Sleep deprivation has been a natural and common occurrence throughout human evolution. It seems highly implausible that "an all-nighter" would cause permanent brain damage in any meaningful sense.
I live in a place with lower taxes, universal free health care, and scores higher in livability and freedom indexes. Get more pay less. All you have to do is stop drinking the loonitarian koolaid and look around. Of course, your mental illness will not allow you to think.
Wonderful! You found yourself a tax shelter in some small, rich enclave. There are plenty of those around: Norway, Monaco, Singapore, New Zealand, you name it. Why can't the rest of the world live just like you do? Let them eat cake! Yet, you lack the balls to actually give up your US citizenship because deep down you know that the place you're living right now is built on sand.
Are contracts a market mechanism? As they are enforced by the government.
Market mechanisms are the interactions by which buyers and sellers arrive at efficient allocations of goods and services in a free market. Contracts and government enforcement of contracts are not "market mechanism", nor are they even necessary for market mechanisms to operate.
Or are you just "No True Scotsman"ing me, where any counter-point I mention will be excluded from your moving target argument?
Your claim that pre-ACA, we had a free market in health care is ludicrous. You have made no argument to support your ludicrous claim. Once you do make an argument, we can have a debate. Given that you are struggling with basic economic concepts like "market mechanism", I won't hold my breath.
The Therac-25 problems could have been easily prevented with better software processes and practices; no hardware safeguards were/are needed. If the hardware had been developed like the software was, the hardware would likely have failed too.
This paradigm is centuries old and taught in every halfway reasonable engineering curriculum. That this even needs to be brought up shows that IT and CS do not qualify as engineering disciplines at this time
Any halfway reasonable engineering curriculum also teaches that engineering is all about tradeoffs, and that safety and security are variables like any other. Hardware based safety and security features are expensive, costs that aren't made up for by reductions in risk in many applications.
Furthermore, software developers usually don't even get to make these calls anyway. Engineers and system designers decide how safety and security is to be handled and software developers then do the best they can under the given constraints. That is, the people responsible for how things get divided between hardware/software are engineers, not software developers, and if they make the wrong calls, don't blame the software developers.
My guess would be that people have been exceedingly stupid, e.g. by putting the limiters in software in SCADA systems.
In many cases, dangerous regimes cannot be excluded by simple limits on individual variables, so hardware limiters are not even an option. Even if they are, they are not automatically safer or more secure.
When I asked my EE student class (bachelor level) what they though about that, their immediate response was that this is stupid. Apparently CS types are still ignoring well-established knowledge.
Sounds like your EE student class is getting some bad instruction by someone who likes simplistic answers and who likes to engage in unproductive blame shifting.
The government is eliminating market mechanisms like fraud.
Fraud isn't a market mechanism.
We'd be so much better off with no regulations at all. Keeping the poor multi-billionaires down by preventing mass fraud against the desperate. If they aren't millionaires, they obviously are inferior humans who deserve it.
Spare me your ignorant sarcasm. It's people like you who are condemning large portions of the US to poverty and inadequate medical care.
The problem with healthcare isn't evil multi-billionaires (they aren't affected by health care legislation at all), it's evil people like you.
Government control means eliminating market mechanisms; that's the whole point of government control of anything.
So they claim that the state of health care prior to ACA was the best in the world? The best it could be?
The US hasn't had a free market in health care in more than a century. ACA has simply moved us from one corrupt, highly regulated system to an even more corrupt, highly regulated system.
It is no more or less sustainable than 100% participation in private insurance.
Private insurance is constrained by market mechanisms: insurers can only offer what makes financial sense, and customers and investors can punish bad insurance companies. Government or tax payer financing of insurance kills those market mechanisms; it removes the only mechanism by which we can actually constrain and punish badly behaving corporations.
Given their focus on blaming the government and not solving the problem they state exists makes me doubt all that comes from them.
They are trying to solve the problem, namely by taking away government control of health care (and other parts of our lives) and handing it back to individuals and markets.
Once wealth, power and security are seen as birthrights and not hard-won prizes
They aren't "seen as" birthrights, they are actually enshrined as birthrights by law. People don't become lazy as that happens, they simply respond rationally and efficiently to a new economic and social environment, an environment that increasingly socializes costs and risks, and that increasingly rewards rent seeking.
