Corporations in the USA also have "free speech", and are allowed to spend money in political campaigns as much as they want. They also have religious beliefs
"Corporations" have those rights in the US because individuals have them. That is, I don't lose my right to free speech or campaign contributions or conduct my business according to my religion just because I choose to run my business as a corporation. In Europe, corporations don't have those rights because individuals don't have those rights either; the European system is much more corrupt and serves the ruling elites much better.
But "rights" aren't the same as "power" anyway. European corporations don't need to bother with free speech or campaign contributions, since they are in bed with their governments in much more direct ways. Many large corporations in Europe are partly state owned. Just look at VW, which has a lengthy history of joint ownership between Porsche and various German governments, starting with the Nazis. And unlike US corporations, which are largely public, a lot of powerful European corporations are privately held and hidden behind a web of shell companies and other such mechanisms.
actually, they hold LESS power in the EU than they do in the US, were in some aspects they are considered on the same level (and above) than actual citizens.
Of all of the things on a very long list in Europe and beyond, have these politicians really nothing better to do than this?
This doesn't originate with politicians, it comes from corporate lobbyists for publishers, newspapers, etc. Those corporations hold a lot of power in Europe and they are seeing their business models and fortunes destroyed by the Internet. And since politicians in Europe are highly dependent on the goodwill of these publishers (not having a lot of other channels for reaching voters), they respond to this kind of pressure.
I've tried scanning some of my books with a camera. This is simply an overhead scanner with manual page turning; you can buy them already. Realistically, it probably takes around 2-3s to scan a page, so it's about 20 minutes to scan a 500 page book. That's a lot of time to sit at a table turning pages.
But let's say you're willing to put in the work. The hard part in making this work is the software, not some $200 digital camera on a stick. And the really hard part in making this work is not on books that are as well behaved and flat as the ones they use in their demo, but on thicker hardcovers, exactly the kind of expensive books you want to preserve by scanning. Unfortunately, they don't talk about their software much, which leads me to believe that they haven't completed it yet. If they had, they could already be selling it without the hardware scanner.
The real test of artificial intelligence will come when the self-driving vehicle will have to decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people - but killing the driver, when the accident is inevitable. Computers just aren't good at all at that sort of thing.
In actual fact, computers are very good at making that kind of decision, and unlike humans, they can make it consistently and reliably, without panic, anger, or selfishness.
So, since you're human and presumably good at making these decisions, just share with the rest of us: what rule should the car follow? Personally, the rule I think it should follow is protect bystanders over protecting the life of the driver, unless the bystanders are doing something illegal. Of course, your preferences may differ.
I can't wait to see the legal and moral discussions that will ensue after the first such accident occur.
Well, and you should be thankful that we can actually, for the first time, have these discussions meaningfully, because until now, such discussions were pointless.
The cars rely on all that data to drive, so they quickly hit problems in areas that haven't been mapped in advance.
I don't see that as a problem. If it works on most of the roads people drive every day, that's good enough. As with all automation, we automate routine tasks and let humans do the rest.
A truly intelligent self-driving car needs
But we don't need "truly intelligent self-driving cars" for self-driving cars to be very useful any more than we need "truly intelligent factory robots" for factory automation to be very useful.
I regularly drive a stretch of road that's just a few miles long, but between construction, accidents, poor marking, bicycles, and heavy traffic I'd be nervous about letting an AI system navigate.
Well, then don't. In fact, your AI driver would probably simply avoid that route altogether precisely for those reasons and still get you to your destination safely and efficiently. Nobody says that an automated driver needs to take the same route as you do; after all, bikes, motorcycles, buses and light rail probably don't either.
We put all those regulations in place because the free market failed real;ly badly. See the current suppliments market.
The US supplements market is actually doing quite well: it supplies stuff people want cheaply and competitively. The "market failure" you seem to be referring to is that it supplies a lot of crap that probably doesn't work, but that's crap people want. That wouldn't be called a "market failure" by economists.
But no matter what you call it, yes, it illustrates exactly how we got into this predicament with our medical system: because people like you don't like the choices their fellow citizens make in a free market, you advocate regulation; and that regulation is then used by politicians and corporations as a vehicle to enrich themselves. And in a twist of irony, you misrepresent your disapproval of other people's free market choices as a "market failure". And once your regulations start causing worse problems than they were intended to cure, you double down, "blame the market" for the failure of your regulations to achieve what they were intended to achieve, and demand even more regulation, in a vicious spiral that often ends up destroying entire market segments. You know, like health care.
