The real test of whether something is science is the idea of falsifiability. God is not falsifiable. There is no experiment you could ever do that could lead you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. Any kind of God hypothesis could never be rigorous enough to meet the standard of science.
If I said I have determined that if we smash some protons at 12 trillion electron volts 50 trillion times, and we don;t see the higgs bososn, it means god doesn't exist, you wouldn't buy it, and you shouldn't. My point is that there *isn't* and experiment you *could* do to disprove God.
Supersymmetry is falsifiable. There are experiments you can do (although maybe not yet), where the results might show that supersymmetry is not an accurate description of reality.
Maybe there is a definition of God you could come up with that was scientifically falsifiable, but I don't think he'd be anything resembling the God that the vast majority of religious people believe in.
If by "theory of religion" you are only talking about proving or disproving individual claims like "Noah's Arc=, etc, then those are potentially falsifiable, but I think this is missing the meat of what religion is.
I don't think science contradicts or even tries to contradict the existence of God. Therefore science is not opposed to deism, pantheism, etc. But honestly what is the point of being a Christian if you don't believe the Bible is true? If it's a bunch of stories that teach a moral message, fine, but why adhere to that moral message? Lots of the moral messages in the Bible are good, but lots are absolutely abhorrent by today's standards.
Believing in a higher power is one thing. Believing that this one particular book is true (or even partly true) is another. Do you really believe Jesus was resurrected and that he died for our sins? Or do you think he was just an enlightened philosopher?
I think some of the ideas attributed to Jesus are truly positive and revolutionary for their time, but I don;t see any reason to believe any of the stories about his divinity, or that I should treat the Bible as a book inspired by a higher power. It seems quite clearly just a man made artifact, although a very historically significant one.
I am not saying you shouldn't believe in a higher power. I don;t think there is any evidence one way or another for that. But if you don't believe in the 100% truth of the bible, then why are you a Christian? The Bible certainly doesn't make any logical arguments for why Jesus is the son of God. Why take the Bible on faith over something like the Book of Mormon or Lord of the Rings?
This goes for all people (not just the elderly) looking to become low level programmers without spending too much time learning the theory, etc.
I think learning to program is a great thing. It really helped me to think in a way that has been very useful and personally enlightening. However, writing code that goes beyond hobby level dependability, maintainability, and scalability requirements requires a good deal of knowledge and understanding to do properly. Maybe you can take solace in the fact that there are plenty of terrible programmers out there to make you look good by comparison if you achieve even a modicum of competence, but quite often doing something poorly actually creates more work than not doing it at all. A programmer who knows what he is doing can do the work of 20 programmers who don't.
There will always be people out there who are willing to take a gamble and hire an amateur at a discount rate, but I think as more and more people begin to realize that it is actually cheaper to hire good programmers who charge more but deliver a more reliable product that is easier to maintain and scale up, I think the market for low level programmers will shrink. I don;t think this market will shrink to zero, but I don;t think it's a good market to be trying to get into.
If you have the stomach for it, I would suggest learning the theory of computing. I am talking about time/space complexity analysis, automata theory, etc, in addition to programming specifics like object oriented programming. They really provide a mindset of how to do things correctly the first time, reducing the need to fix things later. The problem as that these ideas aren't easy to learn quickly. The good thing is that nowadays these things can be learned for free or very cheaply. I had to learn them at an expensive university, but now you can just watch videos of those same lectures on youtube for free. You won't have a degree, but you'll know how to do it without spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It isn't for everyone, which is why almost 3/4 of the people in my major dropped out before graduation, but if you really enjoy it, it isn't like work, but more like a fun puzzle/game that you get paid to solve/play. I find the theory of computing absolutely fascinating. I watch lectures on youtube frequently. I love applying what I've learned so much that I program at home in my spare time everyday after doing it at work for 9 hours a day. If you love it, it's not work. If I didn't love it, I can't imagine how I could manage doing it. I feel sorry for all the people out there who hate their jobs.
I didn't always like computer science. I found it quite frustrating at first, and even dropped out of school twice. But somehow I managed to stick with it and now I can't imagine doing anything else. My advice is to learn to love it if you can manage.
Programming will/should always be challenging. The difference is whether you are challenged by tedious/simple problems that have already been solved, or whether you are challenged by interesting/hard problems that people are willing to pay a lot of money to have solved.
I am not bothered by this nearly as much as I thought I would have been. I don't think giving American terrorist suspects preferential treatment makes things any better.
I think it makes sense to arrest people rather than kill people (if possible) in a criminal situation. I think it makes sense to have less of an obligation to take live prisoners in a military situation. Obviously if they are surrendering, we should take them alive.
But if we are ok will killing foreign Al Queda members without a trial in a military strike, I think killing American Al Queda members without a trial is not any worse. If we are not ok with kill Al Queda members without a trial at all, then that's a different story. This position I think might make all wars (at least as we know them) illegal.
It's sort of a given that in a war you can kill people without a trial. Maybe this is a good reason to be opposed to war, but I don't think specifically exempting Americans from this custom really does anything for civil liberties or humanity in general, anymore than exempting only white people from the death penalty helps the anti-capital punishment cause.
Yes but I think his plan is fatally flawed. It is essentially
Our system is broken because powerful special interests prevent us from passing any laws that fix the system, so here is the new law to restrict the power of powerful special interests and allow us to pass laws to fix the system.
I am stuck in jail and I can't go anywhere. My plan is to get a hack saw from home depot so I can cut through the bars and escape, so I can go where ever I want.
If you could go to home depot to get the hacksaw then you don;t need to cut the bars anymore.
If you could pass the law that restricts the power of special interests that allows you pass new laws that fix the system, then you could just pass the original law you wanted to.
