Really? Their "self driving" cars apparently need two engineers in them in case anything goes wrong.
Google seems to do the same thing with no non-employee passengers at all. I live in Phoenix (specifically, a region called Ahwatukee, which borders Tempe) and I see Google's self-driving cars periodically around here with not less than two but sometimes three people in them.
I don't think it's an "in case anything goes wrong" (they only need one for that) so much as it is a "let's have more than one set of eyes to make notes of what goes wrong so we can update the software later," with the person in the driver's seat more focused on the road like a normal driver would be, while the person in the passenger seat is looking beyond that. I don't know what the third person would be for, but it would make sense if they were watching the spots that are less visible to the people in the front seats.
Drive letters are by and large a hangover from CP/M and DOS, and could have been eliminated, or at least deprecated as early as Windows NT 3.5. Frankly, driver letter are completely ludicrous, to the point of being outright annoying. I've had local storage devices knock out drive shares, as an example of how utterly stupid the system is. We're literally dealing with a 40+ year old file device paradigm that only exists because MS seems completely unwilling to accept that Unix does it better.
I suspect it would break a lot of shit built in to Windows, including Microsoft's failed mobile version. The problem is, a ton of developers (including Microsoft) doesn't use relative paths in many cases, so I suspect these things would never change just like how Microsoft skipped version 9 of Windows for compatibility reasons. That, and path separators should be a front slash instead of a back slash (though Powershell seems to interpret either one just fine) and CRLF should go away, both of which are CP/M holdovers as well and no longer serve a practical purpose, but again, compatibility.
Every other OS in existence (including Android and iOS) no longer use drive letters, and that both makes it less confusing for ma and pa type users while being more powerful for power users.
A quick Google for "car price 1955" pops a quick box saying average of $1,900, which is around $17,000 in today's money. Which is about right for a moderately-featured sedan, give or take.
A house on the other hand averaged about $11,000 in 1955 (from that same quick box.) Which is around $90,000 today. So a somewhat under half of 2016's average US price $213,000.
Both of these figures are somewhat meaningless.
House prices have a very mellow demand in most regions and don't really do much in terms of appreciation or depreciation. The price basically stays the same in these areas. However in certain cities (especially high demand places like San Francisco) the prices are subject to speculation, and speculation only happens when an investor thinks they can flip a house. Taking an average, even within a particular region, tells you almost nothing at all. A median price would be better, but even then that's still not terribly useful.
When GGP talks about houses being unaffordable, he's most likely talking about high demand areas, and to be honest that is just simple supply and demand, with demand being increased by more affordable loans.
As for cars, the regional concept applies as well, though the economics are different because the supply is less finite. And, car manufacturers keep tacking on more and more features to jack up the price, mainly because people will just take out loans. (This is similar, by the way, to how colleges keep adding more amenities and jacking up the tuition.)
Except as a result of this disruption, people became less equal. The same is also true of the Cuban revolution. Sure, Batista was a corrupt mafioso, but at least people were wealthy enough to have nice things. Once Castro took over, he had all of the power to himself, and the only way people survived was by constantly repairing everything they owned at the time. This is why Cuban roads and cars still look the same as they did in 1960.
for other peoples' homes because poor people have trouble affording real estate anymore
Actually, renting has very little to do with whether or not one is poor. In fact, people with higher incomes often prefer to rent. Why? Because then they can easily move to another job that makes a higher bid for their services.
Neat how that works, isn't it?
it was still relatively expected that you'd own a home by your early-to-mid 30s and back in the 50s during the post-war boom
Sure, back when having a job was more coveted, and fewer people would bother to switch jobs. Though, something that does play a bigger role in making housing prices go up is loans. Without loans, houses would surely cost less because then people would be less able to outbid one another, thus putting downward pressure on house prices. However getting rid of them probably wouldn't be a good idea either, because without loans it would be very hard for most people to have a house at all, and/or secure capital for things that you can turn into a profit later, though there *may* (emphasis here) be some wisdom in putting restrictions on it. In practice, few people actually understand how to budget, and if you can't budget, you can't save big sums of money to buy big things.
Another example of where loans drive up prices is college tuition and cars.
