I forgot to add: the zero-cost-manufacturing industries and low-emissions vehicles have a key element in common. A significant portion of the purchase price benefits a whole community more than the purchaser.
I like to think about various different market sectors, and how capitalism succeeds and struggles in these sectors. The auto industry is, for the most part, a good example of capitalism at its best. It still has issues with safety & emissions regulations -- pure market forces would favor lower costs over safety, and definitely favor lower costs over low emissions because the individual car owner doesn't suffer exclusively from their own car's emissions. And there are globalization market effects to contend with, as well as monopolistic tendencies.
Service industries are also great in free market economies, like hair salons and auto shops. Though auto shops do benefit from sleazy tactics that are hard for the average consumer to detect. But a haircut is easy, you know exactly what you're getting and what you're paying. How about the tipping culture though?
I think where capitalism struggles the most today is in information industries like software, news, music, etc where the per-unit production costs are zero or are dwarfed by "development" costs. In these industries, I believe the efficient market hypothesis no longer applies because one of its predicates (an aspect of scarcity) is no longer true. These industries are becoming larger and more important today, so it's not surprising that capitalism itself is being challenged.
This doesn't make me "reject" capitalism, because it still has tremendous value and use. But I don't expect it to work very well in the not-distant future without some significant modifications. And no, I wish I knew what those modifications might be but I don't.
AFAICT, snaps is no worse in this regard than any other packaging system out there: dpkg, rpm, pacman, etc. Am I right? Is all this fuss about the claim of better-but-not-actually-perfect sandboxing? Admittedly there is this gaping hole in X11 security (the way it's implemented in any case), which has been around for decades. But the article makes it sound like snaps are a new kind of bad. I don't think that's true, but hopefully some slashdotter will set me straight.
Typically in university-based research, most of the government funding goes to post-doc salaries. The professors are paid by the university, and most of a grad student's research assistantship (basically minimum wage) is also paid through the university. Post-doc salaries are between about 1/3 to 1/2 of what industry would pay the same people.
I have to disagree with this, at least as it relates to R&D spending. It sounds like you're advocating for pure, unregulated markets and want to rely on free market economics to somehow, magically, create a thriving privatized research program.
I wish I could believe in that, but it's way too simplistic. People point to Bell Labs as an example of successful private research, but other than that and Research Corporation, I don't know of any privately-funded basic research programs. Both of those, combined, produced very little basic science. Not to belittle them, but government funded programs far exceeded them in terms of funding and science output. I view Bell Labs as a market anomaly -- a momentary quirk of a market failure, possible only because Bell telephone held a monopoly for a while and had money they didn't know what to do with and no competition to keep them running lean.
In a properly-functioning market economy, companies that aren't 100% dedicated to maximizing return-on-investment will fail. This rules out basic science funding by corporations. Then you have private philanthropy, which only works when you have such an enormous wealth disparity that the top 0.0001% of citizens hold a large fraction of the nation's wealth and feel the desire at some point to spend a lot of it on research. Again, a consequence of a failed economy.
The way science has been successfully funded in the US has been through government spending by politicians who were motivated to do the right thing for our country. This was publicly justifiable, especially during the cold war, and probably for the wrong reasons. But starting around 1993, the public has begun to steadily lose interest in science and other long-term goals, and our politics have reflected that.
I don't even pretend to know about the pros and cons of the federal reserve bank. I know its history is suspicious at best, but beyond that there is a lot of intelligent debate that's outside my field of expertise. This is an important issue for sure, but I don't see how any fixes related to the Fed would do anything to restore a beneficial state of research in the US. In a healthy, thriving, and competitive economy, basic research can't and won't happen in the private sector.
I'm worried that half-measures like this do more harm than good, because they can create dissatisfaction with voting reform efforts. Get it right, and do the math. Start with replacing plurality / first-past-the-post with any other system. CA's system by itself will probably cause havoc because of the spoiler effect. I like reweighted range voting best for multi-seat elections, but would be happy with transferrable votes and probably others as well.
I don't see much activity on this front, but I like the material at rangevoting.org. I wonder what the status is of current efforts to get range voting implemented in the US?