Now you say that manufacturing doesn't bring down prices?
1. Manufacturers do more than just manufacturing. They also do R&D.
2. Manufacturing indirectly lowers prices by providing money to do R&D. If we are subsidizing manufacturing in order to bring prices down, we may as well skip a step and subsidize R&D directly.
So as soon as it's cheap, it's good? News flash, it will never be cheap and it will always be getting better. You can't wait until its 'better'. If you wait, you never start. Solar power is fully realizable right now, there are simply no technological hurdles to implementing it.
Yes. If we eliminate all externalities on both renewables and fossil fuels, then the cheapest energy is the one that requires the least human effort and resources to produce.
The only reason solar makes any sense over coal is global warming, and to a lesser extent pollution. If global warming isn't a clear and present danger, then solar and most other renewables aren't worth it. We have plenty of coal to run our grid for literally centuries.
If it is a clear and present danger, then it does make clear economic sense to start now well before it's economical. Because the macro economics are that the costs of continued coal use will dwarf any production costs and interest over time. How much is moving NYC going to cost? Miami?
Production of solar panels requires the use of fossil fuels, and it pollutes the environment too. When they become cheaper, it is a signal that their production is causing less pollution (i.e. because ideally we'd be taxing pollution and co2 emissions).
Ok, now what about the century head start oil and gas have over solar? That's not a fair playing field, they have the advantage already just by standing still.
I don't care about playing fair. I care about taking the most economic path to cleaner more efficient energy. If that path includes using fossil fuels for now so be it. If we mandated that we had to use 0 fossil fuels starting tomorrow, we would actually hurt the cause of renewable energy. We would completely cripple the economy and we would cripple production of renewables because of how much fossil fuel is required to produce solar panels. (e.g. imagine running factories and transporting materials with solar powered trucks we don't have.)
even if you throw out the environment, how about we subsidize US industry to build faster and then sell the results of that R&D through manufacturing to the rest of the world? Because that's exactly what China is doing right now. Or do you want to cede the entire market to the Chinese? The rest of the world WANTS solar in a big way, and yet you're arguing we shouldn't be subsidizing our home grown manufacturing to build what the world wants? Economic suicide.
The world wants the technology to make cheap and efficient solar panels. They don't want the physical solar panels we are producing right now at the price we need to charge to just break even. I want China to succeed in advancing technology. I want us to succeed to. This isn't a zero sum game and we shouldn;t be treating it like one especially with global warming looming. In fact we should probably be making the technology freely available to everyone in hopes that maybe it will accelerate the process of making them cheaper and more efficient. Right now they are only using about 20% of the energy they get and lose 80% in the conversion from light to electricity, and it costs like $30,000 to install solar panels on your house which reduces your monthly bill by like $30. Having solar panels on your house is more of a political statement than it is helping the environment. We need to change that and make it cost like $500 to put solar panels on your house for the same results.
Subsidizing production only makes sense when there is a shortage of something. There is no shortage of
I don't see how developing web apps could ever be enjoyable. I have to write specific code for ie, firefox, chrome, opera, safari, not to mention whatever crazy mobile browsers people have. Not to mention that all have varying levels of support for HTML 5 which is constantly changing. You are almost forced to write ugly code.
If I was a web developer I would kill myself.
The production doesn't improve the technology. R&D improves technology. People associate production with improving technology, but really it is the profits from production/sales that fund R&D that improves technology which leads to more production.
You can do the R&D without the production. It's not like Average Joe on the production line figures out a way to do it faster after the experience gained from assembling a million widgets. You can test a 100 solar panels for R&D purposes without making a million of them and selling them to homeowners and getting subsidies from the government. Producing a million more of the same solar panels doesn't give you any more insight into how to make them better.
To do the production before it is economically competitive is just wasteful and potentially more harmful to the environment.
And yes the subsidies to the oil companies should be removed too. The answer isn't subsidizing both. The market works best when the price of everything reflects it's true cost whether it's oil, coal, or solar panels.
Remove all subsidies, add a carbon tax, and let the market produce whatever is cheaper (using true costs) of all energy production methods. It might still be oil and coal for now. That's ok. We can use the money to research ever more efficient alternative energy solutions. Eventually as fossil fuels grow more scare, and technology improves, one or more alternative technologies will actually become more economical and that's when production should start.
Wasting time and resources building expensive solar panels makes no sense. We should be waiting until solar panels are the best alternative before mass production, and meanwhile we can be finding the R&D driving costs down.
Not to mention that most people in prison don't have father figures in their lives, which means that marriage has a strong positive effect on society.
Actually it doesn't mean that at all. It *could* be true. But it *could* just be a correlation. You have to do actual statistics to figure out if there is a causal relationship.
A shockingly high percentage of people going to the hospital die within days of their visit. Clearly hospitals are bad for your health.
It could simply be that some other factor is causing both the criminality and the lack of fathers. In which case, simply getting married, will not fix the problem of criminality. Just like how not going to the hospital will not keep you from dying.
Morality was not invented by people who wanted better societies. Morality is not invented by anyone. Morality in humans is the result of billions of years of evolution. We are a social species and a moral compass is advantageous to the survival of the species. It also exists in different forms in other social animals. And it existed in humans well before any of the great philosophers like Rawls or Kant. They simply added to our collective understanding of morality.
Some people conflate morality with some kind of "universal" Christian morality, but there is no objective set of moral axioms. It was moral for Inuits to kill their first baby if it was a girl. It was moral for Chistians and Muslims to have slaves. Morality evolves. There is no reason that marriage or fathers *should* have anything to do with morality.
And I'm sure that if there was some service out there that was useful to criminal rich white banker men, then google would target it towards them rather than black people.
I don't think anyone should allow google ads for jobs greatly influence their career path.