However, while things like houses, cars, and tuition have gone up, virtually everything that we don't need capital loans for has gone down. That includes things like food, travel expenses, luxury goods (phones and TVs for example,) etc. The only exception are things that have for one reason or another become scarce due to causes outside of economics, like cannabis for example, which has seen dramatic reduction in prices lately now that its artificial scarcity has been gradually peeled back.
Whilst you're correct about these countries not being socialist, you're wrong about what socialism is.
No, actually you've got this backwards. I'll explain in detail below.
What you have described is fascism, the merger of corporate and state power.
No, it's not. Fascism (a term coined by Benito Mussolini) specifically references a bundle making a stronger whole. It's not an economic system so much as it is a governing system, so it's pretty much irrelevant to this discussion. Also, a tangentially fun fact, (because a lot of people, including yourself, misunderstand these terms) racism employed by the Nazi party is not central to fascism. Mussolini thought of racism as a distraction, though a strong national identity, regardless of race, is central to fascism. Mussolini's wife, who put a lot of effort into establishing fascism, was in fact a practicing Jew.
If you want a good idea what fascism would look like in modern times, watch that show Man in the High Castle. Note how Obergruppenfuhrer Smith's kid is supposed to do well in school for the fatherland, not for himself, and the bad kids were the ones that do it for themselves. That's classic fascism. In terms of economics (which fascism isn't strictly about,) fascism is what I previously described as "mostly socialism", because private businesses could exist, just like they can in Venezuela, but they are discouraged and subject to being nationalized. And in practice, fascism has only superficial differences from stalinism.
Fascism = You have two cows, the government takes both and sells you some milk. Communism = You have two cows, the government takes both and gives you some milk. Socialism = You have two cows, you own them and milk them yourself. You share the unused milk with a your neighbour. Capitalism = You have two cows, your neighbour owns them and all the other cows, you have to milk them and buy the milk from your neighbour.
While this is cute, it doesn't reflect reality. Victor Dhupay, who coined the term communism, would tell you that communism is what you described as socialism. You can use whatever communist philosopher you'd like, such as Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, etc, (Marx would disagree with you as well, by the way) but I'm going by the people who first defined these terms, not whatever revision somebody else made later, because honestly they often conflict in very confusing ways while using the exact same terms.
And that said, there are many variations on each of these. Your definition of capitalism sounds more like feudalism because it says you have the cows but your neighbor (i.e. the local lord) owns them. That said, it's kind of a crap definition because it implies that you could never own any cows. The US variation of capitalism is (IMO, I wrote it myself) this:
You have no cows, you might inherit two and your parents will teach you how to run a milk business, or if you inherit nothing you could go to college and get a degree in agriculture and then buy two of your neighbors cows and start a business selling milk. But not everybody drinks milk so you'll need to pay a marketer to find more customers, and that marketer will need to pay other people to do his job, ad infinitum.
Socialism is not government ownership, but democratic ownership, where people get more of a say in what a service does.
This is where you're confused, and it's really glaringly obvious if you just pay attention to your own words. In a democracy, what are we voting for? A system of governance. Basically, any kind of rule or regulation, including the manner with which something is distributed, is your de-facto government.
And a variation of a democracy, of course, is a republic, where you elect people to represent your interests and vote on your behalf, which is what basically all "democracies" really are, with limited democracy (for example, referendums are direct democracy, and t
Like in the military, schools, medicine, roads, rail, fire brigade, garbage collection, national parks etc you mean? Pretty much all western nations (incl the US) are socialist to some extent. This may not gel with your ideology, but all of these things are socialist.
Military yes, medicine no, roads maybe, rail (mostly) no, and I specifically mentioned garbage.
Honestly if you would have just read past the first sentence you quoted you would have saved yourself some embarrassment.
If your liver is not working right, and an app advises you to eat certain amounts of certain foods, you won't know you were not capable of eating those foods until your doctor is telling you you have only 4 days to live unless you luck into a liver transplant.