When there is something that we clearly need that the current innovation engine will not steer us toward for a long time, it can make sense to tweak that innovation engine a bit
You have failed to answer the question why the US needs to do that. Supposedly, the oh-so-more-"socialist", wealthy, and rational European nations could do that. Yet they don't.
Not at all--I think there is amazing innovation in US healthcare
The amount of innovation in US health care is pitiful compared to what it could be. We have the biggest public health care system in the world (both in absolute terms and per capita), with the spending of the remaining private system massively regulated. And both public and private systems redirect money towards highly profitable but mostly useless interventions, because that's what health care providers, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical lobby for. The only saving grace of our health care system is that others are even worse. But increasing government health care spending takes us in exactly the wrong direction.
If the free market is dropping the ball, it needs to get picked up in some way.
"The free market" hasn't dropped the ball because there is nothing even remotely like a free market in health care or drugs in the US. The US health care market is almost entirely dominated by government incentives and policies, and drug makers, hospitals, and doctors are responding to those incentives, to the exclusion of common sense, medical ethics, and the common good.
why wouldn't some of our defense money be spent on antibiotics and vaccines?
Government health and prescription drug policy is broken in such fundamental ways, why would you expect this to work? A large percentage of Americans is on hugely expensive proprietary lifestyle drugs, subsidized agribusinesses engage in widespread abuse of antibiotics, and funding priorities for diseases are based on political lobbying, not rational trade-offs. We're already spending much more in government health care spending per capita than Europe and still have outcomes that are no better, and arguably worse. And you want to throw even more money into this bottomless money pit? What's the point? The problem with our health care system and drug development system isn't too little government involvement, it is too much: rent seeking and crony capitalism are stifling innovation and driving up health care costs.
There are no companies in the United States that care. They’re happy to sell existing antibiotics, but they’re not interested in researching and developing new ones.
Apparently, there are no companies anywhere that care. In fact, of all the countries in the world, the US is by far the most active in terms of new drug development, and the US market has been the primary driver for new drug development. However, with increasing regulation and cost controls in the US health care market, and the potential for a single payer market, the motivation to develop new drugs will likely dwindle here as well.
There are plenty of flexible and adjustable screen holders and keyboard holders that let you work in any position you like, for the simple reason that there are plenty of people with disabilities or who are bed ridden.
The cheapest alternative, however, is probably prism eye glasses, for less than $10. Search for "bed prism glasses" on Google.
Who knows what the intelligence agencies actually found out; we are always getting the message the administration wants to get out, regardless of the actual facts, whether it's Obama or Bush.
Your implication being that it shouldn't matter to the credit card company whether they give cards to someone who increases their fraud risk? If that reasoning worked, why would they do any screening at all then? Just to deny people cards in order to inconvenience them, because credit card companies are big, evil corporations?
Credit card companies depend on vendors to take their cards for a profit; if a credit card company doesn't select low-risk, low-hassle customers to carry their cards, then vendors will drop that card and the credit card company will stop making money.
Just thinking about the breaches there, it's horrific," he added. A leaked classified report this summer found that as much as 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings
Given that US planes aren't exploding every day, this seems anything but horrific. In fact, it seems like excellent news, because it suggests that the screening is probably not needed (unless you believe that only terrorists are deterred by it).
appropriate protections, for disclosing information about suspected wrongdoing (PDF) within an intelligence and security agency
Disclosing "within the intelligence agency" would have been pointless; it would simply have been swept under the rug, protections or not.
The only thing Snowden could do with this information is disclose it publicly if he felt it was sufficiently important, and if he was willing to pay the personal price and hope for leniency eventually. That's what he did. Now, you may agree or disagree with his decision, but there really are not a whole lot of options to change this process.
so with a credit limit of $5000 how exactly am I supposed to spend $7000 on a single purchase?
You put $7000 into your checking account and pay with your checking-account-linked debit card. Or you get one of the dozens of prepaid VISA/MC cards, put $7000 in that, and pay with that.
Planning a vacation that costs $10,000 becomes a lot more difficult.
More difficult than what? Than if you had a good credit rating? Of course. How is that anybody else's problem?
What gives you that idea? Payment behavior on previous loans is an obvious factor in considering whether to extend new credit. Germany uses it as well, for example:
If the mortgage decision was just between you and your bank and your bank actually took a financial risk, like it used to be, they'd mostly be relying on their own information.