Google is a tool. You don't have to use it. Lots of people are racist. I doubt google as a corporation is racist. Given that there is racism in the world, an accurate search engine would necessarily reflect that. If you don't want to see reflections of the racism in the world on your computer, then there is nothing stopping you from abstaining from using google.
I get a million ads about hot girls in my neighborhood. Guess what gender I am. I feel confident in my ability to choose to ignore them.
Life is not fair. The sooner people realize this, the better off they are. I am not saying that making the world more fair is not a noble goal. It is important to realize they way things are, and try to succeed no matter what situation you find yourself in. Lots of woman have managed to become doctors against the odds. I think encouraging women to be whatever they want to be whether it's a teacher or a doctor is a far better use of time than trying to adjust google ads to be less discriminatory.
Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.
The method is simple: a progressive tax on businesses. We tax a company’s gross income, with a tax rate that increases as the company gets bigger. Companies would be able to reduce their tax rates by splitting themselves up.
I really like Richard Stallman, and I am even intrigued by this idea, but I see a few obvious issues with it.
1. They will block any laws like this. If they can't, block the laws due to public outrage,etc, then we could have just simply passed the first hypothetical law stopping them from destroying the economy.
2. Whats to stop them from circumventing such a law by splitting up into smaller companies but still being controlled by a small group of owners. A rich person or group of people can hold a majority stock in many large companies and do everything they could do when the companies were one. Is being a powerful shareholder for 10 different HP division spinoff companies be different than being a powerful shareholder of monolithic HP stock?
I feel like the simplest and best answer to "too big to fail" is not artificially keeping companies small, but rather letting big companies fail. Yes letting companies fail in an irresponsible way can have devastating consequences. But bailouts are not the only alternative to catastrophe. This is the same false dichotomy thrown out whenever another bailout happens. It is possible to do a controlled failure. We can fire all the top executives, ensure that all other employees get paid, and have the shareholders of the company lose their shirts rather than the tax payer. Meanwhile we can have the government keep the company running until the assets are liquidated or the whole company sold to the highest bidder.
In order for the free market to work, bad decisions need to be punished. Perverse incentives are what screws everything up. If a company can be big and not fail, then great. But we have to let them fail if they are failing. We can do it gently like putting a big company on hospice or something, but it needs to happen. Otherwise we have the same incompetent people running even larger companies and shareholders who are incapable of losing money so there is no incentive to make good decisions.
There should be no such thing as too big to fail. IF we currently can;t manage big failures, then that's the thing that needs to be fixed.
Solar panels are not yet economical. They are being subsidized to make them competitive in the market. I think it would be much more effective to spend our tax money on researching making solar panels cheaper than spending money on building lots of expensive solar panels.
In the free market, prices naturally come down as manufacturers try to cut costs and maximize profits. When you subsidize something because it is too expensive otherwise, then there is less incentive to make it cheaper and lose your subsidy.
The knowledge is valuable, not the actual product. The products will keep evolving and improving. The information drives that evolution and improvement. If we subsidize anything it should be knowledge. We should also do a carbon tax to set the cost of using fossil fuels to a more accurate value accounting for externalities. But the market should decide what actually gets manufactured after the government ensures that costs are accurate.
It's not just adoption. There were 2 fundamental differences between windows and linux in terms of security models.
1. Linux has users with different privilege levels. A user surfing the web doesn't have permission from the OS to download and execute a virus that can modify system files. There could be a security hole which allows this, but a poor user decision is not sufficient.
Windows had user accounts for a very long time, but unfortunately many things didn't work (e.g. games) unless the user was at the highest privilege (administrator). This meant that if a user executed a virus you got a virus, a security hole was not necessary to infect the system. Linux and windows both had security holes, but in windows you didn't even need to exploit a security hole to infect the OS. You only had to trick the user. That has changed since windows vista.
2. Linux is open source. Many people think this a security weakness. In the short term it is. It is much easier to attack a system if you can better see all the holes easily. In the long term this visibility means that more security holes are caught by the people trying to fix them and there are less to exploit.
Windows relies on "security through obscurity". This is like burying your money in a place nobody knows about (that you know of), rather than keeping it in a vault. The vault is less safe because all the criminals know where it is, but it is still more secure than a hole in your back yard. (This is just an example, I don;t want to start a debate about banking).
Also, Linux is not actually that rare. Most servers are running linux. Most embedded devices are running linux including routers, mobile phones, DVRs, etc. It is true that the % of desktops running linux is low, viruses and hackers don't only target desktops. There are probably more instances of the linux OS running than windows if you count all computers.
People and companies should be able to sell or not sell to whomever they want. Yes they are doing it because they are trying to make more money. Is that a bad thing? Are the camera companies obligated to prop up a secondary market out of charity? The customers decide if they want to buy a camera from a company that limits repairs to official repair centers (that have whatever customer service, costs they have).
If the customers don't care about the choice to bring their camera to a local repair shop, then there is no point in having them be there. It sucks losing a job, but we can't keep obsolete jobs around just so people never need to learn a new trade. Maybe we need to make it easier to learn new trades or something, but stagnation is just not an option.
If the customers do care about this choice, than any of the major camera companies could theoretically beat their competition by being the only company to provide this choice. If all these companies care about is money then this is exactly what they should do. Customers demand other things like megapixels and portability. Why don't they demand the choice to take their cameras to local repair shops?
Maybe the customers are ignorant about the advantages of this choice? Well then protesting is probably the right thing to do to bring attention to the situation.