They make an interesting argument that it's better to lobby for range voting than approval voting, because it's a little harder to repeal. The graph at the bottom of the home page, for me, is a shockingly strong argument. With the plurality system, we do not do much better than picking a winner at random. If we actually value democracy, we should place more emphasis on this issue. The electoral college system is also badly flawed, but I'd honesly go after the voting system first.
I think challenging the two-party system (a stable equilibrium of plurality voting) is extremely important for political debate because, for one, mud-slinging is most effective when there are only two viable candidates. At rangevoting.org they argue that range voting helps independents more than any of the other systems considered.
That's a valid point. I'm really preferring my $2 trillion cleanup figure anyway. Not that anyone is going to actually clean this up, because no one can afford to be responsible. And I suspect that $200/tonne CO2 reclamation is not a very accurate figure, even hypothetically.
Still, I'd like to suggest that we aren't addressing global warming until we enact a reclamation tax for all significant greenhouse emissions including gasoline prices and electricity from coal plants.
You're dividing 112 days of methane leak by one year's-worth of automobile consumption. So now we're at 0.7%.
That still seems smallish, and when talking about greenhouse emissions it's a global problem. One has to take into account global greenhouse gas production, but also global carbon sinks. I wonder what percentage of unabsorbed greenhouse gasses this contributed to over that period of time?
Maybe another way of digesting the impact is in terms of money. That, we can relate to. So maybe here's the question: given current technology for atmospheric carbon reclamation (and they say methane traps 100 times more heat than CO2), how much would it cost to reclaim 9.71 Gg of CO2? I see one reference quoting reclamation at $200 per tonne CO2, which for this leak equals $2 trillion. How does this compare to past disaster cleanup costs? It's a lot of money.
While on the topic of Nazi Germany, this whole ICBM in NK thing reminds me of the history surrounding Hitler deploying troops in Rhineland. This and subsequent military pushes violated a neutral zone established after WWI, and no other countries reacted because at that time the public was adamantly anti-war because, again, of WWI. By the time any actual resistance was established against Germany's invasions, it was too late. I've heard historians identify the occupation of Rhineland as the last time at which Nazi Germany could have been contained without nearly as much loss of life.
I don't know all the complexities with NK politics today and their relationship with China, etc. So I hate to suggest this but with them having developed nukes and now testing ICBMs, it seems to me like today could be a modern-day parallel to that pre-WWII situation in some ways.
This is dangerous talk because it's such a vague analogy and makes more of an emotional issue out of this than anything else. I'm generally strongly in favor of talks and negotiations, but I'm a little worried that in some situations there is a clock ticking and negotiations have a time limit.
I don't know the details, but the signals they are looking for are particular distributions of light. There are a lot of background processes that produce light, but in patterns or distributions that can be subtracted out. The experiment is carefully designed to have small backgrounds with respect to the signals they hope for, but I'm sure there is still a lot of data being generated.
I feel like you're parroting back to us things that skilled politicians have been teaching the public to think. This is fear propaganda.
Yes, there are serious turmoil problems going on in the world right now. I won't try to moralize on how we put this in perspective and deal with it. It's worth having conversations on this subject but only if that conversation is rich in content and reason, and depleted of propaganda. One thing is that terrorism is a highly asymmetrical thing (quite unlike war). It costs many orders of magnitude more money to directly fight against or rebuild from very low-cost attacks. Effective strategies are non-military ones.
It said something like "Don't worry, your files are exactly where you left them."
I started to worry a lot when I saw this. Either MS was being fantastically condescending, or someone had hacked into my network and was encrypting my filesystem. It was taking a long time, so I was leaning toward the latter possibility. I expected the next message to be a ransom notice and I was reminding myself of how to restore from backups, how long it would take, and what I might lose. I finally thought to google the message on my phone. Phew, it was just MS being condescending. But honestly why would they even say this?! It's a cruel joke I think, and it worked brilliantly.
I didn't know about GPS devices using Kalman filters. But I noticed this issue when using MyTracks to measure my hikes a couple years ago. I wished the project was open-source so I could go in and add some sort of algorithm to correct the issue. I think the problem isn't the lower-level GPS reports but the way the tracking apps are designed.