There's a big difference between an individual moral failing ("laziness") and a rational response to a new economic environment. Widespread moral failings would be hard to influence, but ending socializing costs and risks, and making rent seeking is something we know how to do. It may still be hard to do politically, but legally and economically, we could do it.
You're counting on some magical technology to be discovered that will save humanity? That is not only a huge gamble, it's an unbelievably stupid gamble as well.
It's worked for the past 10000 years: every time we hit some limit, new technology let us get around the limit.
Furthermore, if we fail to develop new technologies, we'll simply stop growing.
That's a very narrow and conservative point of view that doesn't allow for any kind of technological achievement that we don't yet understand
That's not the "conservative" point of view, it's the "liberal" point of view. (US-style) liberals, progressives, and the left wing have been worried about a Malthusian catastrophy for a long time and want to regulate and interefere. Global warming is just the latest example of this. Much of the long term planning of progressives simply does not account (and cannot account) for technological change and market mechanisms.
Conservatives generally want people to have as many kids as possible. Contrary to the straw man put up by progressives, conservatives generally don't deny the occurrence of global warming, they just don't care because they believe markets and market-driven development of new technologies will take care of whatever the consequences might be. That's a "conservative" view because that's how the US and other nations have dealth with change for a long time.
That rant would be a lot more convincing if it came from someone who (1) actually produced something creative, and (2) who could make a convincing argument that he has actually been harmed by Google.
So far, I see the whinings of a third-rate author whose works aren't infringed by Google and who has probably benefited enormously from publicity due to Google, not to mention that he and others creating "his" show probably use Gmail and other Google tools.
The Koch brothers and friends are always bitching about the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance when they work full time.
I've never seen the Koch brothers "bitch" about "bout the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance". Citation?
The Koch brothers, like most people who believe in classical liberalism, simply believe that government financing of programs like health care and retirement is simply not sustainable; what they are "bitching" about is Democrats pushing through legislation that is good for their short term political gains but in the long term will invariably result in "the bottom 90%" not being able to get good health insurance.
The overbearing, unrepresentative, one-size-fits-all approach that we're suffering from right now is simply due to trying to have a single federal government make more and more decisions about economics, social policy, etc.
There is a much simpler and more traditional way of achieving the same effect: reduce the size and power of the federal government. That way, people will naturally sort themselves into states and counties with similar political interests and leanings, and one state/county has little power over another. I.e., if people in your neighborhood don't spend money the way you like it, just move. That has a number of advantages over your approach, foremost that people need to live with the consequences of their choices (i.e., if they want low welfare spending, they must move in a community with low welfare spending), and that changes in allocation can't be made on a whim but exact a price from people who make those changes (i.e., moving).
A free market in education lets parents choose what their children learn, which results in a wide diversity of viewpoints being taught. That's a good approach.
The approach we are increasingly heading towards is having everybody educated according to a single, government-imposed standard. That results in exactly what you fear: generations of students who "get fed biased information and suffer for it on the world stage".
Don't believe me? Look at the US education system. It's not the private schools that are dragging it down in international comparisons, it's the public schools. And public schools drag us down despite having some of the highest per pupil spending on the planet.
Not many people meet in the park these days to discuss ideas (or gossip) on Sunday afternoons.
No, we meet on the Internet instead.
We used to own the government. Now private enterprise does.
That's utter nonsense. The US government has always been in the hands of a rich elite. It's just that the damage it could do was limited by its limited role. But the rich elite has figured out that by promising people "stuff" (social security, health care, cheap homes, etc.), they can convince them to give them more and more power and money, and they use that to enrich themselves.
Watch as the US Postal Service is delivered to the hands of private enterprise in the next 10 years.
Whether billionaires also spend money on additional research makes no iota of difference to the publicly funded research.
Furthermore, large-scale government funding of research is historically a relatively recent phenomenon and closely tied to the rise of socialism and communism: socialist and communist regimes in large part tried to direct research for what their central planners considered "the public good", and the US responded in turn with nuclear weapons research, research into industrial agriculture, etc. Let's not even get into publicly funded research into social science, politics, and race. So, it isn't even clear that publicly funded research is a good thing. But whether it is or not, we have plenty of it.