You'd KNOW you were sick LOOOONG before you had 4 days left. In most cases, your liver would be enlarged due to inflammation (aka hepatitis) at the very least, which would be quite painful and you'd notice, but you'd still be a ways off from liver failure (and indeed your liver is resilient enough to recover from this point so long as you eliminate whatever is causing it harm.) Even if not that (i.e. you developed cirrhosis without painful hepatitis,) you'd have developed jaundice quite a bit before then and would definitely notice that your color doesn't look right.
Please read the article before your next post. The very first sentence makes it clear it is referring to income inequality, not equality in general.
My very first post was specifically discussing quality of life, especially arguing that making everybody equally poor doesn't make for a better society. And that is in fact what GP was arguing against, though admittedly my second post did go on a tangent, but that was because of the few points the article makes about civil equality (i.e. mention of voting rights.)
It all depends on what your view of "better" is. Some people equate better with a particular population as a whole having a significantly lower chance of starving to death or perishing from a commonly curable disease on any given day. Other assign higher value to the percentages of the population realizing varying, generally accepted as realistically achievable under contemporary circumstances, tiers of material gain.
By every single measurement you've listed, we're doing better. Really, we are, even by that last one. Remember during the 80's when only rich people had 55" TVs in their house? Well, those TVs have shit quality compared to even bigger ones that I've seen poor people with. Oh, and remember car phones? Well, now poor people carry phones in their pocket with far better service availability at much lower service fees, never mind having it tethered to their car.
The Declaration may not be "Law", but it is _the_ single most important document in American History.
No, it's not. The document that guides literally every single law in this country is the constitution, so it is quite measurably more important. And in case you didn't notice, the constitution specifically mentions that some people only count as 3/5ths of a person, so it even codified inequality.
Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands.
These countries (nor the ones GP listed) aren't socialist. Socialism is when the government owns the means of production. This means that the workers work directly for the government, and the government sells goods and services directly to consumers. Cuba is almost completely socialist, so is North Korea. Venezuela is mostly socialist, but not quite as much as those two. USSR was completely socialist, along with the warsaw pact nations.
These countries do have a few economic sectors that are socialist, such as their health care systems (i.e. the doctors work for and are paid by the government,) and in the US very few socialist systems exist but they can include things like municipal water, trash, emergency, and fire services. However when the government buys from the private sector and gives to the public, that isn't socialism, that's welfare. For example, food stamps are welfare (essentially, the government buys food and gives it to the poor, but doesn't make the food.)
And then there's communism, which in all cases has never lasted more than a few years. Although USSR identified itself as communist, it was in fact socialist.
More seriously, you have it wrong, the catastrophes make for more opportunities and freedom, as the mechanisms of oppression and exploitation are disrupted.
I imagine you might think that if you didn't read the article.
So you're telling me that we were all more equal before the civil rights era? Before gay marriage was a thing? Because that's what the article is saying.
False equivalency. The push for equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Conflicts after the Civil war are just as likely to have quelled movements toward equality as well as helped them.
Please define "enshrined", because the declaration of independence isn't a legally binding document within the scope of US law. Also see my post below.
Oh and to add to that: The postwar era was also the pre-civil rights era, and now we're less equal?
Furthermore, the rise of big businesses has more or less enforced civil equality, and overall good citizen conduct way more than any laws have. While the government was still debating gay marriage, big corporations were already pushing their health insurance (and other benefit providers) to recognize domestic partnerships as an enticement for them to work there. HR departments in all big companies often over-react to off-color jokes in ways that governments never do (see donglegate for example.) But it doesn't even have to get to civil rights issues, they'll even fire high up people just for being assholes completely outside of work.
Do mishaps happen? You bet your ass they do, but to imply that it was better during the postwar era is total bullshit. Likewise, without this form of check and balance (i.e. if everybody is poor and there's no job security regardless of whether or not you're an asshole) there's really not much to keep bad actors from discriminating against and harassing people that they see as less than themselves.
Seriously this article makes it sound like life just after a devastating conflict is better than economic prosperity because most people are equally poor.
