McDonald's sells cheap food. This is the reason why, in America, "fresh food" is expensive.
Okay, as a poor person myself, I am incredibly tired of this argument. After my other expenses, I have less than $40 a month left over for food, and so I have to pay very close attention to the price and nutritional content of my food. And the thing is, buying a mixture of raw ingredients(mostly flour, sugar, and eggs) and fresh seasonal produce(produce, meaning fruits and veggies. Any meat is expensive, and is well outside of my price range most of the time) is far cheaper than getting that non-nutritional garbage from fast food joints(believe me, I have looked, and if fast food was cheaper per nutrient, that's the only thing I would be eating because every dollar I can save really does matter in my situation).
Of course raw ingredients and fresh produce do come with their own particular downside; it takes time and effort to prepare it, and it also takes time and effort to learn how to cook. Some poor people work multiple jobs or long hours, and when they come home at the end of the day, they're too tired to put in the required effort, or they don't have enough time left in the day to cook a proper meal. It's faster and easier to either buy some fast food, or to just heat up a frozen microwave dinner, despite it costing more. Maybe they value their free time more than they value the monetary savings. Or maybe they can't do math. Or maybe they're just lazy. Most likely, it's a combination of all of the above. But I don't know about other people, all I know is that when I come home after working for 10 or 12 hours, I'm really tired and don't want to put in the time and effort to cook a meal despite being quite hungry, but I cook anyway, because that's the sound financial decision.
It's a hell of a lot easier to understand and accept the why of organic chaos than it is to understand or justify manufactured chaos.
It's funny that you think there's a difference.
Humans are just another animal, trained by billions of years of evolution to fight as viciously as possible to gain and exploit every single advantage we have. Just like every other animal that exists. The only difference is that we are more effective, which means that we fight all the more viciously. That's just the natural order of things.
People have been claiming 'Tesla is going under! Just you wait and see their next quarter results, it's going to bury them!' for years, and they're still going along just fine(continually increasing their production capacity, constant stream of sales, new contracts and deals being made, etc, etc), so I'm going to continue to be skeptical of speculative gloom & doom prophecies until I see some real data to back it up.
It looks like it's both easier and more successful to start with a clean slate, and just aim for the results, rather than emulate a specific, non-optimal, process.
You're completely correct, which is exactly why we don't want to do this too much. Recall the paperclip maximizer.
Point number two is just silly. You competitor has bad unreliable programmers, yeah, yahoo (heh, heh), yippee kiyay mother flocker. I would also write non-negative references for employees you are trying to unload on competitors. I would also use surreptitious methods to direct crappy customers to competitors and If I could catch out a competitors fraud or criminal practices I would report it to the authorities. I would ower zero loyalty to opposing companies, they are the enemy, I would doubt the loyalty of staff who did not publicly share the same attitude. That, direct shit customers at a specific competitor, might take a while to pay off but it is a funny as fuck when it does (two for one, bad customer dealt with and bad competitor dealt with, mwa hah hah).
No... Just no. It's one thing to be a competitor with another company; to respect them to the same degree that you respect yourself, and to attempt to gain more revenue/customers/profit/etc, through self-improvement(and advertising, of course), both despite and because of that mirror image. It is a completely different thing to view them as "the enemy." Viewing competition as an "enemy" is simply sociopathic, which coincidentally is also an apt description for the treatment you're suggesting for your own employees.
I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that no matter what company people happen to work for, they are always people first, and everything else is secondary. What you are suggesting reverses that prioritization, which is by definition dehumanizing.
Given that the bees didn't die and they were able to carry out their primary mission (bring food back to the hive) I'd say their exposure was below acceptable limits.
Sure, it was probably within the limit for the healthy adult worker bees, but how about the much weaker and less developed bee larvae?
I thought Poker was a game of understanding your opponents not only based on past actions with cards but also by looking at facial expressions, body language and determining whether or not they have a good hand. Along with that, a big part is developing subtle gestures to throw your opponents off.
Without this information, isn't this win somewhat random or "lucky" and not really indicative of how the AI can play against other humans?
Nope. The game is pure statistics based on the known cards, which computers are very good at. Collecting a database on your opponent's habits is also far more useful than looking at their face could ever be. After all, their body language is only an inevitably misleading stay stream of data, controlled entirely by your opponent, whose entire purpose is to throw you off. You're much better off completely ignoring that distraction.