One could use piecewise linear regression to fit a series of line segments through the GPS data, only adding in kinks when doing so results in a significantly better fit. One could additionally throw in a fudge factor to correct for a predictably inflated distance measurement.
I just take this kind of comment from Trump as the usual "I'm not politically correct so get used to it" bluster. If we take his statement literally, I guess it would translate into an executive order that everyone must say "Merry Christmas" at a certain time on Dec 25, probably while kneeling and facing Bethlehem.:-) Hopefully that's crazy... I think it's just Trump being the expert demagogue he is.
There is something to be said about excessive political correctness and hypersensitivity, but a U.S. President is not in a good position to take on cultural issues like that.
I liked a lot of his answers too. Though I may not agree with everything, McAfee argues his positions with much better reasoning and somewhat less rhetoric than any other political candidates I've heard from recently. My favorite answer is "I would still rather drive a nail through my foot...." If he's honest about this, then he satisfies what I think is the most important qualification of any politician: they don't want the job.
But if I agree with him on these issues, wouldn't he make a better congressman than president? What are the actual demands of a president? His last answer addresses this more directly, but aside from the pardons the rest may be impractical. From what I can tell our presidents are primarily diplomats, not policy leaders. Still I like him more than the Democrat and Republican candidates. This isn't saying much.
In the usnews article, they break down the costs of medical malpractice into the actual lawsuits (18%) and "defensive costs" (82%). So if "Looser pays legal fees" provides some reformation but still leaves the medical practitioners open to huge settlements against them, those defensive costs will not go away.
Yours is a fine theory but it needs some testing. There are a whole lot of factors that changed our culture in (roughly) 1980. The personal computer even. Many of those could be argued to be related to mass murders. But regardless of the arguments, the vast majority of these theories will be wrong. McAfee is putting forward a theory with a prediction: if anti-depressants are a cause (there need not be only one cause), one would expect the murderers to be using them. Is appears likely this is the case. This theory is still not completely believable, but it has something going for it and warrants further testing.
This kind of social science reminds me of Freakonomics, correlating Roe v. Wade with decreased violent crime. Even this study can be (and has been) criticized, but it's interesting to read about the ways their theory is tested.
It's hard to know, but I'm guessing that the possibility of being shot and killed by a police officer does very little to deter crime. Sometimes the perp thinks about a crime ahead of time and effectively weighs gains against risks, and in that case they are thinking of being caught and possibly sentenced, not about the arrest itself. Other times the crime is spontaneous or out of complete desperation and again the perp is not thinking about the danger of arrest or anything else for that matter.
Only when confronted by an officer does fear of that officer come into play. And in those cases it's really hard to say whether extreme fear of the officer does more good than harm. If one feels like one's life is in danger, it's all about fight or flight.
In general I think we focus too much on deterrence when it comes to our justice system. Consider these goals of the justice system: reformation, protection, deterrence, and revenge. Non-lethal tech is focused on the first two, and lethal tech is focused on the last three. In general we do a really bad job at reformation, so it makes sense to focus more effort there.
I liked the terms quoted: "reputable source" and "certified." These are great BS words that many people actually believe guarantees higher quality. This product must be good because we have a contract with its supplier. Windows XP is certified and thus much more reliable than, say, Windows 7, CentOS 7, or Arch Linux. Perception dominates.
Of course the OS and hardware make very little difference compared to the application software they are using, whatever that may be.
I also agree although mine is an older G3. If your Android device doesn't have an easily-accessible battery and SD card slot and cannot be modded, it might as well be an iPhone. My previous phone was an SGS3 too, but it had serious overheating issues. For me the main things I look for are: replaceable battery, SD card slot, thermal management, battery life, and good antenna sensitivity (wifi and cellular). I also found the SGS3 annoying in that I had to hold it in specific ways to not press buttons like volume, power, back, or menu. This meant I could not hand my phone to someone else without buttons getting pressed at random.
For me the main drawbacks of the LG G3 are bootloader protections and the lack of equivalent camera functionality in Cyanogenmod-based builds. LG worked hard to lock the phone down, and this has slowed the modding community quite a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot to add: the zero-cost-manufacturing industries and low-emissions vehicles have a key element in common. A significant portion of the purchase price benefits a whole community more than the purchaser.