Well, Heinlein is right, though not in the way he probably intended it.
In totalitarian regimes or anarchies, people have to be polite even if they are wronged because if they don't, they'll get hurt.
If they are lucky, those cultures then develop into wealthy, liberal societies. In those kinds of societies, people have some degree of free speech and personal security, so they feel free to speak up and speak their mind, even if it offends people.
Eventually, wealthy and liberal societies come to an end for other reasons. People like Heinlein are then looking for causes and misattribute the fall to whatever negative social phenomena they observed prior to the fall.
So, a period of "rudeness" usually precedes the fall of a great civilization, but there is no causal relationship: rudeness doesn't cause the fall, and the fall doesn't cause rudeness.
This seems to be what the population of Europe is clamoring for, and Hungary delivers. Populism at its best. Hungary is simply less constrained by a tradition of democracy and liberty than other European nations. But don't worry, France, Germany, and the UK will catch up.
The rich in Florence were actively promoting the development of arts and culture
The rich in Florence were actually rich, as in being able to afford palaces, servants, and all that. A bunch of Facebook stock doesn't buy you that kind of wealth anymore.
Sure, you are correct that much of it was private, but the architecture, and public buildings (and the paintings within them) were for everyone - or at least, so everyone could see how great they were.
SF zoning and planning means nobody can build shit in the city, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's part of the reason for the housing shortage. It's also why SF architecture is so dismal.
I'd argue that it is nothing like classical Florence, where the artists had sponsors
So would I. I classical Florence, the rich could do whatever they wanted. They could tear down entire blocks, build palaces, and display their vast wealth in whatever way they wanted. In San Francisco, you can't even chop down a tree without getting lynched by the mob and raped by the planning commission. In fact, the people San Franciscans complain about as being "wealthy" are Internet millionaires who have just barely enough money to buy themselves a nice two bedroom.
There's no analog in Silly Valley for that, none of the new rich are sponsoring great art, whether for themselves or the public.
The truly rich in Silicon Valley spend their money on private space flight, exploring the human genome, building robots, and tons of other stuff. Stuff that's actually useful.
Creating artificial chemical structures based on his theory, like this paper seems to do, is a neat additional gimmick, but that has been done many times before. Even if it were new, it wouldn't be little more than a simulation of his equations; what counts is whether biology behaves like he predicted.
The real test of Turing's theory is whether it describes actual morphogenesis, and it has been shown to do that, many times over the years. That's the real "validation".
Group insurance works well, as it removes adverse selection (the phenomenon where only the sick buy health insurance).
Insurance is a transfer of a risk of a loss against a payment. Calling Obamacare "insurance" is a fraud. A concept of "adverse selection" simply does not exist with insurance; once you're sick, there is no risk to be transferred anymore.
As long as everybody in the country is part of the group, there isn't the problem of losing one's insurance along with one's job.
We don't have health insurance in this country. What we have is poorly regulated, vastly overpriced health maintenance.
Slashdot Mirror
Sleep deprivation has been a natural and common occurrence throughout human evolution. It seems highly implausible that "an all-nighter" would cause permanent brain damage in any meaningful sense.
But if you challenge the "scientific consensus", then you'll be ridiculed, lose your funding, and will be kicked out of academia.
Wonderful! You found yourself a tax shelter in some small, rich enclave. There are plenty of those around: Norway, Monaco, Singapore, New Zealand, you name it. Why can't the rest of the world live just like you do? Let them eat cake! Yet, you lack the balls to actually give up your US citizenship because deep down you know that the place you're living right now is built on sand.
Market mechanisms are the interactions by which buyers and sellers arrive at efficient allocations of goods and services in a free market. Contracts and government enforcement of contracts are not "market mechanism", nor are they even necessary for market mechanisms to operate.
Your claim that pre-ACA, we had a free market in health care is ludicrous. You have made no argument to support your ludicrous claim. Once you do make an argument, we can have a debate. Given that you are struggling with basic economic concepts like "market mechanism", I won't hold my breath.
The Therac-25 problems could have been easily prevented with better software processes and practices; no hardware safeguards were/are needed. If the hardware had been developed like the software was, the hardware would likely have failed too.