I suspect that it is all about money. Not so much unregulated greed, but just about trying to control their products. Some of the local repair shops are probably good, others probably think they are good and actually suck. It is probably just easier for them to have official repair centers where they can control how their products are repaired. When you have official repair centers, there is no question of whether the fault is the repair center or the manufacturer when things go wrong because they are the same. If a repair goes bad in a local shop, the local shop can just blame it on Nikon and say their camera's just suck. Whether true or not, I think that's kind of what the manufacturers don't want. They want to be able to control the way their products are repaired.
This isn't so foreign. I can open an Apple repair shop and demand Apple sell me spare parts, so I can undercut their own repair centers, but I probably won't get very far. There are companies that sell 3rd party apple repair parts, but they don't expect any support from apple. They are lucky just not to get sued.
There was X amount of energy at the start of the universe. It is constantly being converted into other forms of energy by interactions governed by the laws of physics, losing a bit to entropy all along the way.
There are many factors to consider when deciding which energy to spend our resources harnessing.
1. How much total energy can be harnessed before the source is exhausted?
2. At what rate can the source be exploited? (how much power can be drawn)
3. What are the safety concerns?
4. What are the environmental concerns?
Does it really matter if energy passes through our sun as an intermediary before us using it?
The fact that solar only works during the day is only a factor because we don't have good battery technology, but developing good batteries would change this, and yield many other benefits.
You don't think it would be useful to have solar panels that cost a fraction of what they cost now to build? You don't think that research into making solar panels cheap enough that they don't need subsidies to complete with other energy sources is import?
The price of solar energy is the limiting factor in how many solar cells can be produced. Reducing the cost of solar cells by half means twice as many can be built for the same amount of natural resources and human labor, for half the pollution.
Such schemes are doomed to fail, and not because of the economic "reality" or the political "reality" -- however daunting those may be. They are doomed because of the physical reality: It's simply not physically possible for the world's human population to continue growing in numbers, affluence, and energy consumption without trashing the planet.
The author is criticizing others for being dreamers and making over-claiming. This is exactly what the author is doing. Claiming that something is physically impossible is a pretty grand claim. I suppose he can define "trashing the planet" in a sufficiently vague way to save himself from being wrong, but that's beside the point.
The kinds of things that are ok to label physically impossible are violating physical laws like relativity and thermodynamics. In fact sustaining all of humankind on renewable energy is *exactly* the kind of thing that is *not* physically impossible, but merely very difficult in practice and possibly less economical and environmentally friendly than other solutions.
This is like when people use "literally" wrong. Example: "This author is *literally* eviscerating the English language and conventions of scientific discourse, by making claims like this."
"'Whether something is private or not should be up to the internet surfer, not Google. We are best placed to decide, not them.'"
Fulfilling the expectation that the internet surfer's privacy wishes are being honored is the job of a browser without security, not a massive corporation whose primary income source is targeted advertisements.
Notice I didn't say that there is not wealth disparity. I said it is lower. In order to prove that I am wrong, you can't simply quote statistics from today, you have to compare them to the past. Yes wealth disparity is lower worldwide. The US has only existed for a few centuries so long term trends are not available, but even in the US there was just as much wealth disparity during the industrial revolution as today. There is less wealth disparity in democracies than in fuedal societies.
I suggest you read the book "The better angels of our nature" by stephen pinker.
When I say the world is *less* violent. I am not saying that it *isn't* violent. I am saying that the chances you'd be murdered or raped or killed by warfare has been gradually going down over the course of human history.
I know all resources are finite. When I say they can be treated as infinite, I am referring to the idea that resources can be so plentiful and untapped that one person extracting resources does not have a noticeable impact on reducing the amount that other people can extract. It isn't a zero sum game. This is not true when resources are limited.
In regards to using wealth inequality as an incentive to producers... I think this makes sense when it is the skill of people that are actually doing the producing (i.e management skills, investing skills, medical knowledge, physical strength, strong work ethic, etc). When robots can use algorithms to figure out optimal allocations of resources for managing and investing, when they can store giant databases of medical information and make more accurate diagnoses and predict better treatments than human doctors, when they can work 24/7 and be stronger than 1000 people, I don't see the point of offering wealth inequality as an incentive to humans anymore. Giving higher pay to people that owned the most robots or owned the mines with all the raw materials seems does not seem like it is incentivizing production, it is incentivizing luck. I am not a socialist. I think there were times when people really do deserve the millions they make by investing and managing. I also see the benefit of granting rich people the right to transfer wealth to their children to further strengthen the incentive of production, but I just don;t see the point when we get to the kind of future I am talking about. The kind of future when technology is on autopilot requiring no further input from humanity to keep it going. The kind of future when automation is automated. The kind of future where running a CNC machine to build another CNC machine really does require 0 human labor (rather than requiring experienced human technicians for operation and maintenance, etc)
I am not saying society won't be disrupted. I am talking about the endgame.
I am not sure if wealth equality will be better or worse in the future. You could argue that automation will rob the unskilled of their livelihood. But you could also argue that the reduction of amount of human labor required to survive through automation will be the thing that allows the majority of the unskilled the freedom to become skilled. The major trends for wealth disparity for the last 10000 years are that it is gradually going down. It has gone down quite sharply in the last few centuries when we saw the industrial revolution, enlightenment, etc. I think there is a perception that things are getting worse at all times, but the fact is that things were much worse in the past.
The one thing I am fairly sure about is that poor people in the future will be better off than poor people now regardless of the state of wealth distribution. Sure maybe the rich will be 1000 times more wealthy than the wealthy of today, while the poor are only 3 times more wealthy (taking into account cost of living). So what? That sounds like a better society than what we have today. Not because of the state of the wealth gap, but simply because of the absolute better state of poor people.
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The real test of whether something is science is the idea of falsifiability. God is not falsifiable. There is no experiment you could ever do that could lead you to the conclusion that God doesn't exist. Any kind of God hypothesis could never be rigorous enough to meet the standard of science.