But mortgages aren't really made by banks anymore, they are simply highly paid data collectors; those mortgages will eventually be held by the federal government. For your bank to certify to the federal government how much you pay in rent or what your income is is just an additional and unnecessary legal risk. It is simpler and safer for them to have you certify and sign for all your financial information yourself, because if there's a problem with your mortgage, they can then point at you.
This does not mean a non-payer, this means someone who PAYS and doesn't carry balances, thereby denying the banks the opportunity to collect interest at extortionate interest rates. Is there something wrong with this whole system?
I don't see what you think is "wrong" with this. Banks will only do business with you if the expected income they get from you exceeds the money people of your type will cost them on average. Giving you a credit card places exposes them risk, not just of you not repaying, but also of your card being used for fraud, so if you don't make them much money, why should they do business with you? They aren't a charity.
No, it just makes you a likely poor customer: if you pay off your cards right away and pay cash for a lot of your purchases, card companies are not going to be making much money on you, and they aren't interested in doing business with you. Credit scores are just one factor used by lenders; you'd probably easily get a mortgage.
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.
Don't dismiss it so lightly. Humans (and primates) are social creatures for a reason. Social groups are much stronger than individuals when it comes to conquering and defending resources. And building social groups takes political and social skills. At the individual level, if you have average intelligence and strength, your best bet for successfully passing on your genes is through your social skills (that's pretty much what NT means, unless it means that other thing about women that is also helpful for passing on their genes).
Successful societies really take both kinds: socially skilled managers and organizers, as well as highly intelligent individualists and loners. The problem is that both groups don't understand each other: the former group thinks that individualists and loners are disruptive and need to be forced back into the fold, while the latter often don't see the value of cooperation.
The solution is likely not to try to design one global society that accommodates both kinds of humans (and all the other varieties there are), but to allow many different societies to co-exist and give people the freedom to choose where they want to live.
But that doesn't mean anything if you are measuring the wrong things and are looking at just a coincidence in the profiles for both autism / stem jobs. [...] Remenber also correlation != causation.
Statistically significant correlations are, by definition, improbably explained as "just a coincidence". And the statement "correlation does not mean causation" doesn't mean you can dismiss all correlations as potentially a-causal; what the statement means is that a correlation between A and B does not mean that A causes B; it might also mean that B causes A, or that C causes both A and B.
In fact, the causal relationship that is implied in these studies is not that "autism" causes "STEM jobs", but that a common factor (genetics and early childhood development) causes both; the authors may not talk about it because it's so obvious to their readers. The other two hypotheses, that "autism causes STEM jobs" or "STEM jobs cause autism" are implausible to begin with ("autism causes STEM jobs" is implausible because it would mean that you could induce autism in normal adults, and then they would suddenly start taking STEM jobs.)
If you have a correlation between "a-social" and autism and have the same correlation between "a-social" and stem jobs, then you can say you have a correlation between both autism and stem jobs.
Yes, and the causal relationship would still be that all three are caused by a common factor, namely "genetics and early childhood development". That is, there is no causal relationship between the observed variables, but they are all caused by the same common factor.
Slashdot Mirror
"Corporations" have those rights in the US because individuals have them. That is, I don't lose my right to free speech or campaign contributions or conduct my business according to my religion just because I choose to run my business as a corporation. In Europe, corporations don't have those rights because individuals don't have those rights either; the European system is much more corrupt and serves the ruling elites much better.
But "rights" aren't the same as "power" anyway. European corporations don't need to bother with free speech or campaign contributions, since they are in bed with their governments in much more direct ways. Many large corporations in Europe are partly state owned. Just look at VW, which has a lengthy history of joint ownership between Porsche and various German governments, starting with the Nazis. And unlike US corporations, which are largely public, a lot of powerful European corporations are privately held and hidden behind a web of shell companies and other such mechanisms.
You don't know what you are talking about.
This doesn't originate with politicians, it comes from corporate lobbyists for publishers, newspapers, etc. Those corporations hold a lot of power in Europe and they are seeing their business models and fortunes destroyed by the Internet. And since politicians in Europe are highly dependent on the goodwill of these publishers (not having a lot of other channels for reaching voters), they respond to this kind of pressure.
I've tried scanning some of my books with a camera. This is simply an overhead scanner with manual page turning; you can buy them already. Realistically, it probably takes around 2-3s to scan a page, so it's about 20 minutes to scan a 500 page book. That's a lot of time to sit at a table turning pages.