Any halfway reasonable engineering curriculum also teaches that engineering is all about tradeoffs, and that safety and security are variables like any other. Hardware based safety and security features are expensive, costs that aren't made up for by reductions in risk in many applications.
Furthermore, software developers usually don't even get to make these calls anyway. Engineers and system designers decide how safety and security is to be handled and software developers then do the best they can under the given constraints. That is, the people responsible for how things get divided between hardware/software are engineers, not software developers, and if they make the wrong calls, don't blame the software developers.
In many cases, dangerous regimes cannot be excluded by simple limits on individual variables, so hardware limiters are not even an option. Even if they are, they are not automatically safer or more secure.
Sounds like your EE student class is getting some bad instruction by someone who likes simplistic answers and who likes to engage in unproductive blame shifting.
Fraud isn't a market mechanism.
Spare me your ignorant sarcasm. It's people like you who are condemning large portions of the US to poverty and inadequate medical care.
The problem with healthcare isn't evil multi-billionaires (they aren't affected by health care legislation at all), it's evil people like you.
Government control means eliminating market mechanisms; that's the whole point of government control of anything.
The US hasn't had a free market in health care in more than a century. ACA has simply moved us from one corrupt, highly regulated system to an even more corrupt, highly regulated system.
Private insurance is constrained by market mechanisms: insurers can only offer what makes financial sense, and customers and investors can punish bad insurance companies. Government or tax payer financing of insurance kills those market mechanisms; it removes the only mechanism by which we can actually constrain and punish badly behaving corporations.
They are trying to solve the problem, namely by taking away government control of health care (and other parts of our lives) and handing it back to individuals and markets.
They aren't "seen as" birthrights, they are actually enshrined as birthrights by law. People don't become lazy as that happens, they simply respond rationally and efficiently to a new economic and social environment, an environment that increasingly socializes costs and risks, and that increasingly rewards rent seeking.
There's a big difference between an individual moral failing ("laziness") and a rational response to a new economic environment. Widespread moral failings would be hard to influence, but ending socializing costs and risks, and making rent seeking is something we know how to do. It may still be hard to do politically, but legally and economically, we could do it.
The solar system is full of vast amounts of resources, and they are within reach of current technologies. No Star Trek technologies required.
It's worked for the past 10000 years: every time we hit some limit, new technology let us get around the limit.
Furthermore, if we fail to develop new technologies, we'll simply stop growing.
That's not the "conservative" point of view, it's the "liberal" point of view. (US-style) liberals, progressives, and the left wing have been worried about a Malthusian catastrophy for a long time and want to regulate and interefere. Global warming is just the latest example of this. Much of the long term planning of progressives simply does not account (and cannot account) for technological change and market mechanisms.
Conservatives generally want people to have as many kids as possible. Contrary to the straw man put up by progressives, conservatives generally don't deny the occurrence of global warming, they just don't care because they believe markets and market-driven development of new technologies will take care of whatever the consequences might be. That's a "conservative" view because that's how the US and other nations have dealth with change for a long time.
That rant would be a lot more convincing if it came from someone who (1) actually produced something creative, and (2) who could make a convincing argument that he has actually been harmed by Google.
So far, I see the whinings of a third-rate author whose works aren't infringed by Google and who has probably benefited enormously from publicity due to Google, not to mention that he and others creating "his" show probably use Gmail and other Google tools.
I've never seen the Koch brothers "bitch" about "bout the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance". Citation?
The Koch brothers, like most people who believe in classical liberalism, simply believe that government financing of programs like health care and retirement is simply not sustainable; what they are "bitching" about is Democrats pushing through legislation that is good for their short term political gains but in the long term will invariably result in "the bottom 90%" not being able to get good health insurance.
The overbearing, unrepresentative, one-size-fits-all approach that we're suffering from right now is simply due to trying to have a single federal government make more and more decisions about economics, social policy, etc.