How is Google being a dick? They're following common industry practices. Public disclosure does two things:
- Deadlines put pressure on the software vendor to patch their shit sooner rather than later (without a deadline, or an unenforced deadline, they tend to just sit on bugs for a long time.) - If the software vendor fails to patch their product, then at least the end users can come up with their own countermeasures (i.e. adding IDS signatures, switching to different software, suspending services, creating workarounds, etc) before some rogue actor takes advantage of them.
If Google didn't stick to these timelines, and/or delayed them on a whim, then there may as well be none.
I never heard of him until a south park episode a few years back (and haven't heard the name since) but even though I'm not a fan of his, I think the reaction is overkill. He could always move to a youtube competitor; if he has THAT many viewers, it would pull a lot of users away from youtube and wouldn't surprise me if they went out of their way to get him back.
I hope Elon has a computer surgically implanted in his brain to show everyone how dumb an idea it is.
I don't think it's that dumb. Imagine if instead of having to manually perform math in your head, you had your result just as soon as you could mentally build the function; no need to pull out a piece of paper or type in LaTex, and you understand the entire process, even if your biological brain parts don't (you don't mentally understand how your biological brain parts work anyways, so what's the difference?) Or suppose you wanted to build a list of objects algorithmically, and instead of needing to open up your IDE and start writing code, you could accurately visualize the result near instantaneously. That would be pretty neat, and allow you to become more productive; probably even moreso than any AI.
Something like this may come, though probably not within our lifetimes...unless it's for the purpose of extending them. Even if we solve things like aging, cancer, etc, the barrier will inevitably be how to keep your brain working for more than one natural lifespan, so we'll need to conquer not only how it works, but also develop a technology solution for extending our memories.
So indeed, what Musk suggests may be inevitable, unless skynet beats us to the punch.
Slashdot Mirror
No, just mountpoints.
Really? Their "self driving" cars apparently need two engineers in them in case anything goes wrong.
Google seems to do the same thing with no non-employee passengers at all. I live in Phoenix (specifically, a region called Ahwatukee, which borders Tempe) and I see Google's self-driving cars periodically around here with not less than two but sometimes three people in them.
I don't think it's an "in case anything goes wrong" (they only need one for that) so much as it is a "let's have more than one set of eyes to make notes of what goes wrong so we can update the software later," with the person in the driver's seat more focused on the road like a normal driver would be, while the person in the passenger seat is looking beyond that. I don't know what the third person would be for, but it would make sense if they were watching the spots that are less visible to the people in the front seats.
Drive letters are by and large a hangover from CP/M and DOS, and could have been eliminated, or at least deprecated as early as Windows NT 3.5. Frankly, driver letter are completely ludicrous, to the point of being outright annoying. I've had local storage devices knock out drive shares, as an example of how utterly stupid the system is. We're literally dealing with a 40+ year old file device paradigm that only exists because MS seems completely unwilling to accept that Unix does it better.
I suspect it would break a lot of shit built in to Windows, including Microsoft's failed mobile version. The problem is, a ton of developers (including Microsoft) doesn't use relative paths in many cases, so I suspect these things would never change just like how Microsoft skipped version 9 of Windows for compatibility reasons. That, and path separators should be a front slash instead of a back slash (though Powershell seems to interpret either one just fine) and CRLF should go away, both of which are CP/M holdovers as well and no longer serve a practical purpose, but again, compatibility.
Every other OS in existence (including Android and iOS) no longer use drive letters, and that both makes it less confusing for ma and pa type users while being more powerful for power users.
A quick Google for "car price 1955" pops a quick box saying average of $1,900, which is around $17,000 in today's money. Which is about right for a moderately-featured sedan, give or take.
A house on the other hand averaged about $11,000 in 1955 (from that same quick box.) Which is around $90,000 today. So a somewhat under half of 2016's average US price $213,000.
Both of these figures are somewhat meaningless.
House prices have a very mellow demand in most regions and don't really do much in terms of appreciation or depreciation. The price basically stays the same in these areas. However in certain cities (especially high demand places like San Francisco) the prices are subject to speculation, and speculation only happens when an investor thinks they can flip a house. Taking an average, even within a particular region, tells you almost nothing at all. A median price would be better, but even then that's still not terribly useful.
When GGP talks about houses being unaffordable, he's most likely talking about high demand areas, and to be honest that is just simple supply and demand, with demand being increased by more affordable loans.