If I said I have determined that if we smash some protons at 12 trillion electron volts 50 trillion times, and we don;t see the higgs bososn, it means god doesn't exist, you wouldn't buy it, and you shouldn't. My point is that there *isn't* and experiment you *could* do to disprove God.
Supersymmetry is falsifiable. There are experiments you can do (although maybe not yet), where the results might show that supersymmetry is not an accurate description of reality.
Maybe there is a definition of God you could come up with that was scientifically falsifiable, but I don't think he'd be anything resembling the God that the vast majority of religious people believe in.
If by "theory of religion" you are only talking about proving or disproving individual claims like "Noah's Arc=, etc, then those are potentially falsifiable, but I think this is missing the meat of what religion is.
I don't think science contradicts or even tries to contradict the existence of God. Therefore science is not opposed to deism, pantheism, etc. But honestly what is the point of being a Christian if you don't believe the Bible is true? If it's a bunch of stories that teach a moral message, fine, but why adhere to that moral message? Lots of the moral messages in the Bible are good, but lots are absolutely abhorrent by today's standards.
Believing in a higher power is one thing. Believing that this one particular book is true (or even partly true) is another. Do you really believe Jesus was resurrected and that he died for our sins? Or do you think he was just an enlightened philosopher?
I think some of the ideas attributed to Jesus are truly positive and revolutionary for their time, but I don;t see any reason to believe any of the stories about his divinity, or that I should treat the Bible as a book inspired by a higher power. It seems quite clearly just a man made artifact, although a very historically significant one.
I am not saying you shouldn't believe in a higher power. I don;t think there is any evidence one way or another for that. But if you don't believe in the 100% truth of the bible, then why are you a Christian? The Bible certainly doesn't make any logical arguments for why Jesus is the son of God. Why take the Bible on faith over something like the Book of Mormon or Lord of the Rings?
This goes for all people (not just the elderly) looking to become low level programmers without spending too much time learning the theory, etc.
I think learning to program is a great thing. It really helped me to think in a way that has been very useful and personally enlightening. However, writing code that goes beyond hobby level dependability, maintainability, and scalability requirements requires a good deal of knowledge and understanding to do properly. Maybe you can take solace in the fact that there are plenty of terrible programmers out there to make you look good by comparison if you achieve even a modicum of competence, but quite often doing something poorly actually creates more work than not doing it at all. A programmer who knows what he is doing can do the work of 20 programmers who don't.
There will always be people out there who are willing to take a gamble and hire an amateur at a discount rate, but I think as more and more people begin to realize that it is actually cheaper to hire good programmers who charge more but deliver a more reliable product that is easier to maintain and scale up, I think the market for low level programmers will shrink. I don;t think this market will shrink to zero, but I don;t think it's a good market to be trying to get into.
If you have the stomach for it, I would suggest learning the theory of computing. I am talking about time/space complexity analysis, automata theory, etc, in addition to programming specifics like object oriented programming. They really provide a mindset of how to do things correctly the first time, reducing the need to fix things later. The problem as that these ideas aren't easy to learn quickly. The good thing is that nowadays these things can be learned for free or very cheaply. I had to learn them at an expensive university, but now you can just watch videos of those same lectures on youtube for free. You won't have a degree, but you'll know how to do it without spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It isn't for everyone, which is why almost 3/4 of the people in my major dropped out before graduation, but if you really enjoy it, it isn't like work, but more like a fun puzzle/game that you get paid to solve/play. I find the theory of computing absolutely fascinating. I watch lectures on youtube frequently. I love applying what I've learned so much that I program at home in my spare time everyday after doing it at work for 9 hours a day. If you love it, it's not work. If I didn't love it, I can't imagine how I could manage doing it. I feel sorry for all the people out there who hate their jobs.
I didn't always like computer science. I found it quite frustrating at first, and even dropped out of school twice. But somehow I managed to stick with it and now I can't imagine doing anything else. My advice is to learn to love it if you can manage.
Programming will/should always be challenging. The difference is whether you are challenged by tedious/simple problems that have already been solved, or whether you are challenged by interesting/hard problems that people are willing to pay a lot of money to have solved.
I am not bothered by this nearly as much as I thought I would have been. I don't think giving American terrorist suspects preferential treatment makes things any better.
I think it makes sense to arrest people rather than kill people (if possible) in a criminal situation. I think it makes sense to have less of an obligation to take live prisoners in a military situation. Obviously if they are surrendering, we should take them alive.
But if we are ok will killing foreign Al Queda members without a trial in a military strike, I think killing American Al Queda members without a trial is not any worse. If we are not ok with kill Al Queda members without a trial at all, then that's a different story. This position I think might make all wars (at least as we know them) illegal.
It's sort of a given that in a war you can kill people without a trial. Maybe this is a good reason to be opposed to war, but I don't think specifically exempting Americans from this custom really does anything for civil liberties or humanity in general, anymore than exempting only white people from the death penalty helps the anti-capital punishment cause.
I can picture screaming through a cavernous mansion how fucking stupid everything is. Maybe I am just more neurotic than you :)
Yes but I think his plan is fatally flawed. It is essentially
Our system is broken because powerful special interests prevent us from passing any laws that fix the system, so here is the new law to restrict the power of powerful special interests and allow us to pass laws to fix the system.
I am stuck in jail and I can't go anywhere. My plan is to get a hack saw from home depot so I can cut through the bars and escape, so I can go where ever I want.
If you could go to home depot to get the hacksaw then you don;t need to cut the bars anymore.
If you could pass the law that restricts the power of special interests that allows you pass new laws that fix the system, then you could just pass the original law you wanted to.
Now you say that manufacturing doesn't bring down prices?