There is a much simpler and more traditional way of achieving the same effect: reduce the size and power of the federal government. That way, people will naturally sort themselves into states and counties with similar political interests and leanings, and one state/county has little power over another. I.e., if people in your neighborhood don't spend money the way you like it, just move. That has a number of advantages over your approach, foremost that people need to live with the consequences of their choices (i.e., if they want low welfare spending, they must move in a community with low welfare spending), and that changes in allocation can't be made on a whim but exact a price from people who make those changes (i.e., moving).
A free market in education lets parents choose what their children learn, which results in a wide diversity of viewpoints being taught. That's a good approach.
The approach we are increasingly heading towards is having everybody educated according to a single, government-imposed standard. That results in exactly what you fear: generations of students who "get fed biased information and suffer for it on the world stage".
Don't believe me? Look at the US education system. It's not the private schools that are dragging it down in international comparisons, it's the public schools. And public schools drag us down despite having some of the highest per pupil spending on the planet.
No, we meet on the Internet instead.
That's utter nonsense. The US government has always been in the hands of a rich elite. It's just that the damage it could do was limited by its limited role. But the rich elite has figured out that by promising people "stuff" (social security, health care, cheap homes, etc.), they can convince them to give them more and more power and money, and they use that to enrich themselves.
We should be so lucky.
Federal science funding is near an all time high (disregarding the one-time stimulus nonsense):
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
Whether billionaires also spend money on additional research makes no iota of difference to the publicly funded research.
Furthermore, large-scale government funding of research is historically a relatively recent phenomenon and closely tied to the rise of socialism and communism: socialist and communist regimes in large part tried to direct research for what their central planners considered "the public good", and the US responded in turn with nuclear weapons research, research into industrial agriculture, etc. Let's not even get into publicly funded research into social science, politics, and race. So, it isn't even clear that publicly funded research is a good thing. But whether it is or not, we have plenty of it.
Well, Heinlein is right, though not in the way he probably intended it.
In totalitarian regimes or anarchies, people have to be polite even if they are wronged because if they don't, they'll get hurt.
If they are lucky, those cultures then develop into wealthy, liberal societies. In those kinds of societies, people have some degree of free speech and personal security, so they feel free to speak up and speak their mind, even if it offends people.
Eventually, wealthy and liberal societies come to an end for other reasons. People like Heinlein are then looking for causes and misattribute the fall to whatever negative social phenomena they observed prior to the fall.
So, a period of "rudeness" usually precedes the fall of a great civilization, but there is no causal relationship: rudeness doesn't cause the fall, and the fall doesn't cause rudeness.
This seems to be what the population of Europe is clamoring for, and Hungary delivers. Populism at its best. Hungary is simply less constrained by a tradition of democracy and liberty than other European nations. But don't worry, France, Germany, and the UK will catch up.
The rich in Florence were actually rich, as in being able to afford palaces, servants, and all that. A bunch of Facebook stock doesn't buy you that kind of wealth anymore.
SF zoning and planning means nobody can build shit in the city, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's part of the reason for the housing shortage. It's also why SF architecture is so dismal.
So would I. I classical Florence, the rich could do whatever they wanted. They could tear down entire blocks, build palaces, and display their vast wealth in whatever way they wanted. In San Francisco, you can't even chop down a tree without getting lynched by the mob and raped by the planning commission. In fact, the people San Franciscans complain about as being "wealthy" are Internet millionaires who have just barely enough money to buy themselves a nice two bedroom.
The truly rich in Silicon Valley spend their money on private space flight, exploring the human genome, building robots, and tons of other stuff. Stuff that's actually useful.
San Jose is on Light Rail and Caltrain, and near the BART terminus. Downtown San Jose is getting its own BART station next year.
Yeah. It shows. Please stay there.
Creating artificial chemical structures based on his theory, like this paper seems to do, is a neat additional gimmick, but that has been done many times before. Even if it were new, it wouldn't be little more than a simulation of his equations; what counts is whether biology behaves like he predicted.
The real test of Turing's theory is whether it describes actual morphogenesis, and it has been shown to do that, many times over the years. That's the real "validation".
Insurance is a transfer of a risk of a loss against a payment. Calling Obamacare "insurance" is a fraud. A concept of "adverse selection" simply does not exist with insurance; once you're sick, there is no risk to be transferred anymore.
We don't have health insurance in this country. What we have is poorly regulated, vastly overpriced health maintenance.