If only there could be some sensible approach to solve that problem, like simply allowing an exception for easily provably exceptional circumstances like kidnappings. If only that was possible. Unfortunately it's not, so we must follow one extreme or the other, always a warrant or never a warrant. Too bad.
Politicians are free to say: 'I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.' That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.' That's not a moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based
Our natural rights do not derive from statistics. What a dangerous idea. What if statistics really showed (hypothetically) that sending drug users to prison was effective at engineering some 'greater goal', would that make it morally OK? Precisely not.
I could probably show "evidence" that slavery helped reduce the economic costs of picking cotton. Such "evidence" - even when true - is clearly not what ought to be the foundation of our political and moral reasoning.
Henderson is right that politics should be evidence-based, but he gets it precisely the wrong way round. It should precisely be the moral claims that are evidence-based and reason-based (e.g. whether drug users should be punished).
Politics is basically all about when violence should be applied, and politicians should not be free to claim "violence should be used against drug users" - that notion that such "morality" subjective is very and dangerously wrong - such a claim must in itself be able to be objectively backed by facts and reason. It is objectively wrong (using facts and reason) to initiate violence against (i.e. put in jail) drug users who are harming nobody --- the moral claim is precisely the one that ought to be attacked. And the statistical claims, while peripherally interesting, should be utterly irrelevant to politics --- again, our natural rights do not derive from statistics, any more that hypothetical statistics showing (say) that slavery had economic benefits, would in any way be a valid argument for slavery. Slavery was wrong because it involves the non-consenting initiation of force against the slaves, not because of statistical evidence relating to indirect consequences.
It is correct that scientific thinking should be applied to politics, but it should be applied in the sense of using scientific thinking properly to determine the validity of moral claims, from which law must then be derived.
It's not really a "tax" because it's completely voluntary. Private casinos are also allowed to rig the game in their favor, and that's fine, that isn't the problem. All a state lottery really is, is a casino operation, but with a measure of state protectionism against the free market. Think of it the same way you would think of, say, government operating a dairy farm and selling milk. Or government offering broadband. It competes with free market operations that provide the same service, but with protection from free market forces. It's government offering services. It's basically the same also as if a casino operator (or dairy farmer) bribed state officials to enact laws to protect his/her business specifically.
If a decent security programmer/expert earns say $50/hr, then this covers only 10 hours of work, and that ignores actual cost-to-company equivalent costs of hiring an expert (e.g. desk, HR, equipment, admin, accounting overheads, so it's actually closer to 5 or 6 hours worth of programmer time). Do you mean to tell me that if they hired an expert internally, they expert the cost of that expert equivalent finding a bug every 5 hours? This is highly patronizing, they are basically treating the security experts out there as children who are supposed to get excited wasting their time doing virtually-free work for the great Facebook just for the so-called "prestige". In fact, most will spend many hours and are likely to earn nothing. Facebook, hire some programmers out of your own damn pocket. Security experts, retain some dignity.
It is human to do it, but I think it is counterproductive to confuse "nostalgic value" with "value".
I really enjoy reading very good books that stimulate my mind, but I am puzzled when people say 'the joy is in the experience' and refer nostalgically to 'turning pages'. When I'm reading a really good book, I couldn't care for the 'experience', it's about what I'm reading. I do find reading text on a screen somehow less "engaging", but I won't go so far as to say 'the joy is in the experience', and frankly if I was a young kid today and my grandpa was trying to encourage me to read because I get to 'turn pages' and 'the joy is in the experience', I expect I would probably find that a rather lame argument and would go back to my e-everything. I think if you want a kid to read a physical book give him an interesting physical book.
For books, true "value" though is in the text, not the medium. Our children will grow up not missing turning pages, but will develop arbitrarily associated deeply nostalgic feelings for the particular look and user interface of the (relatively primitive) e-ink and e-reader standards of today. Then they will grow up and try to explain to their (eyes rolling) children how the joy of reading on these primitive screens is "in the experience", and that their kids are missing something because they only read books through, I don't know, the direct-brain-reader-interface of 2040.
