I think when we look back we'll see the near universal adoption of smartphones as a watershed event in the history of transportation. Yes, it's not all about what GP wants, but it's not all about what you think people ought to want, either.
It's about what critical masses of people want, and what a lot of them seem to want is to spend as much time as possible with their noses glued to their mobile devices. This makes both autonomous cars and public transit a lot more desirable. My children are 17-20 years old, and their peers seem a lot less interested in getting a car and license than my generation was at that age, and I'd conjecture that's because they see driving not as independence, but as an interruption.
Connected is the new desirable default state, everything else people do is an interruption. I personally think that's an unhealthy development; there are situations where our lives are enriched by mindfulness: eating, conversing, appreciating a piece of art. But driving, for the most part, isn't one of those things.
Being in the minority does not make one's position invalid.
But it does take some of the shine off grandiose statements about core components of liberal society. It doesn't sound quite so convincing to say, "the thing I really like about the way things are now...":)
Well, I should imagine that's a complicated question, because damage resistance is ultimately a property of the overall installation and design, not just individual components.
The lightness and flexibility of the thing suggests that as a component it would be easy to damage; for example you could pick it up and crease it like a piece of paper. But those same properties would make it possible to install it in ways that would be quite damage resistant. For example on a notebook you could glue them to the surface of the notebook and cover it with a hard, transparent lacquer. Then if you dropped the notebook the force experienced by the cell and its interconnects would be quite small because the acceleration would be that much less than a more massive solar cell.
Do the crime, do the time, that should be the end of it.
I'm generally in agreement with this notion. There's a kind of irrational savagery that infects Americans, right or left (speaking as a leftist myself) when it comes to inflicting punishments on people we don't like. I remember a few years ago the liberal glee when Randy "Duke" Cunningham request to have his firearms rights restored was turned down. I don't know if you remember him, but he was a Republican Congressman who literally had a price list for companies who wanted favors; generally speaking $50k more in Cunningham's pocket bought you an additional $1M in earmarks. Now I think Randy Cunningham is a terrible person; he's a convicted felon, a bigot and a homophobe who exploited a public office for private gain. But even though I detest him personally I see no public interst served by denying an old man a chance to go hunting in his last few declining years. Now if he'd been convicted of knowingly supplying guns to criminals, or using them in the commission of a crime himself, then that'd be a different story. Denying him access to firearms would at least arguably serve a purpose.
Now there is sometimes a public purpose to sex offender registries. Certain types of offenders like pedophiles can be reasonably argued as being likely to reoffend. But sex registry laws aren't necessarily written to focus likely reoffenders. There was a man in my neighborhood who was on the sex offender registry for having sex with a 14 year-old when he was 16. These "Romeo and Juliet" cases are rarely prosecuted in this state, but technically it's still statutory rape. He just got unlucky because he ran across a prosecutor eager to put another notch in his belt. When the sex offender registry law came out in '96 he was forced to move out of his old neighborhood into ours; he moved out of our neighborhood after word spread and his kids were ostracized by their friends' parents. There was no rational justification for this; nobody thinks a teenager who has consensual sex with another teenager is any more likely to still be having sex with minors twenty years later. Fortunately the laws in our state were updated so now he's probably now "level 1 offender"; that means while he still has to register with local law enforcement, they can no longer publish his name, picture, home and work addresses on their website.
Punishment should serve rational public purposes. It should protect the public, recompense the victims as far as possible, and reform the offender. It should not cater to the public's barbaric, petty or paranoid impulses.
Trump may be a phony plutocrat and Sanders may be a socialist, but if you're rejecting the establishment political narrative, these are the choices you have.
The fact that neither candidate fits into the establishment framework doesn't mean that they're in any sense similar. Sure you might at the outset decide to look at both of them, but if you don't quickly come to the conclusion that you reject at least one of them then there's something wrong with your reasoning process.
If you don't think very hard about it. There isn't much you can do in the way of slowing down from 2 mph, so the only way it could have avoided the accident is speeding up to get out of the way, which might have worked, or might have made the accident worse. We can't be sure.