I like to think about various different market sectors, and how capitalism succeeds and struggles in these sectors. The auto industry is, for the most part, a good example of capitalism at its best. It still has issues with safety & emissions regulations -- pure market forces would favor lower costs over safety, and definitely favor lower costs over low emissions because the individual car owner doesn't suffer exclusively from their own car's emissions. And there are globalization market effects to contend with, as well as monopolistic tendencies.
Service industries are also great in free market economies, like hair salons and auto shops. Though auto shops do benefit from sleazy tactics that are hard for the average consumer to detect. But a haircut is easy, you know exactly what you're getting and what you're paying. How about the tipping culture though?
I think where capitalism struggles the most today is in information industries like software, news, music, etc where the per-unit production costs are zero or are dwarfed by "development" costs. In these industries, I believe the efficient market hypothesis no longer applies because one of its predicates (an aspect of scarcity) is no longer true. These industries are becoming larger and more important today, so it's not surprising that capitalism itself is being challenged.
This doesn't make me "reject" capitalism, because it still has tremendous value and use. But I don't expect it to work very well in the not-distant future without some significant modifications. And no, I wish I knew what those modifications might be but I don't.
AFAICT, snaps is no worse in this regard than any other packaging system out there: dpkg, rpm, pacman, etc. Am I right? Is all this fuss about the claim of better-but-not-actually-perfect sandboxing? Admittedly there is this gaping hole in X11 security (the way it's implemented in any case), which has been around for decades. But the article makes it sound like snaps are a new kind of bad. I don't think that's true, but hopefully some slashdotter will set me straight.
Typically in university-based research, most of the government funding goes to post-doc salaries. The professors are paid by the university, and most of a grad student's research assistantship (basically minimum wage) is also paid through the university. Post-doc salaries are between about 1/3 to 1/2 of what industry would pay the same people.
I have to disagree with this, at least as it relates to R&D spending. It sounds like you're advocating for pure, unregulated markets and want to rely on free market economics to somehow, magically, create a thriving privatized research program.
I wish I could believe in that, but it's way too simplistic. People point to Bell Labs as an example of successful private research, but other than that and Research Corporation, I don't know of any privately-funded basic research programs. Both of those, combined, produced very little basic science. Not to belittle them, but government funded programs far exceeded them in terms of funding and science output. I view Bell Labs as a market anomaly -- a momentary quirk of a market failure, possible only because Bell telephone held a monopoly for a while and had money they didn't know what to do with and no competition to keep them running lean.
In a properly-functioning market economy, companies that aren't 100% dedicated to maximizing return-on-investment will fail. This rules out basic science funding by corporations. Then you have private philanthropy, which only works when you have such an enormous wealth disparity that the top 0.0001% of citizens hold a large fraction of the nation's wealth and feel the desire at some point to spend a lot of it on research. Again, a consequence of a failed economy.
The way science has been successfully funded in the US has been through government spending by politicians who were motivated to do the right thing for our country. This was publicly justifiable, especially during the cold war, and probably for the wrong reasons. But starting around 1993, the public has begun to steadily lose interest in science and other long-term goals, and our politics have reflected that.
I don't even pretend to know about the pros and cons of the federal reserve bank. I know its history is suspicious at best, but beyond that there is a lot of intelligent debate that's outside my field of expertise. This is an important issue for sure, but I don't see how any fixes related to the Fed would do anything to restore a beneficial state of research in the US. In a healthy, thriving, and competitive economy, basic research can't and won't happen in the private sector.
Next up: golden opportunities for Gerrymandering.
I just read this and thought: Google the phrases "you liberals" and "you conservatives" and see if there is an asymmetry in the search results.
"you liberals": 196,000 reslults
"you conservatives": 60,400 results
I don't know what to make of that, but it's some measure of how pervasive partisan politics (us vs them) is among the major parties.
I'm worried that half-measures like this do more harm than good, because they can create dissatisfaction with voting reform efforts. Get it right, and do the math. Start with replacing plurality / first-past-the-post with any other system. CA's system by itself will probably cause havoc because of the spoiler effect. I like reweighted range voting best for multi-seat elections, but would be happy with transferrable votes and probably others as well.