Also, what better "poker face" is there than an emotionless calculating machine that you know will always make the mathematically optimal choice? That has to be unnerving to play against.
propose a solution that doesn't bounce us into the dark ages please.
Nuclear energy. It's clean, it's safe, and it would be cheap if it weren't for paranoid over-regulation. Yes, some safety regulation is needed, but the nuclear industry has far more than it needs, which only restricts its much needed development.
Now, here's the big fat gotcha to what you had to say that will really bake your noodle: People like you, who think things like you presented here, always believe that they are going to be one of the 'chosen ones' allowed the privilege -- and you'd be completely and totally wrong in that regard.
Hate to break this to you, but I'm one of the people who believes that the uneducated masses should not have this much voting power, and that I don't think that I should be one of the people with the vote either. You see, the vote should belong only to the people that have the time and rational capacity to devote to massive in-depth study of politics, economics, law, and society. Most people who are either full time students or are working at least one full time job simply don't have time for that, because they're too busy being otherwise productive members of society. I fully admit that I am one of those people lacking the time required to dedicate to proper study of the subjects required to be able to cast what I would evaluate as a sufficiently educated vote.
Furthermore, I strongly believe that one of the biggest problems that America faces is that our form of democracy actively encourages anti-intellectualism by making everyone's votes equal, which makes a lot of people think "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." We don't let people who haven't studied cars vote on how to build or fix our cars. We don't let people who haven't studied medicine vote on how to heal us when we're sick and wounded. We must be either overly self-important idiots, just insane, or simply uneducated and/or unthinking, if we permit people who haven't studied the things that go into running a country vote on running a country.
Plus we have a lot to learn before we start exo-farming. It's not clear how reliably we can grow crops on Mars even in a well controlled greenhouse
Which is exactly why we should go there. Were not going to find out or learn anything without going to Mars to test these things.
Mars has enough gravity that most plants should grow just fine,
Perhaps but currently that is an unproven assertion. Frankly the gravity is likely to be among the least of the challenges to growing food on Mars. When you have a small self contained garden you run the risk of any number of problems hugely disrupting the entire crop.... I'm not saying it's impossible but it probably will be quite a challenge.
Yet more reasons to go there and start growing as many things as possible, so that we can test absolutely everything.
In any first-past-the-post election system, you will end up with a two-party system. Very occasionally, a third party will displace one of the majors, but then end up as the despised mainstream party.
Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, The Philippines, and several other countries with persistent multi-election multiple party systems would beg to disagree.
I agree. They're both corrupt lying criminals unfit for anything close to public office. There's no practical difference between Hillary and Trump beyond the irrelevant minutiae they both use to manipulate their respective cults.
They know that rocket science is hard and involves many years of setbacks from expected schedules. While Musk is very good at producing rockets, he's not so great at realistic timeframes. Recall that he stated that the first Falcon Heavy launch would happen sometime in 2013. Repeated delays now have the first launch being expected in 2018. Musk announces timeframes for if everything goes perfectly, which is a very low probability possibility when dealing with rockets.
Yes, Musk will get us to Mars eventually, it just won't be quite as soon as he first announced.
Good for them. ROI is good for the investor. You must know that here is no obligation (moral or otherwise) to fix other people's problems, or to develop technology that fixes other people's problems.
Sure there is an obligation, at least if you admit one has an obligation to better oneself. Measured altruism is self-interest. If a someone can develop a technology that fixes other people's problems, those people will not only pay for that technology, benefiting all parties involved, but they will also have more of some resource now freed up by that technology to devote to developing some sort of other beneficial technology themselves. Overall standard of living increases as a result, including one's own standard of living.
If one has an obligation to improve oneself, or one's standings, one necessarily also has an obligation to help others so as to enable them to better help oneself(or some other person who then could help oneself).
Ultimately, the answer is simply this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Everything else is just a justification, true ones of course, but never the primary reason.
Some people get it, some people don't. I happen to be one of the people who do, and that's okay. It sounds like you happen to be one of the people who don't, and that's okay too.
Those considering this need to completely rethink propulsion and come up with a plan for getting people not only there, but home.... safely and expediently, in time scales measured in hours or a few days at most... not weeks, and certainly not months. Otherwise, any rocket we send them up in may as well be their tomb.