This explains the weird phenomenon of Trump supporters who also like Bernie Sanders. These are people who are desperate for something different than business as usual to be done, but don't know what that different thing should be and don't care.
It's easy to dismiss Trump supporters are morons who can't see he's a liar who changes his story every time it's convenient, just as it's easy to scoff at poor people who buy lottery tickets, which are the last thing anyone short of money should buy. But it's a little too easy for people who are secure and comfortable to demand people who aren't live without hope, even false hope.
Well, it only creates cognitive dissonance if you think like a moron. Thoughtful people understand that nobody is consistently wrong, any more than anyone is consistently right. The Nazis built the authobahn (a.k.a. "Reichsautobahn"), but I don't hear people arguing against superhighways because they were a Nazi idea.
So it's a good thing that Trump brought up this issue; it'll force the other candidates to address it, or at least dance around it. But I doubt he really cares about it; he's too narcissistic and mercurial to care about anyone but himself for very long.
It's not really analogous at all, because banking applications tend to have a public facing interface anyone has access to. Attacking autonomous weapons is more analogous to the Stuxnet attack on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities; it'd be very, very hard to mount an attack on them, but by the same token it would be very hard to defend against the kind of parties that do have the range of capabilities to make a realistic attempt.
ATMS are a terrible analogy to use in any kind of thinking about security, because they aren't particularly secure. It'd be nice if they were, but there are lots and lots and lots of them so it's more important that they be cheap than they be ultra-secure. People assume ATMS have to be super-secure because they hand out cash, but in fact the bank's interest is in minimizing the total cost of theft + security measures.
That may be true in some jurisdictions, but what's true in all jurisdictions is driving is that right of way isn't a license to get into an accident that you can avoid. If the Google car really was traveling at just 2 mph, then you have to wonder whether the bus driver could have avoided the accident.
In any case it's clear that if the safety driver had been driving the accident still would have happened; he judged that the bus would yield, but it didn't.
Well it eliminates the taxi driver driving around looking for a fare, but I suspect that some future iteration of Uber will involve lending your autonomous car out. This would be particularly attractive for plug-in hybrids in cities, where the fixed cost of maintaining cars is high but the wear-and-tear of stop and go driving is less. After your car drops you off at work you'll send it forth to go pay for itself. Unless there is some provision for queueing autonomous cars waiting for a fare you might well get an increase in emissions from cars cruising around waiting for a fare.
In places with efficient transit systems, like Manhattan, autonomous vehicles (especially for hire) might well cause people to use transit less, and that would increase emissions. In cities where the transit system is so bad that people prefer to sit in traffic jams and pay for parking rather than use transit, I suspect you'll see a great deal more casual mobility if you can flag down an autonomous taxi anywhere. That will increase emissions too by reducing urban planners' incentive to deal with sprawl.
You can spin almost any kind of scenario out for a future technology like this -- the devil's always in the details. The one thing you can be certain of is that the way people use a revolutionary new technology will be full surprises.
It's a matter of dilution and longevity in the atmosphere. The half-life of NO2 (emitted NO quickly becomes NO2) in the atmosphere is on the order of days; it comes out as acid rain among other things which of course is bad in itself. CO2 has a half-life on the order of centuries.
So NOx and CO2 are different kinds of concerns. NOx is an acute concern, but not a chronic concern. All we have to do is stop emitting NOx and it quickly goes away. Emitting CO2 gradually but for practical purposes irreversibly shifts equilibria in atmospheric chemistry and dynamics and ecosystems. Since CO2 is a trace gas it's not poisoning anything acutely, but it is chronically undermining local ecosystems and human populations that depend upon them.
Humans are astonishingly versatile, but of course have many limitations. Oddly enough many managers don't seem to appreciate this, demanding things from people that they aren't good at and failing to exploit human strengths. So clearly one important factor in the ideal mix between robots and human workers at any point in time is how skillful you are at managing people. If you aren't very good at it, that tends to skew the best mix towards robots.
Well if you stipulate "over" regulation it's logically impossible to disagree that that would be too much. But that doesn't actually tell you anything; it's just a tautology.