I don't see much activity on this front, but I like the material at rangevoting.org. I wonder what the status is of current efforts to get range voting implemented in the US?
They make an interesting argument that it's better to lobby for range voting than approval voting, because it's a little harder to repeal. The graph at the bottom of the home page, for me, is a shockingly strong argument. With the plurality system, we do not do much better than picking a winner at random. If we actually value democracy, we should place more emphasis on this issue. The electoral college system is also badly flawed, but I'd honesly go after the voting system first.
I think challenging the two-party system (a stable equilibrium of plurality voting) is extremely important for political debate because, for one, mud-slinging is most effective when there are only two viable candidates. At rangevoting.org they argue that range voting helps independents more than any of the other systems considered.
That's a valid point. I'm really preferring my $2 trillion cleanup figure anyway. Not that anyone is going to actually clean this up, because no one can afford to be responsible. And I suspect that $200/tonne CO2 reclamation is not a very accurate figure, even hypothetically.
Still, I'd like to suggest that we aren't addressing global warming until we enact a reclamation tax for all significant greenhouse emissions including gasoline prices and electricity from coal plants.
You're dividing 112 days of methane leak by one year's-worth of automobile consumption. So now we're at 0.7%.
That still seems smallish, and when talking about greenhouse emissions it's a global problem. One has to take into account global greenhouse gas production, but also global carbon sinks. I wonder what percentage of unabsorbed greenhouse gasses this contributed to over that period of time?
Maybe another way of digesting the impact is in terms of money. That, we can relate to. So maybe here's the question: given current technology for atmospheric carbon reclamation (and they say methane traps 100 times more heat than CO2), how much would it cost to reclaim 9.71 Gg of CO2? I see one reference quoting reclamation at $200 per tonne CO2, which for this leak equals $2 trillion. How does this compare to past disaster cleanup costs? It's a lot of money.
While on the topic of Nazi Germany, this whole ICBM in NK thing reminds me of the history surrounding Hitler deploying troops in Rhineland. This and subsequent military pushes violated a neutral zone established after WWI, and no other countries reacted because at that time the public was adamantly anti-war because, again, of WWI. By the time any actual resistance was established against Germany's invasions, it was too late. I've heard historians identify the occupation of Rhineland as the last time at which Nazi Germany could have been contained without nearly as much loss of life.
I don't know all the complexities with NK politics today and their relationship with China, etc. So I hate to suggest this but with them having developed nukes and now testing ICBMs, it seems to me like today could be a modern-day parallel to that pre-WWII situation in some ways.
This is dangerous talk because it's such a vague analogy and makes more of an emotional issue out of this than anything else. I'm generally strongly in favor of talks and negotiations, but I'm a little worried that in some situations there is a clock ticking and negotiations have a time limit.
I don't know the details, but the signals they are looking for are particular distributions of light. There are a lot of background processes that produce light, but in patterns or distributions that can be subtracted out. The experiment is carefully designed to have small backgrounds with respect to the signals they hope for, but I'm sure there is still a lot of data being generated.
I feel like you're parroting back to us things that skilled politicians have been teaching the public to think. This is fear propaganda.
Yes, there are serious turmoil problems going on in the world right now. I won't try to moralize on how we put this in perspective and deal with it. It's worth having conversations on this subject but only if that conversation is rich in content and reason, and depleted of propaganda. One thing is that terrorism is a highly asymmetrical thing (quite unlike war). It costs many orders of magnitude more money to directly fight against or rebuild from very low-cost attacks. Effective strategies are non-military ones.
It said something like "Don't worry, your files are exactly where you left them."
I started to worry a lot when I saw this. Either MS was being fantastically condescending, or someone had hacked into my network and was encrypting my filesystem. It was taking a long time, so I was leaning toward the latter possibility. I expected the next message to be a ransom notice and I was reminding myself of how to restore from backups, how long it would take, and what I might lose. I finally thought to google the message on my phone. Phew, it was just MS being condescending. But honestly why would they even say this?! It's a cruel joke I think, and it worked brilliantly.
Oh it is open source I think. Well, game on!
I didn't know about GPS devices using Kalman filters. But I noticed this issue when using MyTracks to measure my hikes a couple years ago. I wished the project was open-source so I could go in and add some sort of algorithm to correct the issue. I think the problem isn't the lower-level GPS reports but the way the tracking apps are designed.