Why? Why do you think that colonists want to return to place they left? And why do you think that Earth is necessarily a better tomb for every single person than Mars would be?
If any part of Musk's plan involves indenturement, or stakeholder value increase, and does not come out upfront say that the one and only purpose is colonization, for the sake of colonization, it needs to be treated with revulsion and derision.
The former is how you secure slaves in space based manufacturing.
Why would anyone want space slaves for manufacturing when they could use industrial equipment and manufacturing robots that are far cheaper than having to supply expensive food/water/air/medical/misc to maintain slaves? There just isn't any advantage to slavery anymore, and especially not when you get into space.
Yes it is the major issue. Which always brings to mind my favorite proposed solution: Mine neodymium from asteroids, use it to construct a massive rare earth magnet ring around Mars, and watch as Mars' solid metal core once again becomes magnetized and creates a planetary magnetic field. Sure, it would be a truly massive project, but it would be easier by orders of magnitude as compared to trying to restart the magnetic field by liquefying the mantle and outer core of Mars. Plus, we wouldn't have to worry restarting Olympus Mons.
They're missing the point...
on
How To Die On Mars
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The point of a permanent Mars settlement is the fact that some of us would rather die on Mars. I don't understand why people are finding any problems with that.
While I agree with the conclusion, I do beleive you arrived at it a bit incorrectly. It's that mosquitoes don't fill any useful ecological niche. Their sole purpose in the environment is to make things suffer, and they don't have any positive contributions which even come close to evening that out. This is a rare thing that should enable us to slaughter them in massive quantities to the point of extinction without any noticeable effect on the environment except that more people will be willing to go on nature walks.
It sure seems that if a larger landing area was available, so that the rocket didn't have to lean so far to adjust to a very small target and thus could prioritize staying vertical, it would be able to land successfully.
Or they could get their engineers to take a look at the PID system they're using so that the rocket could correct for the error by making more gradual adjustments sooner, it wouldn't have to lean so far.
Slashdot Mirror
McDonald's sells cheap food. This is the reason why, in America, "fresh food" is expensive.
Okay, as a poor person myself, I am incredibly tired of this argument. After my other expenses, I have less than $40 a month left over for food, and so I have to pay very close attention to the price and nutritional content of my food. And the thing is, buying a mixture of raw ingredients(mostly flour, sugar, and eggs) and fresh seasonal produce(produce, meaning fruits and veggies. Any meat is expensive, and is well outside of my price range most of the time) is far cheaper than getting that non-nutritional garbage from fast food joints(believe me, I have looked, and if fast food was cheaper per nutrient, that's the only thing I would be eating because every dollar I can save really does matter in my situation).
Of course raw ingredients and fresh produce do come with their own particular downside; it takes time and effort to prepare it, and it also takes time and effort to learn how to cook. Some poor people work multiple jobs or long hours, and when they come home at the end of the day, they're too tired to put in the required effort, or they don't have enough time left in the day to cook a proper meal. It's faster and easier to either buy some fast food, or to just heat up a frozen microwave dinner, despite it costing more. Maybe they value their free time more than they value the monetary savings. Or maybe they can't do math. Or maybe they're just lazy. Most likely, it's a combination of all of the above. But I don't know about other people, all I know is that when I come home after working for 10 or 12 hours, I'm really tired and don't want to put in the time and effort to cook a meal despite being quite hungry, but I cook anyway, because that's the sound financial decision.
It's a hell of a lot easier to understand and accept the why of organic chaos than it is to understand or justify manufactured chaos.
It's funny that you think there's a difference.
Humans are just another animal, trained by billions of years of evolution to fight as viciously as possible to gain and exploit every single advantage we have. Just like every other animal that exists. The only difference is that we are more effective, which means that we fight all the more viciously. That's just the natural order of things.
People have been claiming 'Tesla is going under! Just you wait and see their next quarter results, it's going to bury them!' for years, and they're still going along just fine(continually increasing their production capacity, constant stream of sales, new contracts and deals being made, etc, etc), so I'm going to continue to be skeptical of speculative gloom & doom prophecies until I see some real data to back it up.
It looks like it's both easier and more successful to start with a clean slate, and just aim for the results, rather than emulate a specific, non-optimal, process.