Too much/too little regulation seems a simplistic way of framing the problem. I think it makes more sense to start with does a regulation serve a legitimate purpose; then you proceed to whether it is likely to accomplish that purpose, and whether it's costs and unintended consequences are reasonable, what the alternatives are for accomplishing the same thing, etc Many regulations are clearly poorly conceived or can't justify their costs. You could call that "too much- but really what's going on is that such a regulation accomplishes too little for its costs or distributes costs unseasonably.
Global megacorps dodge taxes, destroy local businesses and move employment to the places where people are more easily exploited.
In short, they do whatever maximizes profits and which we permit them to do.
Corporations are wonderfully flexible machines; they adapt whatever way they have to to maximize profits. That's why the notion that regulation will destroy profit and wealth generation is practically superstitious.
While what you say is true, it may not apply in this case. In general juries give a huge benefit of the doubt to police in doing things which are justified in certain situations. Sometimes it's legitimate for a cop to split someone's head open with a night stick, to tase someone, or to shoot someone dead. There's a strong presumption that a cop doing these things is justified, because jurors are afraid of crime and don't want cops to be hampered by doubts. It's an irrational position, but it's understandable at least.
None of that applies to cops doing things which they are never supposed to do, like stealing drugs from the evidence locker and selling them.
Yeah, but college presidents are "the elite". They got where they are by being intellectual and understanding things most us don't. CEOs -- by which I especially mean the CEOs of big companies -- got where they are by embodying the virtues and character traits most admired in our society.
Actually what might be useful is figuring out whether the officer misused confidential information in a way that is either illegal or against department policy.
So you're worried that measuring might turn you into a hypochondriac? Well I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that measuring doesn't turn people into a hypochondriacs; it just gives the ones who are already hypochondriacs another thing to worry about. The bad news is that it sounds like the question may be moot in your case.
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I think when we look back we'll see the near universal adoption of smartphones as a watershed event in the history of transportation. Yes, it's not all about what GP wants, but it's not all about what you think people ought to want, either.
It's about what critical masses of people want, and what a lot of them seem to want is to spend as much time as possible with their noses glued to their mobile devices. This makes both autonomous cars and public transit a lot more desirable. My children are 17-20 years old, and their peers seem a lot less interested in getting a car and license than my generation was at that age, and I'd conjecture that's because they see driving not as independence, but as an interruption.
Connected is the new desirable default state, everything else people do is an interruption. I personally think that's an unhealthy development; there are situations where our lives are enriched by mindfulness: eating, conversing, appreciating a piece of art. But driving, for the most part, isn't one of those things.
Being in the minority does not make one's position invalid.
But it does take some of the shine off grandiose statements about core components of liberal society. It doesn't sound quite so convincing to say, "the thing I really like about the way things are now..." :)
If you're using crowdsourcing to figure out the safe way to go, someone's got to be the first one to report a hazard.
Well, I should imagine that's a complicated question, because damage resistance is ultimately a property of the overall installation and design, not just individual components.
The lightness and flexibility of the thing suggests that as a component it would be easy to damage; for example you could pick it up and crease it like a piece of paper. But those same properties would make it possible to install it in ways that would be quite damage resistant. For example on a notebook you could glue them to the surface of the notebook and cover it with a hard, transparent lacquer. Then if you dropped the notebook the force experienced by the cell and its interconnects would be quite small because the acceleration would be that much less than a more massive solar cell.
Do the crime, do the time, that should be the end of it.
I'm generally in agreement with this notion. There's a kind of irrational savagery that infects Americans, right or left (speaking as a leftist myself) when it comes to inflicting punishments on people we don't like. I remember a few years ago the liberal glee when Randy "Duke" Cunningham request to have his firearms rights restored was turned down. I don't know if you remember him, but he was a Republican Congressman who literally had a price list for companies who wanted favors; generally speaking $50k more in Cunningham's pocket bought you an additional $1M in earmarks. Now I think Randy Cunningham is a terrible person; he's a convicted felon, a bigot and a homophobe who exploited a public office for private gain. But even though I detest him personally I see no public interst served by denying an old man a chance to go hunting in his last few declining years. Now if he'd been convicted of knowingly supplying guns to criminals, or using them in the commission of a crime himself, then that'd be a different story. Denying him access to firearms would at least arguably serve a purpose.