1. Manufacturers do more than just manufacturing. They also do R&D.
2. Manufacturing indirectly lowers prices by providing money to do R&D. If we are subsidizing manufacturing in order to bring prices down, we may as well skip a step and subsidize R&D directly.
So as soon as it's cheap, it's good? News flash, it will never be cheap and it will always be getting better. You can't wait until its 'better'. If you wait, you never start. Solar power is fully realizable right now, there are simply no technological hurdles to implementing it.
Yes. If we eliminate all externalities on both renewables and fossil fuels, then the cheapest energy is the one that requires the least human effort and resources to produce.
The only reason solar makes any sense over coal is global warming, and to a lesser extent pollution. If global warming isn't a clear and present danger, then solar and most other renewables aren't worth it. We have plenty of coal to run our grid for literally centuries. If it is a clear and present danger, then it does make clear economic sense to start now well before it's economical. Because the macro economics are that the costs of continued coal use will dwarf any production costs and interest over time. How much is moving NYC going to cost? Miami?
Production of solar panels requires the use of fossil fuels, and it pollutes the environment too. When they become cheaper, it is a signal that their production is causing less pollution (i.e. because ideally we'd be taxing pollution and co2 emissions).
Ok, now what about the century head start oil and gas have over solar? That's not a fair playing field, they have the advantage already just by standing still.
I don't care about playing fair. I care about taking the most economic path to cleaner more efficient energy. If that path includes using fossil fuels for now so be it. If we mandated that we had to use 0 fossil fuels starting tomorrow, we would actually hurt the cause of renewable energy. We would completely cripple the economy and we would cripple production of renewables because of how much fossil fuel is required to produce solar panels. (e.g. imagine running factories and transporting materials with solar powered trucks we don't have.)
even if you throw out the environment, how about we subsidize US industry to build faster and then sell the results of that R&D through manufacturing to the rest of the world? Because that's exactly what China is doing right now. Or do you want to cede the entire market to the Chinese? The rest of the world WANTS solar in a big way, and yet you're arguing we shouldn't be subsidizing our home grown manufacturing to build what the world wants? Economic suicide.
The world wants the technology to make cheap and efficient solar panels. They don't want the physical solar panels we are producing right now at the price we need to charge to just break even. I want China to succeed in advancing technology. I want us to succeed to. This isn't a zero sum game and we shouldn;t be treating it like one especially with global warming looming. In fact we should probably be making the technology freely available to everyone in hopes that maybe it will accelerate the process of making them cheaper and more efficient. Right now they are only using about 20% of the energy they get and lose 80% in the conversion from light to electricity, and it costs like $30,000 to install solar panels on your house which reduces your monthly bill by like $30. Having solar panels on your house is more of a political statement than it is helping the environment. We need to change that and make it cost like $500 to put solar panels on your house for the same results.
Subsidizing production only makes sense when there is a shortage of something. There is no shortage of
No block scoping?
I don't see how developing web apps could ever be enjoyable. I have to write specific code for ie, firefox, chrome, opera, safari, not to mention whatever crazy mobile browsers people have. Not to mention that all have varying levels of support for HTML 5 which is constantly changing. You are almost forced to write ugly code. If I was a web developer I would kill myself.
The production doesn't improve the technology. R&D improves technology. People associate production with improving technology, but really it is the profits from production/sales that fund R&D that improves technology which leads to more production.
You can do the R&D without the production. It's not like Average Joe on the production line figures out a way to do it faster after the experience gained from assembling a million widgets. You can test a 100 solar panels for R&D purposes without making a million of them and selling them to homeowners and getting subsidies from the government. Producing a million more of the same solar panels doesn't give you any more insight into how to make them better.
To do the production before it is economically competitive is just wasteful and potentially more harmful to the environment.
And yes the subsidies to the oil companies should be removed too. The answer isn't subsidizing both. The market works best when the price of everything reflects it's true cost whether it's oil, coal, or solar panels.
Remove all subsidies, add a carbon tax, and let the market produce whatever is cheaper (using true costs) of all energy production methods. It might still be oil and coal for now. That's ok. We can use the money to research ever more efficient alternative energy solutions. Eventually as fossil fuels grow more scare, and technology improves, one or more alternative technologies will actually become more economical and that's when production should start.
Wasting time and resources building expensive solar panels makes no sense. We should be waiting until solar panels are the best alternative before mass production, and meanwhile we can be finding the R&D driving costs down.
Not to mention that most people in prison don't have father figures in their lives, which means that marriage has a strong positive effect on society.
Actually it doesn't mean that at all. It *could* be true. But it *could* just be a correlation. You have to do actual statistics to figure out if there is a causal relationship.
A shockingly high percentage of people going to the hospital die within days of their visit. Clearly hospitals are bad for your health.
It could simply be that some other factor is causing both the criminality and the lack of fathers. In which case, simply getting married, will not fix the problem of criminality. Just like how not going to the hospital will not keep you from dying.
Morality was not invented by people who wanted better societies. Morality is not invented by anyone. Morality in humans is the result of billions of years of evolution. We are a social species and a moral compass is advantageous to the survival of the species. It also exists in different forms in other social animals. And it existed in humans well before any of the great philosophers like Rawls or Kant. They simply added to our collective understanding of morality.
Some people conflate morality with some kind of "universal" Christian morality, but there is no objective set of moral axioms. It was moral for Inuits to kill their first baby if it was a girl. It was moral for Chistians and Muslims to have slaves. Morality evolves. There is no reason that marriage or fathers *should* have anything to do with morality.
And I'm sure that if there was some service out there that was useful to criminal rich white banker men, then google would target it towards them rather than black people.
I don't think anyone should allow google ads for jobs greatly influence their career path.