You're completely correct, which is exactly why we don't want to do this too much. Recall the paperclip maximizer.
Point number two is just silly. You competitor has bad unreliable programmers, yeah, yahoo (heh, heh), yippee kiyay mother flocker. I would also write non-negative references for employees you are trying to unload on competitors. I would also use surreptitious methods to direct crappy customers to competitors and If I could catch out a competitors fraud or criminal practices I would report it to the authorities. I would ower zero loyalty to opposing companies, they are the enemy, I would doubt the loyalty of staff who did not publicly share the same attitude. That, direct shit customers at a specific competitor, might take a while to pay off but it is a funny as fuck when it does (two for one, bad customer dealt with and bad competitor dealt with, mwa hah hah).
No... Just no. It's one thing to be a competitor with another company; to respect them to the same degree that you respect yourself, and to attempt to gain more revenue/customers/profit/etc, through self-improvement(and advertising, of course), both despite and because of that mirror image. It is a completely different thing to view them as "the enemy." Viewing competition as an "enemy" is simply sociopathic, which coincidentally is also an apt description for the treatment you're suggesting for your own employees.
I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that no matter what company people happen to work for, they are always people first, and everything else is secondary. What you are suggesting reverses that prioritization, which is by definition dehumanizing.
Given that the bees didn't die and they were able to carry out their primary mission (bring food back to the hive) I'd say their exposure was below acceptable limits.
Sure, it was probably within the limit for the healthy adult worker bees, but how about the much weaker and less developed bee larvae?
Step 1: provide service for free. ...
Step 3: change the service price to now cost 100x more than during the step 1 period.
Something tells me you didn't do the math on this one.
I must admit to finding your sig very amusing in the context of your post here.
I thought Poker was a game of understanding your opponents not only based on past actions with cards but also by looking at facial expressions, body language and determining whether or not they have a good hand. Along with that, a big part is developing subtle gestures to throw your opponents off.
Without this information, isn't this win somewhat random or "lucky" and not really indicative of how the AI can play against other humans?
Nope. The game is pure statistics based on the known cards, which computers are very good at. Collecting a database on your opponent's habits is also far more useful than looking at their face could ever be. After all, their body language is only an inevitably misleading stay stream of data, controlled entirely by your opponent, whose entire purpose is to throw you off. You're much better off completely ignoring that distraction.
Also, what better "poker face" is there than an emotionless calculating machine that you know will always make the mathematically optimal choice? That has to be unnerving to play against.
propose a solution that doesn't bounce us into the dark ages please.
Nuclear energy. It's clean, it's safe, and it would be cheap if it weren't for paranoid over-regulation. Yes, some safety regulation is needed, but the nuclear industry has far more than it needs, which only restricts its much needed development.
Whoooooosh
Now, here's the big fat gotcha to what you had to say that will really bake your noodle: People like you, who think things like you presented here, always believe that they are going to be one of the 'chosen ones' allowed the privilege -- and you'd be completely and totally wrong in that regard.
Hate to break this to you, but I'm one of the people who believes that the uneducated masses should not have this much voting power, and that I don't think that I should be one of the people with the vote either. You see, the vote should belong only to the people that have the time and rational capacity to devote to massive in-depth study of politics, economics, law, and society. Most people who are either full time students or are working at least one full time job simply don't have time for that, because they're too busy being otherwise productive members of society. I fully admit that I am one of those people lacking the time required to dedicate to proper study of the subjects required to be able to cast what I would evaluate as a sufficiently educated vote.
Furthermore, I strongly believe that one of the biggest problems that America faces is that our form of democracy actively encourages anti-intellectualism by making everyone's votes equal, which makes a lot of people think "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." We don't let people who haven't studied cars vote on how to build or fix our cars. We don't let people who haven't studied medicine vote on how to heal us when we're sick and wounded. We must be either overly self-important idiots, just insane, or simply uneducated and/or unthinking, if we permit people who haven't studied the things that go into running a country vote on running a country.
Plus we have a lot to learn before we start exo-farming. It's not clear how reliably we can grow crops on Mars even in a well controlled greenhouse
Which is exactly why we should go there. Were not going to find out or learn anything without going to Mars to test these things.