Now there is sometimes a public purpose to sex offender registries. Certain types of offenders like pedophiles can be reasonably argued as being likely to reoffend. But sex registry laws aren't necessarily written to focus likely reoffenders. There was a man in my neighborhood who was on the sex offender registry for having sex with a 14 year-old when he was 16. These "Romeo and Juliet" cases are rarely prosecuted in this state, but technically it's still statutory rape. He just got unlucky because he ran across a prosecutor eager to put another notch in his belt. When the sex offender registry law came out in '96 he was forced to move out of his old neighborhood into ours; he moved out of our neighborhood after word spread and his kids were ostracized by their friends' parents. There was no rational justification for this; nobody thinks a teenager who has consensual sex with another teenager is any more likely to still be having sex with minors twenty years later. Fortunately the laws in our state were updated so now he's probably now "level 1 offender"; that means while he still has to register with local law enforcement, they can no longer publish his name, picture, home and work addresses on their website.
Punishment should serve rational public purposes. It should protect the public, recompense the victims as far as possible, and reform the offender. It should not cater to the public's barbaric, petty or paranoid impulses.
Trump may be a phony plutocrat and Sanders may be a socialist, but if you're rejecting the establishment political narrative, these are the choices you have.
The fact that neither candidate fits into the establishment framework doesn't mean that they're in any sense similar. Sure you might at the outset decide to look at both of them, but if you don't quickly come to the conclusion that you reject at least one of them then there's something wrong with your reasoning process.
If you don't think very hard about it. There isn't much you can do in the way of slowing down from 2 mph, so the only way it could have avoided the accident is speeding up to get out of the way, which might have worked, or might have made the accident worse. We can't be sure.
This explains the weird phenomenon of Trump supporters who also like Bernie Sanders. These are people who are desperate for something different than business as usual to be done, but don't know what that different thing should be and don't care.
It's easy to dismiss Trump supporters are morons who can't see he's a liar who changes his story every time it's convenient, just as it's easy to scoff at poor people who buy lottery tickets, which are the last thing anyone short of money should buy. But it's a little too easy for people who are secure and comfortable to demand people who aren't live without hope, even false hope.
Well, it only creates cognitive dissonance if you think like a moron. Thoughtful people understand that nobody is consistently wrong, any more than anyone is consistently right. The Nazis built the authobahn (a.k.a. "Reichsautobahn"), but I don't hear people arguing against superhighways because they were a Nazi idea.
So it's a good thing that Trump brought up this issue; it'll force the other candidates to address it, or at least dance around it. But I doubt he really cares about it; he's too narcissistic and mercurial to care about anyone but himself for very long.
It's not really analogous at all, because banking applications tend to have a public facing interface anyone has access to. Attacking autonomous weapons is more analogous to the Stuxnet attack on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities; it'd be very, very hard to mount an attack on them, but by the same token it would be very hard to defend against the kind of parties that do have the range of capabilities to make a realistic attempt.
ATMS are a terrible analogy to use in any kind of thinking about security, because they aren't particularly secure. It'd be nice if they were, but there are lots and lots and lots of them so it's more important that they be cheap than they be ultra-secure. People assume ATMS have to be super-secure because they hand out cash, but in fact the bank's interest is in minimizing the total cost of theft + security measures.
That may be true in some jurisdictions, but what's true in all jurisdictions is driving is that right of way isn't a license to get into an accident that you can avoid. If the Google car really was traveling at just 2 mph, then you have to wonder whether the bus driver could have avoided the accident.
In any case it's clear that if the safety driver had been driving the accident still would have happened; he judged that the bus would yield, but it didn't.
Well it eliminates the taxi driver driving around looking for a fare, but I suspect that some future iteration of Uber will involve lending your autonomous car out. This would be particularly attractive for plug-in hybrids in cities, where the fixed cost of maintaining cars is high but the wear-and-tear of stop and go driving is less. After your car drops you off at work you'll send it forth to go pay for itself. Unless there is some provision for queueing autonomous cars waiting for a fare you might well get an increase in emissions from cars cruising around waiting for a fare.