Google is a tool. You don't have to use it. Lots of people are racist. I doubt google as a corporation is racist. Given that there is racism in the world, an accurate search engine would necessarily reflect that. If you don't want to see reflections of the racism in the world on your computer, then there is nothing stopping you from abstaining from using google.
I get a million ads about hot girls in my neighborhood. Guess what gender I am. I feel confident in my ability to choose to ignore them.
Life is not fair. The sooner people realize this, the better off they are. I am not saying that making the world more fair is not a noble goal. It is important to realize they way things are, and try to succeed no matter what situation you find yourself in. Lots of woman have managed to become doctors against the odds. I think encouraging women to be whatever they want to be whether it's a teacher or a doctor is a far better use of time than trying to adjust google ads to be less discriminatory.
Many are so big that they can block the laws needed to stop them from destroying the economy or the environment.
The method is simple: a progressive tax on businesses. We tax a company’s gross income, with a tax rate that increases as the company gets bigger. Companies would be able to reduce their tax rates by splitting themselves up.
I really like Richard Stallman, and I am even intrigued by this idea, but I see a few obvious issues with it.
1. They will block any laws like this. If they can't, block the laws due to public outrage,etc, then we could have just simply passed the first hypothetical law stopping them from destroying the economy.
2. Whats to stop them from circumventing such a law by splitting up into smaller companies but still being controlled by a small group of owners. A rich person or group of people can hold a majority stock in many large companies and do everything they could do when the companies were one. Is being a powerful shareholder for 10 different HP division spinoff companies be different than being a powerful shareholder of monolithic HP stock?
I feel like the simplest and best answer to "too big to fail" is not artificially keeping companies small, but rather letting big companies fail. Yes letting companies fail in an irresponsible way can have devastating consequences. But bailouts are not the only alternative to catastrophe. This is the same false dichotomy thrown out whenever another bailout happens. It is possible to do a controlled failure. We can fire all the top executives, ensure that all other employees get paid, and have the shareholders of the company lose their shirts rather than the tax payer. Meanwhile we can have the government keep the company running until the assets are liquidated or the whole company sold to the highest bidder.
In order for the free market to work, bad decisions need to be punished. Perverse incentives are what screws everything up. If a company can be big and not fail, then great. But we have to let them fail if they are failing. We can do it gently like putting a big company on hospice or something, but it needs to happen. Otherwise we have the same incompetent people running even larger companies and shareholders who are incapable of losing money so there is no incentive to make good decisions.
There should be no such thing as too big to fail. IF we currently can;t manage big failures, then that's the thing that needs to be fixed.
Solar panels are not yet economical. They are being subsidized to make them competitive in the market. I think it would be much more effective to spend our tax money on researching making solar panels cheaper than spending money on building lots of expensive solar panels.
In the free market, prices naturally come down as manufacturers try to cut costs and maximize profits. When you subsidize something because it is too expensive otherwise, then there is less incentive to make it cheaper and lose your subsidy.
The knowledge is valuable, not the actual product. The products will keep evolving and improving. The information drives that evolution and improvement. If we subsidize anything it should be knowledge. We should also do a carbon tax to set the cost of using fossil fuels to a more accurate value accounting for externalities. But the market should decide what actually gets manufactured after the government ensures that costs are accurate.
It's not just adoption. There were 2 fundamental differences between windows and linux in terms of security models.
1. Linux has users with different privilege levels. A user surfing the web doesn't have permission from the OS to download and execute a virus that can modify system files. There could be a security hole which allows this, but a poor user decision is not sufficient.
Windows had user accounts for a very long time, but unfortunately many things didn't work (e.g. games) unless the user was at the highest privilege (administrator). This meant that if a user executed a virus you got a virus, a security hole was not necessary to infect the system. Linux and windows both had security holes, but in windows you didn't even need to exploit a security hole to infect the OS. You only had to trick the user. That has changed since windows vista.
2. Linux is open source. Many people think this a security weakness. In the short term it is. It is much easier to attack a system if you can better see all the holes easily. In the long term this visibility means that more security holes are caught by the people trying to fix them and there are less to exploit.
Windows relies on "security through obscurity". This is like burying your money in a place nobody knows about (that you know of), rather than keeping it in a vault. The vault is less safe because all the criminals know where it is, but it is still more secure than a hole in your back yard. (This is just an example, I don;t want to start a debate about banking).
Also, Linux is not actually that rare. Most servers are running linux. Most embedded devices are running linux including routers, mobile phones, DVRs, etc. It is true that the % of desktops running linux is low, viruses and hackers don't only target desktops. There are probably more instances of the linux OS running than windows if you count all computers.
People and companies should be able to sell or not sell to whomever they want. Yes they are doing it because they are trying to make more money. Is that a bad thing? Are the camera companies obligated to prop up a secondary market out of charity? The customers decide if they want to buy a camera from a company that limits repairs to official repair centers (that have whatever customer service, costs they have).
If the customers don't care about the choice to bring their camera to a local repair shop, then there is no point in having them be there. It sucks losing a job, but we can't keep obsolete jobs around just so people never need to learn a new trade. Maybe we need to make it easier to learn new trades or something, but stagnation is just not an option.
If the customers do care about this choice, than any of the major camera companies could theoretically beat their competition by being the only company to provide this choice. If all these companies care about is money then this is exactly what they should do. Customers demand other things like megapixels and portability. Why don't they demand the choice to take their cameras to local repair shops?
Maybe the customers are ignorant about the advantages of this choice? Well then protesting is probably the right thing to do to bring attention to the situation.