As for cars, the regional concept applies as well, though the economics are different because the supply is less finite. And, car manufacturers keep tacking on more and more features to jack up the price, mainly because people will just take out loans. (This is similar, by the way, to how colleges keep adding more amenities and jacking up the tuition.)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Except as a result of this disruption, people became less equal. The same is also true of the Cuban revolution. Sure, Batista was a corrupt mafioso, but at least people were wealthy enough to have nice things. Once Castro took over, he had all of the power to himself, and the only way people survived was by constantly repairing everything they owned at the time. This is why Cuban roads and cars still look the same as they did in 1960.
Have you ever wondered why? It's because they were trying to reduce the influence of slaveholders.
I know exactly why, but that's not relevant. The fact is, inequality was codified into the constitution, period.
for other peoples' homes because poor people have trouble affording real estate anymore
Actually, renting has very little to do with whether or not one is poor. In fact, people with higher incomes often prefer to rent. Why? Because then they can easily move to another job that makes a higher bid for their services.
Neat how that works, isn't it?
it was still relatively expected that you'd own a home by your early-to-mid 30s and back in the 50s during the post-war boom
Sure, back when having a job was more coveted, and fewer people would bother to switch jobs. Though, something that does play a bigger role in making housing prices go up is loans. Without loans, houses would surely cost less because then people would be less able to outbid one another, thus putting downward pressure on house prices. However getting rid of them probably wouldn't be a good idea either, because without loans it would be very hard for most people to have a house at all, and/or secure capital for things that you can turn into a profit later, though there *may* (emphasis here) be some wisdom in putting restrictions on it. In practice, few people actually understand how to budget, and if you can't budget, you can't save big sums of money to buy big things.
Another example of where loans drive up prices is college tuition and cars.
However, while things like houses, cars, and tuition have gone up, virtually everything that we don't need capital loans for has gone down. That includes things like food, travel expenses, luxury goods (phones and TVs for example,) etc. The only exception are things that have for one reason or another become scarce due to causes outside of economics, like cannabis for example, which has seen dramatic reduction in prices lately now that its artificial scarcity has been gradually peeled back.
Whilst you're correct about these countries not being socialist, you're wrong about what socialism is.
No, actually you've got this backwards. I'll explain in detail below.
What you have described is fascism, the merger of corporate and state power.
No, it's not. Fascism (a term coined by Benito Mussolini) specifically references a bundle making a stronger whole. It's not an economic system so much as it is a governing system, so it's pretty much irrelevant to this discussion. Also, a tangentially fun fact, (because a lot of people, including yourself, misunderstand these terms) racism employed by the Nazi party is not central to fascism. Mussolini thought of racism as a distraction, though a strong national identity, regardless of race, is central to fascism. Mussolini's wife, who put a lot of effort into establishing fascism, was in fact a practicing Jew.
If you want a good idea what fascism would look like in modern times, watch that show Man in the High Castle. Note how Obergruppenfuhrer Smith's kid is supposed to do well in school for the fatherland, not for himself, and the bad kids were the ones that do it for themselves. That's classic fascism. In terms of economics (which fascism isn't strictly about,) fascism is what I previously described as "mostly socialism", because private businesses could exist, just like they can in Venezuela, but they are discouraged and subject to being nationalized. And in practice, fascism has only superficial differences from stalinism.
Fascism = You have two cows, the government takes both and sells you some milk.
Communism = You have two cows, the government takes both and gives you some milk.
Socialism = You have two cows, you own them and milk them yourself. You share the unused milk with a your neighbour.
Capitalism = You have two cows, your neighbour owns them and all the other cows, you have to milk them and buy the milk from your neighbour.
While this is cute, it doesn't reflect reality. Victor Dhupay, who coined the term communism, would tell you that communism is what you described as socialism. You can use whatever communist philosopher you'd like, such as Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, etc, (Marx would disagree with you as well, by the way) but I'm going by the people who first defined these terms, not whatever revision somebody else made later, because honestly they often conflict in very confusing ways while using the exact same terms.