But let's say you're willing to put in the work. The hard part in making this work is the software, not some $200 digital camera on a stick. And the really hard part in making this work is not on books that are as well behaved and flat as the ones they use in their demo, but on thicker hardcovers, exactly the kind of expensive books you want to preserve by scanning. Unfortunately, they don't talk about their software much, which leads me to believe that they haven't completed it yet. If they had, they could already be selling it without the hardware scanner.
In actual fact, computers are very good at making that kind of decision, and unlike humans, they can make it consistently and reliably, without panic, anger, or selfishness.
So, since you're human and presumably good at making these decisions, just share with the rest of us: what rule should the car follow? Personally, the rule I think it should follow is protect bystanders over protecting the life of the driver, unless the bystanders are doing something illegal. Of course, your preferences may differ.
Well, and you should be thankful that we can actually, for the first time, have these discussions meaningfully, because until now, such discussions were pointless.
I don't see that as a problem. If it works on most of the roads people drive every day, that's good enough. As with all automation, we automate routine tasks and let humans do the rest.
But we don't need "truly intelligent self-driving cars" for self-driving cars to be very useful any more than we need "truly intelligent factory robots" for factory automation to be very useful.
Well, then don't. In fact, your AI driver would probably simply avoid that route altogether precisely for those reasons and still get you to your destination safely and efficiently. Nobody says that an automated driver needs to take the same route as you do; after all, bikes, motorcycles, buses and light rail probably don't either.
The US supplements market is actually doing quite well: it supplies stuff people want cheaply and competitively. The "market failure" you seem to be referring to is that it supplies a lot of crap that probably doesn't work, but that's crap people want. That wouldn't be called a "market failure" by economists.
But no matter what you call it, yes, it illustrates exactly how we got into this predicament with our medical system: because people like you don't like the choices their fellow citizens make in a free market, you advocate regulation; and that regulation is then used by politicians and corporations as a vehicle to enrich themselves. And in a twist of irony, you misrepresent your disapproval of other people's free market choices as a "market failure". And once your regulations start causing worse problems than they were intended to cure, you double down, "blame the market" for the failure of your regulations to achieve what they were intended to achieve, and demand even more regulation, in a vicious spiral that often ends up destroying entire market segments. You know, like health care.
The prisoner's dilemma is a mathematical result that holds under very limited and specific conditions, none of which are satisfied here.
You need to educate yourself on the subject because you evidently have no understanding of it whatsoever.
You have failed to answer the question why the US needs to do that. Supposedly, the oh-so-more-"socialist", wealthy, and rational European nations could do that. Yet they don't.
The amount of innovation in US health care is pitiful compared to what it could be. We have the biggest public health care system in the world (both in absolute terms and per capita), with the spending of the remaining private system massively regulated. And both public and private systems redirect money towards highly profitable but mostly useless interventions, because that's what health care providers, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical lobby for. The only saving grace of our health care system is that others are even worse. But increasing government health care spending takes us in exactly the wrong direction.
"The free market" hasn't dropped the ball because there is nothing even remotely like a free market in health care or drugs in the US. The US health care market is almost entirely dominated by government incentives and policies, and drug makers, hospitals, and doctors are responding to those incentives, to the exclusion of common sense, medical ethics, and the common good.
Government health and prescription drug policy is broken in such fundamental ways, why would you expect this to work? A large percentage of Americans is on hugely expensive proprietary lifestyle drugs, subsidized agribusinesses engage in widespread abuse of antibiotics, and funding priorities for diseases are based on political lobbying, not rational trade-offs. We're already spending much more in government health care spending per capita than Europe and still have outcomes that are no better, and arguably worse. And you want to throw even more money into this bottomless money pit? What's the point? The problem with our health care system and drug development system isn't too little government involvement, it is too much: rent seeking and crony capitalism are stifling innovation and driving up health care costs.
Apparently, there are no companies anywhere that care. In fact, of all the countries in the world, the US is by far the most active in terms of new drug development, and the US market has been the primary driver for new drug development. However, with increasing regulation and cost controls in the US health care market, and the potential for a single payer market, the motivation to develop new drugs will likely dwindle here as well.
There are plenty of flexible and adjustable screen holders and keyboard holders that let you work in any position you like, for the simple reason that there are plenty of people with disabilities or who are bed ridden.
The cheapest alternative, however, is probably prism eye glasses, for less than $10. Search for "bed prism glasses" on Google.
Who knows what the intelligence agencies actually found out; we are always getting the message the administration wants to get out, regardless of the actual facts, whether it's Obama or Bush.