I suspect that it is all about money. Not so much unregulated greed, but just about trying to control their products. Some of the local repair shops are probably good, others probably think they are good and actually suck. It is probably just easier for them to have official repair centers where they can control how their products are repaired. When you have official repair centers, there is no question of whether the fault is the repair center or the manufacturer when things go wrong because they are the same. If a repair goes bad in a local shop, the local shop can just blame it on Nikon and say their camera's just suck. Whether true or not, I think that's kind of what the manufacturers don't want. They want to be able to control the way their products are repaired.
This isn't so foreign. I can open an Apple repair shop and demand Apple sell me spare parts, so I can undercut their own repair centers, but I probably won't get very far. There are companies that sell 3rd party apple repair parts, but they don't expect any support from apple. They are lucky just not to get sued.
Yeah also, the world will be 625% Hispanic in 2050, not that there's anything wrong with that.
There was X amount of energy at the start of the universe. It is constantly being converted into other forms of energy by interactions governed by the laws of physics, losing a bit to entropy all along the way.
There are many factors to consider when deciding which energy to spend our resources harnessing.
1. How much total energy can be harnessed before the source is exhausted?
2. At what rate can the source be exploited? (how much power can be drawn)
3. What are the safety concerns?
4. What are the environmental concerns?
Does it really matter if energy passes through our sun as an intermediary before us using it?
The fact that solar only works during the day is only a factor because we don't have good battery technology, but developing good batteries would change this, and yield many other benefits.
Solar doesn't need anymore research? Why not?
You don't think it would be useful to have solar panels that cost a fraction of what they cost now to build? You don't think that research into making solar panels cheap enough that they don't need subsidies to complete with other energy sources is import?
The price of solar energy is the limiting factor in how many solar cells can be produced. Reducing the cost of solar cells by half means twice as many can be built for the same amount of natural resources and human labor, for half the pollution.
Such schemes are doomed to fail, and not because of the economic "reality" or the political "reality" -- however daunting those may be. They are doomed because of the physical reality: It's simply not physically possible for the world's human population to continue growing in numbers, affluence, and energy consumption without trashing the planet.
The author is criticizing others for being dreamers and making over-claiming. This is exactly what the author is doing. Claiming that something is physically impossible is a pretty grand claim. I suppose he can define "trashing the planet" in a sufficiently vague way to save himself from being wrong, but that's beside the point.
The kinds of things that are ok to label physically impossible are violating physical laws like relativity and thermodynamics. In fact sustaining all of humankind on renewable energy is *exactly* the kind of thing that is *not* physically impossible, but merely very difficult in practice and possibly less economical and environmentally friendly than other solutions.
This is like when people use "literally" wrong. Example: "This author is *literally* eviscerating the English language and conventions of scientific discourse, by making claims like this."
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"'Whether something is private or not should be up to the internet surfer, not Google. We are best placed to decide, not them.'"
Fulfilling the expectation that the internet surfer's privacy wishes are being honored is the job of a browser without security, not a massive corporation whose primary income source is targeted advertisements.
Notice I didn't say that there is not wealth disparity. I said it is lower. In order to prove that I am wrong, you can't simply quote statistics from today, you have to compare them to the past. Yes wealth disparity is lower worldwide. The US has only existed for a few centuries so long term trends are not available, but even in the US there was just as much wealth disparity during the industrial revolution as today. There is less wealth disparity in democracies than in fuedal societies.
I suggest you read the book "The better angels of our nature" by stephen pinker.
When I say the world is *less* violent. I am not saying that it *isn't* violent. I am saying that the chances you'd be murdered or raped or killed by warfare has been gradually going down over the course of human history.
I know all resources are finite. When I say they can be treated as infinite, I am referring to the idea that resources can be so plentiful and untapped that one person extracting resources does not have a noticeable impact on reducing the amount that other people can extract. It isn't a zero sum game. This is not true when resources are limited.
In regards to using wealth inequality as an incentive to producers... I think this makes sense when it is the skill of people that are actually doing the producing (i.e management skills, investing skills, medical knowledge, physical strength, strong work ethic, etc). When robots can use algorithms to figure out optimal allocations of resources for managing and investing, when they can store giant databases of medical information and make more accurate diagnoses and predict better treatments than human doctors, when they can work 24/7 and be stronger than 1000 people, I don't see the point of offering wealth inequality as an incentive to humans anymore. Giving higher pay to people that owned the most robots or owned the mines with all the raw materials seems does not seem like it is incentivizing production, it is incentivizing luck. I am not a socialist. I think there were times when people really do deserve the millions they make by investing and managing. I also see the benefit of granting rich people the right to transfer wealth to their children to further strengthen the incentive of production, but I just don;t see the point when we get to the kind of future I am talking about. The kind of future when technology is on autopilot requiring no further input from humanity to keep it going. The kind of future when automation is automated. The kind of future where running a CNC machine to build another CNC machine really does require 0 human labor (rather than requiring experienced human technicians for operation and maintenance, etc)
I am not saying society won't be disrupted. I am talking about the endgame.
I am not sure if wealth equality will be better or worse in the future. You could argue that automation will rob the unskilled of their livelihood. But you could also argue that the reduction of amount of human labor required to survive through automation will be the thing that allows the majority of the unskilled the freedom to become skilled. The major trends for wealth disparity for the last 10000 years are that it is gradually going down. It has gone down quite sharply in the last few centuries when we saw the industrial revolution, enlightenment, etc. I think there is a perception that things are getting worse at all times, but the fact is that things were much worse in the past.
The one thing I am fairly sure about is that poor people in the future will be better off than poor people now regardless of the state of wealth distribution. Sure maybe the rich will be 1000 times more wealthy than the wealthy of today, while the poor are only 3 times more wealthy (taking into account cost of living). So what? That sounds like a better society than what we have today. Not because of the state of the wealth gap, but simply because of the absolute better state of poor people.