And that said, there are many variations on each of these. Your definition of capitalism sounds more like feudalism because it says you have the cows but your neighbor (i.e. the local lord) owns them. That said, it's kind of a crap definition because it implies that you could never own any cows. The US variation of capitalism is (IMO, I wrote it myself) this:
You have no cows, you might inherit two and your parents will teach you how to run a milk business, or if you inherit nothing you could go to college and get a degree in agriculture and then buy two of your neighbors cows and start a business selling milk. But not everybody drinks milk so you'll need to pay a marketer to find more customers, and that marketer will need to pay other people to do his job, ad infinitum.
Socialism is not government ownership, but democratic ownership, where people get more of a say in what a service does.
This is where you're confused, and it's really glaringly obvious if you just pay attention to your own words. In a democracy, what are we voting for? A system of governance. Basically, any kind of rule or regulation, including the manner with which something is distributed, is your de-facto government.
And a variation of a democracy, of course, is a republic, where you elect people to represent your interests and vote on your behalf, which is what basically all "democracies" really are, with limited democracy (for example, referendums are direct democracy, and t
Like in the military, schools, medicine, roads, rail, fire brigade, garbage collection, national parks etc you mean?
Pretty much all western nations (incl the US) are socialist to some extent. This may not gel with your ideology, but all of these things are socialist.
Military yes, medicine no, roads maybe, rail (mostly) no, and I specifically mentioned garbage.
Honestly if you would have just read past the first sentence you quoted you would have saved yourself some embarrassment.
If your liver is not working right, and an app advises you to eat certain amounts of certain foods, you won't know you were not capable of eating those foods until your doctor is telling you you have only 4 days to live unless you luck into a liver transplant.
You'd KNOW you were sick LOOOONG before you had 4 days left. In most cases, your liver would be enlarged due to inflammation (aka hepatitis) at the very least, which would be quite painful and you'd notice, but you'd still be a ways off from liver failure (and indeed your liver is resilient enough to recover from this point so long as you eliminate whatever is causing it harm.) Even if not that (i.e. you developed cirrhosis without painful hepatitis,) you'd have developed jaundice quite a bit before then and would definitely notice that your color doesn't look right.
Not lately. Hence the non-disruption of the North Korean regime and it's ability to oppress.
If you want to look at history, then you're back to rereading the article.
You should look at history yourself: The rise of the current regime is in fact a result of that civil war.
Please read the article before your next post. The very first sentence makes it clear it is referring to income inequality, not equality in general.
My very first post was specifically discussing quality of life, especially arguing that making everybody equally poor doesn't make for a better society. And that is in fact what GP was arguing against, though admittedly my second post did go on a tangent, but that was because of the few points the article makes about civil equality (i.e. mention of voting rights.)
Give them a nice Civil War to break up their grip on power, and we'll have some data points.
Because Korea obviously hasn't had a civil war in its past, right?
It all depends on what your view of "better" is. Some people equate better with a particular population as a whole having a significantly lower chance of starving to death or perishing from a commonly curable disease on any given day. Other assign higher value to the percentages of the population realizing varying, generally accepted as realistically achievable under contemporary circumstances, tiers of material gain.
By every single measurement you've listed, we're doing better. Really, we are, even by that last one. Remember during the 80's when only rich people had 55" TVs in their house? Well, those TVs have shit quality compared to even bigger ones that I've seen poor people with. Oh, and remember car phones? Well, now poor people carry phones in their pocket with far better service availability at much lower service fees, never mind having it tethered to their car.
The Declaration may not be "Law", but it is _the_ single most important document in American History.
No, it's not. The document that guides literally every single law in this country is the constitution, so it is quite measurably more important. And in case you didn't notice, the constitution specifically mentions that some people only count as 3/5ths of a person, so it even codified inequality.
Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands.
These countries (nor the ones GP listed) aren't socialist. Socialism is when the government owns the means of production. This means that the workers work directly for the government, and the government sells goods and services directly to consumers. Cuba is almost completely socialist, so is North Korea. Venezuela is mostly socialist, but not quite as much as those two. USSR was completely socialist, along with the warsaw pact nations.