In places with efficient transit systems, like Manhattan, autonomous vehicles (especially for hire) might well cause people to use transit less, and that would increase emissions. In cities where the transit system is so bad that people prefer to sit in traffic jams and pay for parking rather than use transit, I suspect you'll see a great deal more casual mobility if you can flag down an autonomous taxi anywhere. That will increase emissions too by reducing urban planners' incentive to deal with sprawl.
You can spin almost any kind of scenario out for a future technology like this -- the devil's always in the details. The one thing you can be certain of is that the way people use a revolutionary new technology will be full surprises.
This is just posturing...
Which turns out to have an amazing track record of success when it comes to lunar missions.
It's a matter of dilution and longevity in the atmosphere. The half-life of NO2 (emitted NO quickly becomes NO2) in the atmosphere is on the order of days; it comes out as acid rain among other things which of course is bad in itself. CO2 has a half-life on the order of centuries.
So NOx and CO2 are different kinds of concerns. NOx is an acute concern, but not a chronic concern. All we have to do is stop emitting NOx and it quickly goes away. Emitting CO2 gradually but for practical purposes irreversibly shifts equilibria in atmospheric chemistry and dynamics and ecosystems. Since CO2 is a trace gas it's not poisoning anything acutely, but it is chronically undermining local ecosystems and human populations that depend upon them.
... that works everywhere, for everything.
Humans are astonishingly versatile, but of course have many limitations. Oddly enough many managers don't seem to appreciate this, demanding things from people that they aren't good at and failing to exploit human strengths. So clearly one important factor in the ideal mix between robots and human workers at any point in time is how skillful you are at managing people. If you aren't very good at it, that tends to skew the best mix towards robots.
Well if you stipulate "over" regulation it's logically impossible to disagree that that would be too much. But that doesn't actually tell you anything; it's just a tautology.
Too much/too little regulation seems a simplistic way of framing the problem. I think it makes more sense to start with does a regulation serve a legitimate purpose; then you proceed to whether it is likely to accomplish that purpose, and whether it's costs and unintended consequences are reasonable, what the alternatives are for accomplishing the same thing, etc Many regulations are clearly poorly conceived or can't justify their costs. You could call that "too much- but really what's going on is that such a regulation accomplishes too little for its costs or distributes costs unseasonably.
You didn't read the book, I take it.
Global megacorps dodge taxes, destroy local businesses and move employment to the places where people are more easily exploited.
In short, they do whatever maximizes profits and which we permit them to do.
Corporations are wonderfully flexible machines; they adapt whatever way they have to to maximize profits. That's why the notion that regulation will destroy profit and wealth generation is practically superstitious.
They shouldn't be using Beta testers for something as horrible as Windows. Micrisoft should be using Deltas or Epislons instead.
"Sarcastic" would be closer to the mark :)
While what you say is true, it may not apply in this case. In general juries give a huge benefit of the doubt to police in doing things which are justified in certain situations. Sometimes it's legitimate for a cop to split someone's head open with a night stick, to tase someone, or to shoot someone dead. There's a strong presumption that a cop doing these things is justified, because jurors are afraid of crime and don't want cops to be hampered by doubts. It's an irrational position, but it's understandable at least.
None of that applies to cops doing things which they are never supposed to do, like stealing drugs from the evidence locker and selling them.
Yeah, but college presidents are "the elite". They got where they are by being intellectual and understanding things most us don't. CEOs -- by which I especially mean the CEOs of big companies -- got where they are by embodying the virtues and character traits most admired in our society.
Actually what might be useful is figuring out whether the officer misused confidential information in a way that is either illegal or against department policy.
So you're worried that measuring might turn you into a hypochondriac? Well I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that measuring doesn't turn people into a hypochondriacs; it just gives the ones who are already hypochondriacs another thing to worry about. The bad news is that it sounds like the question may be moot in your case.
Then scientists will do what they always do in such situations: try to find out what causes the discrepancy.
And if they find it the denialists will do what they always do: see a conspiracy.