Mars has enough gravity that most plants should grow just fine,
Perhaps but currently that is an unproven assertion. Frankly the gravity is likely to be among the least of the challenges to growing food on Mars. When you have a small self contained garden you run the risk of any number of problems hugely disrupting the entire crop. ... I'm not saying it's impossible but it probably will be quite a challenge.
Yet more reasons to go there and start growing as many things as possible, so that we can test absolutely everything.
In any first-past-the-post election system, you will end up with a two-party system. Very occasionally, a third party will displace one of the majors, but then end up as the despised mainstream party.
Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, The Philippines, and several other countries with persistent multi-election multiple party systems would beg to disagree.
I agree. They're both corrupt lying criminals unfit for anything close to public office. There's no practical difference between Hillary and Trump beyond the irrelevant minutiae they both use to manipulate their respective cults.
They know that rocket science is hard and involves many years of setbacks from expected schedules. While Musk is very good at producing rockets, he's not so great at realistic timeframes. Recall that he stated that the first Falcon Heavy launch would happen sometime in 2013. Repeated delays now have the first launch being expected in 2018. Musk announces timeframes for if everything goes perfectly, which is a very low probability possibility when dealing with rockets.
Yes, Musk will get us to Mars eventually, it just won't be quite as soon as he first announced.
Good for them. ROI is good for the investor. You must know that here is no obligation (moral or otherwise) to fix other people's problems, or to develop technology that fixes other people's problems.
Sure there is an obligation, at least if you admit one has an obligation to better oneself. Measured altruism is self-interest. If a someone can develop a technology that fixes other people's problems, those people will not only pay for that technology, benefiting all parties involved, but they will also have more of some resource now freed up by that technology to devote to developing some sort of other beneficial technology themselves. Overall standard of living increases as a result, including one's own standard of living.
If one has an obligation to improve oneself, or one's standings, one necessarily also has an obligation to help others so as to enable them to better help oneself(or some other person who then could help oneself).
Ultimately, the answer is simply this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Everything else is just a justification, true ones of course, but never the primary reason.
Some people get it, some people don't. I happen to be one of the people who do, and that's okay. It sounds like you happen to be one of the people who don't, and that's okay too.
Those considering this need to completely rethink propulsion and come up with a plan for getting people not only there, but home.... safely and expediently, in time scales measured in hours or a few days at most... not weeks, and certainly not months. Otherwise, any rocket we send them up in may as well be their tomb.
Why? Why do you think that colonists want to return to place they left? And why do you think that Earth is necessarily a better tomb for every single person than Mars would be?
If any part of Musk's plan involves indenturement, or stakeholder value increase, and does not come out upfront say that the one and only purpose is colonization, for the sake of colonization, it needs to be treated with revulsion and derision.
The former is how you secure slaves in space based manufacturing.
Why would anyone want space slaves for manufacturing when they could use industrial equipment and manufacturing robots that are far cheaper than having to supply expensive food/water/air/medical/misc to maintain slaves? There just isn't any advantage to slavery anymore, and especially not when you get into space.
Yes it is the major issue. Which always brings to mind my favorite proposed solution: Mine neodymium from asteroids, use it to construct a massive rare earth magnet ring around Mars, and watch as Mars' solid metal core once again becomes magnetized and creates a planetary magnetic field. Sure, it would be a truly massive project, but it would be easier by orders of magnitude as compared to trying to restart the magnetic field by liquefying the mantle and outer core of Mars. Plus, we wouldn't have to worry restarting Olympus Mons.
The point of a permanent Mars settlement is the fact that some of us would rather die on Mars. I don't understand why people are finding any problems with that.
While I agree with the conclusion, I do beleive you arrived at it a bit incorrectly. It's that mosquitoes don't fill any useful ecological niche. Their sole purpose in the environment is to make things suffer, and they don't have any positive contributions which even come close to evening that out. This is a rare thing that should enable us to slaughter them in massive quantities to the point of extinction without any noticeable effect on the environment except that more people will be willing to go on nature walks.
The pad area they have at KSC...
The Kerbal Space Center?
It sure seems that if a larger landing area was available, so that the rocket didn't have to lean so far to adjust to a very small target and thus could prioritize staying vertical, it would be able to land successfully.
Or they could get their engineers to take a look at the PID system they're using so that the rocket could correct for the error by making more gradual adjustments sooner, it wouldn't have to lean so far.