I love pixel-y old low-res video games and side-scrollers because it takes me back to my childhood, but I'm not going to push my children to play them somehow hoping they will get the same "feeling" out of them - they won't. The good news is your children will develop equally deep nostalgic feelings for whatever is the norm their day, so they're not missing anything --- provided you figure out what's actually valuable --- e.g. great books.
do not need the abstract tool of money. No other animal uses such a high level of abstraction to represent value exchange
Um, sure, but other animals still sleep in the dirt, get wet when it rains, die of basic diseases, and no other animals have advanced medicine and technology and such sophisticated division of labor. I'm not sure how 'no other animal' uses it, is an argument against it. Without money, meaningful division of labor would be impossible; without meaningful complex division of labor, we would not have been able to progress much. How would someone be able to specialize in, say, treatment of neurological disorders, or how would newton have been able to specialize in researching newtonian mechanics and lenses, for example, if there was no such thing as money? He would have had to either grow his own food, or would have had to trade his services directly with a farmer, which makes no sense.
Now if you want to define consciousness a just being awake and aware then you can do that, but you limit your ability to go beyond this definition you have, Abstraction only works as well as the agreed upon meaning by the parties using such abstraction. Double speak, triple speak and out right lying are all misuses of the abstract communication tool.
Yes, and this is how "they" use grammar to control our minds!
By 18 years from now, that 1 billion increase over 10 years will constitute an extra half a billion sweet 18-year olds to potentially tap.
OK, seriously, why not just have kids anyway? So they might live through an overpopulation kill-off, so what? These things happen, and it won't kill overyone; I'd rather my offspring be around and survive a great die-off, than some other random chump's offspring be around and survive a great die-off. Plus, it's nice to have kids around. Shit happens, at some point you just have to let go and stop taking things seriously and let the chips fall where they may.
The worst part of that is how people automatically that they are not the stupid ones, but that Facebook "did something". They clearly don't know the first thing about computers but instead of their default assumption being "maybe I am just confused here", their default assumption is that they know what they are doing and that the company is at fault. Having worked tech support I've seen the same thing. I think it's a symptom of our politically correct education system teaching morons that everyone's random brainfarts are "valuable".
Actually they're raising the retirement age for one main reason: They basically blew some of the SS fund. The government spent it. They'd like you to think it's about demographics but the reality is today's demographic state was fairly predictable 20 or 30 years ago.
It's not the beginning of some corporate pattern, it's just Zuckerberg's personality shining through, and it has already started to hurt Facebook so I wouldn't worry, this kind of thing tends to be self-correcting --- if you've been following Facebook for a while, you would've realized long ago that their attitude has always been "let's keep pushing and find the precise line of how much we can get away with", from their ongoing privacy violations, to bullshit like the fact that others can sign you up to groups and FB declared they intend to do nothing about that. The massive sudden leap of early-adopter users to Google+ at their very moment of launch is testament to how much Zuckerberg has been irritating his own userbase, with many just waiting for some alternative to come along. The market has and will continue to define the limits of how far Zuckerberg's controlling personality. When FB does stuff like this article is about, it really does hurt their reputation, and while the effects may feel very abstract sometimes, they are real.
A few other things not factored in: Bitcoin market volatility. Number of miners will continue to grow (as many miners will indeed just run at a loss, due to the reasons in the list I've mentioned). Energy cost inflation. Hardware failures. The number of new BTC's generated will shrink over time. The cost of the computer around the video card. Your time. Market risk (e.g. bitcoin might get banned). The only way you might make money is if you happen to live in a place with cheap electricity and mine in bulk (but then there are scale costs e.g. facility costs, cooling, electricity infrastructure).. very very risky. If you're not mining in scale, then you're unlikely to be making much anyway. Sorry, unless you got in early, BTC mining is mostly just idle entertainment for people with disposable income. But good luck and all the best if you're mining.
Here's the thing, it was profitable until about a month ago. I have actually done the math, and I have followed the prices very closely. Around the beginning of May, there was a huge increase in the number of miners that joined the system. For a while, the average BTC price tracked the average energy costs very closely... until the mini-bubble peaked, mtgox.com was hacked, and a few other negative bits of news broke (e.g. senator announcing he was going after bitcoin, allinvain got robbed, and wallet.dat stealing malware came out). The the price tanked WELL below production cost, and then restabilized at slightly below production cost. However, all through all of this, the number of miners joining the system has just continued to increase.
Then finally, you don't also need to cover your marginal operating costs (energy) - you actually need to recover your capex costs. If your mommy and daddy bought you a nice machine with a fast GPU, or you bought one for some other purpose anyway like gaming, then you don't need to worry about that cost, but purchasing for mining right now? You'd be crazy or stupid.
