up a lot of valid reports against them, as will reckless reporters - prosecute those, and just ignore the occasional reports as the inevitable imperfection of humanity.
They have a point though - you don't need everyone to be out to get you for it to be a problem, just plenty of asshats willing to cause legal-system trouble for people at the touch of a button. (damned kids, foreigners, etc.)
If such a thing is done, it seems to me there should be real penalties for those abusing the system as well. Ideally something that gives the legal system incentive to see justice done and punish abuse. Perhaps something like - if you falsely report a traffic crime, then *you* pay the penalty that would have been imposed on a guilty offender. Hopefully with a gray area for poor judgement by either party, where nobody gets penalized.
We need only look at DMCA take-down notices to see how easily a community-initiated legal process without real penalties for false reports can be abused.
Perhaps it's just me, or how the signs are used where I've been, but "yield" generally conveys an image of "prepare to merge with traffic" - pay attention, be ready to stop if necessary, but don't necessarily slow down significantly. Most of the problem stop signs I see are used in places where there's no reason for a full stop, but a significant slow down really is called for.
Yes it does decay, but that decay is SLOW. Nuclear fuel is NOT appreciably radioactive. The most common nuclear fuels are Uranium-235, with a half-life of 704 million years, and Plutonium-239, with a half life of 24 thousand years.
Leave a bunch of P-239 scattered around for 1000 years and the fraction of fuel remaining will be (1/2)^(1000/24000) = 0.972. So you'll lose less than 3% of your fuel to radioactive decay in a thousand years. Or less than 0.03% in a decade.
If you pack your fuel closely then you get nuclear chain reactions which accelerate the process, but the solution is simple - don't pack the fuel so closely. Maybe that means putting enough space between fuel pellets, or maybe it requires making directly useless fuel-storage bricks by mixing the fuel with a lot of inert material that can be easily separated later when you're ready to produce fuel pellets. Either way, it's not a big deal.
Quite.
And of course "easy access to contraception" also means there has to be no serious cultural stigma against using it - one of those things that puts esp. Catholicism on the wrong side of solving the problem.
As I recall over half the food produced on the planet gets thrown away - we have plenty of food for everyone, there's just no profitable way to get it to the people who are going hungry. A large part of that is because a lot of them have incomes well below a dollar a day, at which point involving any developed-world economic activity costs more than can possibly be made. Heck, we often help make the problem worse by sending in free food aid, destroying local markets for locally grown food, and pushing farmers into growing more profitable crops for export rather than to food to feed their neighbors - turning a short-term crisis into a quasi-permanent shortage.
Meanwhile, Amazon's "free" shipping is nothing of the kind - you pay for shipping regardless. The only question is whether you pay the cost separately, or have it included in the price of the goods you are buying.
I like a nice unobtrusive, easy-to-ignore default ring tone for just that reason - if you're not in my contact list, or I just didn't decide you're worth interrupting my life for, I'll know there's a call coming in, and unless I'm bored you can leave a message if it's important. Friends and family get a different ring tone, since the odds are good that I'd like to talk to them. And my boss and office manager get their own, since they're unlikely to call unless it's important (not necessarily to me, but they pay for the privilege of my attention).
Heck, plenty of scientists today are still saying the world can't support the existing ~seven billion people, even with modern tech. It's not a matter of whether we can feed people today, but whether we can continue doing so indefinitely. With present practices it seems we can't. By producing food at the rate we're doing we're drawing down the ecological capital, reducing long-term productivity in exchange for immediate gains.
Artificial ecologies of course could change things - but the energy requirements will be immense for vertical ones. 1 acre of farmland on the surface receives ~4MW of solar energy. Even if you tune your artificial lighting to just the 45% of the energy spectrum used by plants you'll still need about 2MW of lighting per acre to get the same yields. So either you need nuclear power, or to cover an equivalent surface area with solar panels (assuming incredible 45% efficient solar panels). In which case the benefit of not just covering the surface with greenhouses instead becomes dubious.