These countries do have a few economic sectors that are socialist, such as their health care systems (i.e. the doctors work for and are paid by the government,) and in the US very few socialist systems exist but they can include things like municipal water, trash, emergency, and fire services. However when the government buys from the private sector and gives to the public, that isn't socialism, that's welfare. For example, food stamps are welfare (essentially, the government buys food and gives it to the poor, but doesn't make the food.)
And then there's communism, which in all cases has never lasted more than a few years. Although USSR identified itself as communist, it was in fact socialist.
More seriously, you have it wrong, the catastrophes make for more opportunities and freedom, as the mechanisms of oppression and exploitation are disrupted.
North Korea must be a swell place to live then.
I imagine you might think that if you didn't read the article.
So you're telling me that we were all more equal before the civil rights era? Before gay marriage was a thing? Because that's what the article is saying.
False equivalency. The push for equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Conflicts after the Civil war are just as likely to have quelled movements toward equality as well as helped them.
Please define "enshrined", because the declaration of independence isn't a legally binding document within the scope of US law. Also see my post below.
Oh and to add to that: The postwar era was also the pre-civil rights era, and now we're less equal?
Furthermore, the rise of big businesses has more or less enforced civil equality, and overall good citizen conduct way more than any laws have. While the government was still debating gay marriage, big corporations were already pushing their health insurance (and other benefit providers) to recognize domestic partnerships as an enticement for them to work there. HR departments in all big companies often over-react to off-color jokes in ways that governments never do (see donglegate for example.) But it doesn't even have to get to civil rights issues, they'll even fire high up people just for being assholes completely outside of work.
Do mishaps happen? You bet your ass they do, but to imply that it was better during the postwar era is total bullshit. Likewise, without this form of check and balance (i.e. if everybody is poor and there's no job security regardless of whether or not you're an asshole) there's really not much to keep bad actors from discriminating against and harassing people that they see as less than themselves.
Seriously this article makes it sound like life just after a devastating conflict is better than economic prosperity because most people are equally poor.
That's pretty fucked up, and I'm calling BS.
How is Google being a dick? They're following common industry practices. Public disclosure does two things:
- Deadlines put pressure on the software vendor to patch their shit sooner rather than later (without a deadline, or an unenforced deadline, they tend to just sit on bugs for a long time.)
- If the software vendor fails to patch their product, then at least the end users can come up with their own countermeasures (i.e. adding IDS signatures, switching to different software, suspending services, creating workarounds, etc) before some rogue actor takes advantage of them.
If Google didn't stick to these timelines, and/or delayed them on a whim, then there may as well be none.
I never heard of him until a south park episode a few years back (and haven't heard the name since) but even though I'm not a fan of his, I think the reaction is overkill. He could always move to a youtube competitor; if he has THAT many viewers, it would pull a lot of users away from youtube and wouldn't surprise me if they went out of their way to get him back.
So it must be good. Really though, why is it so hard to use a computer?
Computers require manual entry.
Keeping your brain working longer will take better medicine and biology, not implantable computers. It's called health. Try it some time.
That lasts just over a century tops; I'm talking about longer than that. Your brain has a finite store of memories as well.
I hope Elon has a computer surgically implanted in his brain to show everyone how dumb an idea it is.
I don't think it's that dumb. Imagine if instead of having to manually perform math in your head, you had your result just as soon as you could mentally build the function; no need to pull out a piece of paper or type in LaTex, and you understand the entire process, even if your biological brain parts don't (you don't mentally understand how your biological brain parts work anyways, so what's the difference?) Or suppose you wanted to build a list of objects algorithmically, and instead of needing to open up your IDE and start writing code, you could accurately visualize the result near instantaneously. That would be pretty neat, and allow you to become more productive; probably even moreso than any AI.
Something like this may come, though probably not within our lifetimes...unless it's for the purpose of extending them. Even if we solve things like aging, cancer, etc, the barrier will inevitably be how to keep your brain working for more than one natural lifespan, so we'll need to conquer not only how it works, but also develop a technology solution for extending our memories.
So indeed, what Musk suggests may be inevitable, unless skynet beats us to the punch.
I'd sign up.