The biggest hindrance would be that the electricity cost to generate a Bitcoin is more than the value of a Bitcoin, meaning, you'd literally make an immediate operating loss on every Bitcoin generated. And that's before you even factored in other overhead costs like the IT administrator's hours and increased MTBF and possibly cooling costs and additional accounting costs and complexity and possibly (for any sizable cluster) upgraded electricity infrastructure/capacity.
Mining right now definitely costs more in energy than the value of the bitcoins generated, yes. And yet still people are mining more than ever. I presume that means one (or more) of several things: 1. People expect the bitcoin price to go much higher later, than the current price of electricity to generate a bitcoin 2. People can't do basic math 3. People are too lazy to do the math 4. People are mining for fun, at an expense 5. People expect all currencies other than bitcoins to devalue 6. A sizable portion of people may be mining on excess low-marginal-cost capacity e.g. solar 7. Miners are shifting costs onto unsuspecting victims, e.g. IT admin mining on university lab computers or corporate desktops, or a teenager letting their folks pay the energy bill 8. Some miners are focused in countries with low electricity costs (though I suspect the current differential makes all countries unprofitable to mine) 9. GPU vendors are putting their Kool Aid in the water supply 10. ??
Uhm, no, you've missed an important point. I know it's easy to be forgotten after 100 years of brainwashing to the contrary, but SCOTUS's job is supposed to be to UPHOLD the Constitution, not change it, and it thus makes perfect sense if the Founding Fathers were looking to have a court rule that would rule to overturn VIOLATIONS of the Constitution. Have you actually read the oath a SC judge takes? It states explicitly that they fall "under" the Constitution. Not above it, or to the side of it, but UNDER it. What is missing now is a "Supreme Supreme Court" to make sure the SC upholds the Constitution.
Put it another way: Do you really, honestly, genuinely - and think about this for a moment - do you honestly believe that the Founding Fathers believed that 9 random individuals should have the power to overturn the Constitution? Really?
Slashdot Mirror
If only there could be some sensible approach to solve that problem, like simply allowing an exception for easily provably exceptional circumstances like kidnappings. If only that was possible. Unfortunately it's not, so we must follow one extreme or the other, always a warrant or never a warrant. Too bad.
Politicians are free to say: 'I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.' That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.' That's not a moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based
Our natural rights do not derive from statistics. What a dangerous idea. What if statistics really showed (hypothetically) that sending drug users to prison was effective at engineering some 'greater goal', would that make it morally OK? Precisely not.
I could probably show "evidence" that slavery helped reduce the economic costs of picking cotton. Such "evidence" - even when true - is clearly not what ought to be the foundation of our political and moral reasoning.
Henderson is right that politics should be evidence-based, but he gets it precisely the wrong way round. It should precisely be the moral claims that are evidence-based and reason-based (e.g. whether drug users should be punished).
Politics is basically all about when violence should be applied, and politicians should not be free to claim "violence should be used against drug users" - that notion that such "morality" subjective is very and dangerously wrong - such a claim must in itself be able to be objectively backed by facts and reason. It is objectively wrong (using facts and reason) to initiate violence against (i.e. put in jail) drug users who are harming nobody --- the moral claim is precisely the one that ought to be attacked. And the statistical claims, while peripherally interesting, should be utterly irrelevant to politics --- again, our natural rights do not derive from statistics, any more that hypothetical statistics showing (say) that slavery had economic benefits, would in any way be a valid argument for slavery. Slavery was wrong because it involves the non-consenting initiation of force against the slaves, not because of statistical evidence relating to indirect consequences.
It is correct that scientific thinking should be applied to politics, but it should be applied in the sense of using scientific thinking properly to determine the validity of moral claims, from which law must then be derived.
Because even though I hate the ribbon, no actual power user really USES Windows Explorer as a file manager.
Thats what we did in Florida. All lottery funds are used for education.
ALL of them? So the people running the lottery don't even draw salaries? What do they do, use volunteer labor?
I don't think it can be a "tax" if it's voluntary.
It's not really a "tax" because it's completely voluntary. Private casinos are also allowed to rig the game in their favor, and that's fine, that isn't the problem. All a state lottery really is, is a casino operation, but with a measure of state protectionism against the free market. Think of it the same way you would think of, say, government operating a dairy farm and selling milk. Or government offering broadband. It competes with free market operations that provide the same service, but with protection from free market forces. It's government offering services. It's basically the same also as if a casino operator (or dairy farmer) bribed state officials to enact laws to protect his/her business specifically.