Your implication being that it shouldn't matter to the credit card company whether they give cards to someone who increases their fraud risk? If that reasoning worked, why would they do any screening at all then? Just to deny people cards in order to inconvenience them, because credit card companies are big, evil corporations?
Credit card companies depend on vendors to take their cards for a profit; if a credit card company doesn't select low-risk, low-hassle customers to carry their cards, then vendors will drop that card and the credit card company will stop making money.
Given that US planes aren't exploding every day, this seems anything but horrific. In fact, it seems like excellent news, because it suggests that the screening is probably not needed (unless you believe that only terrorists are deterred by it).
Disclosing "within the intelligence agency" would have been pointless; it would simply have been swept under the rug, protections or not.
The only thing Snowden could do with this information is disclose it publicly if he felt it was sufficiently important, and if he was willing to pay the personal price and hope for leniency eventually. That's what he did. Now, you may agree or disagree with his decision, but there really are not a whole lot of options to change this process.
Really? Can you explain how that works, because it makes no sense.
You put $7000 into your checking account and pay with your checking-account-linked debit card. Or you get one of the dozens of prepaid VISA/MC cards, put $7000 in that, and pay with that.
More difficult than what? Than if you had a good credit rating? Of course. How is that anybody else's problem?
What gives you that idea? Payment behavior on previous loans is an obvious factor in considering whether to extend new credit. Germany uses it as well, for example:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If the mortgage decision was just between you and your bank and your bank actually took a financial risk, like it used to be, they'd mostly be relying on their own information.
But mortgages aren't really made by banks anymore, they are simply highly paid data collectors; those mortgages will eventually be held by the federal government. For your bank to certify to the federal government how much you pay in rent or what your income is is just an additional and unnecessary legal risk. It is simpler and safer for them to have you certify and sign for all your financial information yourself, because if there's a problem with your mortgage, they can then point at you.
You can repay your current balance whenever you want to.
And you don't need to use a credit card to use the VISA / Mastercard payment systems, you can use a debit card.
Finally, so he is inconvenienced. So what? The world does not revolve around making life convenient for him (or for me or for anybody else).
I don't see what you think is "wrong" with this. Banks will only do business with you if the expected income they get from you exceeds the money people of your type will cost them on average. Giving you a credit card places exposes them risk, not just of you not repaying, but also of your card being used for fraud, so if you don't make them much money, why should they do business with you? They aren't a charity.
Why don't you get a prepaid card?
No, it just makes you a likely poor customer: if you pay off your cards right away and pay cash for a lot of your purchases, card companies are not going to be making much money on you, and they aren't interested in doing business with you. Credit scores are just one factor used by lenders; you'd probably easily get a mortgage.
Don't dismiss it so lightly. Humans (and primates) are social creatures for a reason. Social groups are much stronger than individuals when it comes to conquering and defending resources. And building social groups takes political and social skills. At the individual level, if you have average intelligence and strength, your best bet for successfully passing on your genes is through your social skills (that's pretty much what NT means, unless it means that other thing about women that is also helpful for passing on their genes).
Successful societies really take both kinds: socially skilled managers and organizers, as well as highly intelligent individualists and loners. The problem is that both groups don't understand each other: the former group thinks that individualists and loners are disruptive and need to be forced back into the fold, while the latter often don't see the value of cooperation.
The solution is likely not to try to design one global society that accommodates both kinds of humans (and all the other varieties there are), but to allow many different societies to co-exist and give people the freedom to choose where they want to live.
Statistically significant correlations are, by definition, improbably explained as "just a coincidence". And the statement "correlation does not mean causation" doesn't mean you can dismiss all correlations as potentially a-causal; what the statement means is that a correlation between A and B does not mean that A causes B; it might also mean that B causes A, or that C causes both A and B.
In fact, the causal relationship that is implied in these studies is not that "autism" causes "STEM jobs", but that a common factor (genetics and early childhood development) causes both; the authors may not talk about it because it's so obvious to their readers. The other two hypotheses, that "autism causes STEM jobs" or "STEM jobs cause autism" are implausible to begin with ("autism causes STEM jobs" is implausible because it would mean that you could induce autism in normal adults, and then they would suddenly start taking STEM jobs.)
Yes, and the causal relationship would still be that all three are caused by a common factor, namely "genetics and early childhood development". That is, there is no causal relationship between the observed variables, but they are all caused by the same common factor.
You are UNMUTUAL.