If a decent security programmer/expert earns say $50/hr, then this covers only 10 hours of work, and that ignores actual cost-to-company equivalent costs of hiring an expert (e.g. desk, HR, equipment, admin, accounting overheads, so it's actually closer to 5 or 6 hours worth of programmer time). Do you mean to tell me that if they hired an expert internally, they expert the cost of that expert equivalent finding a bug every 5 hours? This is highly patronizing, they are basically treating the security experts out there as children who are supposed to get excited wasting their time doing virtually-free work for the great Facebook just for the so-called "prestige". In fact, most will spend many hours and are likely to earn nothing. Facebook, hire some programmers out of your own damn pocket. Security experts, retain some dignity.
It is human to do it, but I think it is counterproductive to confuse "nostalgic value" with "value".
I really enjoy reading very good books that stimulate my mind, but I am puzzled when people say 'the joy is in the experience' and refer nostalgically to 'turning pages'. When I'm reading a really good book, I couldn't care for the 'experience', it's about what I'm reading. I do find reading text on a screen somehow less "engaging", but I won't go so far as to say 'the joy is in the experience', and frankly if I was a young kid today and my grandpa was trying to encourage me to read because I get to 'turn pages' and 'the joy is in the experience', I expect I would probably find that a rather lame argument and would go back to my e-everything. I think if you want a kid to read a physical book give him an interesting physical book.
For books, true "value" though is in the text, not the medium. Our children will grow up not missing turning pages, but will develop arbitrarily associated deeply nostalgic feelings for the particular look and user interface of the (relatively primitive) e-ink and e-reader standards of today. Then they will grow up and try to explain to their (eyes rolling) children how the joy of reading on these primitive screens is "in the experience", and that their kids are missing something because they only read books through, I don't know, the direct-brain-reader-interface of 2040.
I love pixel-y old low-res video games and side-scrollers because it takes me back to my childhood, but I'm not going to push my children to play them somehow hoping they will get the same "feeling" out of them - they won't. The good news is your children will develop equally deep nostalgic feelings for whatever is the norm their day, so they're not missing anything --- provided you figure out what's actually valuable --- e.g. great books.
do not need the abstract tool of money. No other animal uses such a high level of abstraction to represent value exchange
Um, sure, but other animals still sleep in the dirt, get wet when it rains, die of basic diseases, and no other animals have advanced medicine and technology and such sophisticated division of labor. I'm not sure how 'no other animal' uses it, is an argument against it. Without money, meaningful division of labor would be impossible; without meaningful complex division of labor, we would not have been able to progress much. How would someone be able to specialize in, say, treatment of neurological disorders, or how would newton have been able to specialize in researching newtonian mechanics and lenses, for example, if there was no such thing as money? He would have had to either grow his own food, or would have had to trade his services directly with a farmer, which makes no sense.
Now if you want to define consciousness a just being awake and aware then you can do that, but you limit your ability to go beyond this definition you have,
Abstraction only works as well as the agreed upon meaning by the parties using such abstraction. Double speak, triple speak and out right lying are all misuses of the abstract communication tool.
Yes, and this is how "they" use grammar to control our minds!
Through the timecube of course.
I think you've just described large parts of the UN.
By 18 years from now, that 1 billion increase over 10 years will constitute an extra half a billion sweet 18-year olds to potentially tap.
OK, seriously, why not just have kids anyway? So they might live through an overpopulation kill-off, so what? These things happen, and it won't kill overyone; I'd rather my offspring be around and survive a great die-off, than some other random chump's offspring be around and survive a great die-off. Plus, it's nice to have kids around. Shit happens, at some point you just have to let go and stop taking things seriously and let the chips fall where they may.
I like G+ mainly because it feels new-frontier-ish. That'll change when the masses join.
The worst part of that is how people automatically that they are not the stupid ones, but that Facebook "did something". They clearly don't know the first thing about computers but instead of their default assumption being "maybe I am just confused here", their default assumption is that they know what they are doing and that the company is at fault. Having worked tech support I've seen the same thing. I think it's a symptom of our politically correct education system teaching morons that everyone's random brainfarts are "valuable".
Actually they're raising the retirement age for one main reason: They basically blew some of the SS fund. The government spent it. They'd like you to think it's about demographics but the reality is today's demographic state was fairly predictable 20 or 30 years ago.
It's not the beginning of some corporate pattern, it's just Zuckerberg's personality shining through, and it has already started to hurt Facebook so I wouldn't worry, this kind of thing tends to be self-correcting --- if you've been following Facebook for a while, you would've realized long ago that their attitude has always been "let's keep pushing and find the precise line of how much we can get away with", from their ongoing privacy violations, to bullshit like the fact that others can sign you up to groups and FB declared they intend to do nothing about that. The massive sudden leap of early-adopter users to Google+ at their very moment of launch is testament to how much Zuckerberg has been irritating his own userbase, with many just waiting for some alternative to come along. The market has and will continue to define the limits of how far Zuckerberg's controlling personality. When FB does stuff like this article is about, it really does hurt their reputation, and while the effects may feel very abstract sometimes, they are real.
A few other things not factored in: Bitcoin market volatility. Number of miners will continue to grow (as many miners will indeed just run at a loss, due to the reasons in the list I've mentioned). Energy cost inflation. Hardware failures. The number of new BTC's generated will shrink over time. The cost of the computer around the video card. Your time. Market risk (e.g. bitcoin might get banned). The only way you might make money is if you happen to live in a place with cheap electricity and mine in bulk (but then there are scale costs e.g. facility costs, cooling, electricity infrastructure) .. very very risky. If you're not mining in scale, then you're unlikely to be making much anyway. Sorry, unless you got in early, BTC mining is mostly just idle entertainment for people with disposable income. But good luck and all the best if you're mining.
Kooool Aiiid ...
Here's the thing, it was profitable until about a month ago. I have actually done the math, and I have followed the prices very closely. Around the beginning of May, there was a huge increase in the number of miners that joined the system. For a while, the average BTC price tracked the average energy costs very closely ... until the mini-bubble peaked, mtgox.com was hacked, and a few other negative bits of news broke (e.g. senator announcing he was going after bitcoin, allinvain got robbed, and wallet.dat stealing malware came out). The the price tanked WELL below production cost, and then restabilized at slightly below production cost. However, all through all of this, the number of miners joining the system has just continued to increase.
Then finally, you don't also need to cover your marginal operating costs (energy) - you actually need to recover your capex costs. If your mommy and daddy bought you a nice machine with a fast GPU, or you bought one for some other purpose anyway like gaming, then you don't need to worry about that cost, but purchasing for mining right now? You'd be crazy or stupid.
The biggest hindrance would be that the electricity cost to generate a Bitcoin is more than the value of a Bitcoin, meaning, you'd literally make an immediate operating loss on every Bitcoin generated. And that's before you even factored in other overhead costs like the IT administrator's hours and increased MTBF and possibly cooling costs and additional accounting costs and complexity and possibly (for any sizable cluster) upgraded electricity infrastructure/capacity.
Mining right now definitely costs more in energy than the value of the bitcoins generated, yes. And yet still people are mining more than ever. I presume that means one (or more) of several things:
1. People expect the bitcoin price to go much higher later, than the current price of electricity to generate a bitcoin
2. People can't do basic math
3. People are too lazy to do the math
4. People are mining for fun, at an expense
5. People expect all currencies other than bitcoins to devalue
6. A sizable portion of people may be mining on excess low-marginal-cost capacity e.g. solar
7. Miners are shifting costs onto unsuspecting victims, e.g. IT admin mining on university lab computers or corporate desktops, or a teenager letting their folks pay the energy bill
8. Some miners are focused in countries with low electricity costs (though I suspect the current differential makes all countries unprofitable to mine)
9. GPU vendors are putting their Kool Aid in the water supply
10. ??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
Some people believe that you should not have that right, and they use words like "clarify" as euphemisms for "throw out".
Uhm, no, you've missed an important point. I know it's easy to be forgotten after 100 years of brainwashing to the contrary, but SCOTUS's job is supposed to be to UPHOLD the Constitution, not change it, and it thus makes perfect sense if the Founding Fathers were looking to have a court rule that would rule to overturn VIOLATIONS of the Constitution. Have you actually read the oath a SC judge takes? It states explicitly that they fall "under" the Constitution. Not above it, or to the side of it, but UNDER it. What is missing now is a "Supreme Supreme Court" to make sure the SC upholds the Constitution.
Put it another way: Do you really, honestly, genuinely - and think about this for a moment - do you honestly believe that the Founding Fathers believed that 9 random individuals should have the power to overturn the Constitution? Really?
If they're already better, as you claim, then we surely don't need a law then. Nice own goal there.
I'd say what would be "spin" is pretending there isn't a "ban" by playing with semantics.