One could use piecewise linear regression to fit a series of line segments through the GPS data, only adding in kinks when doing so results in a significantly better fit. One could additionally throw in a fudge factor to correct for a predictably inflated distance measurement.
I just take this kind of comment from Trump as the usual "I'm not politically correct so get used to it" bluster. If we take his statement literally, I guess it would translate into an executive order that everyone must say "Merry Christmas" at a certain time on Dec 25, probably while kneeling and facing Bethlehem. :-) Hopefully that's crazy... I think it's just Trump being the expert demagogue he is.
There is something to be said about excessive political correctness and hypersensitivity, but a U.S. President is not in a good position to take on cultural issues like that.
I liked a lot of his answers too. Though I may not agree with everything, McAfee argues his positions with much better reasoning and somewhat less rhetoric than any other political candidates I've heard from recently. My favorite answer is "I would still rather drive a nail through my foot. ..." If he's honest about this, then he satisfies what I think is the most important qualification of any politician: they don't want the job.
But if I agree with him on these issues, wouldn't he make a better congressman than president? What are the actual demands of a president? His last answer addresses this more directly, but aside from the pardons the rest may be impractical. From what I can tell our presidents are primarily diplomats, not policy leaders. Still I like him more than the Democrat and Republican candidates. This isn't saying much.
In the usnews article, they break down the costs of medical malpractice into the actual lawsuits (18%) and "defensive costs" (82%). So if "Looser pays legal fees" provides some reformation but still leaves the medical practitioners open to huge settlements against them, those defensive costs will not go away.
Yours is a fine theory but it needs some testing. There are a whole lot of factors that changed our culture in (roughly) 1980. The personal computer even. Many of those could be argued to be related to mass murders. But regardless of the arguments, the vast majority of these theories will be wrong. McAfee is putting forward a theory with a prediction: if anti-depressants are a cause (there need not be only one cause), one would expect the murderers to be using them. Is appears likely this is the case. This theory is still not completely believable, but it has something going for it and warrants further testing.
This kind of social science reminds me of Freakonomics, correlating Roe v. Wade with decreased violent crime. Even this study can be (and has been) criticized, but it's interesting to read about the ways their theory is tested.
It's hard to know, but I'm guessing that the possibility of being shot and killed by a police officer does very little to deter crime. Sometimes the perp thinks about a crime ahead of time and effectively weighs gains against risks, and in that case they are thinking of being caught and possibly sentenced, not about the arrest itself. Other times the crime is spontaneous or out of complete desperation and again the perp is not thinking about the danger of arrest or anything else for that matter.
Only when confronted by an officer does fear of that officer come into play. And in those cases it's really hard to say whether extreme fear of the officer does more good than harm. If one feels like one's life is in danger, it's all about fight or flight.
In general I think we focus too much on deterrence when it comes to our justice system. Consider these goals of the justice system: reformation, protection, deterrence, and revenge. Non-lethal tech is focused on the first two, and lethal tech is focused on the last three. In general we do a really bad job at reformation, so it makes sense to focus more effort there.
The reasonable posts like this are always too late to get moderated. A shame.
I liked the terms quoted: "reputable source" and "certified." These are great BS words that many people actually believe guarantees higher quality. This product must be good because we have a contract with its supplier. Windows XP is certified and thus much more reliable than, say, Windows 7, CentOS 7, or Arch Linux. Perception dominates.
Of course the OS and hardware make very little difference compared to the application software they are using, whatever that may be.
I also agree although mine is an older G3. If your Android device doesn't have an easily-accessible battery and SD card slot and cannot be modded, it might as well be an iPhone. My previous phone was an SGS3 too, but it had serious overheating issues. For me the main things I look for are: replaceable battery, SD card slot, thermal management, battery life, and good antenna sensitivity (wifi and cellular). I also found the SGS3 annoying in that I had to hold it in specific ways to not press buttons like volume, power, back, or menu. This meant I could not hand my phone to someone else without buttons getting pressed at random.
For me the main drawbacks of the LG G3 are bootloader protections and the lack of equivalent camera functionality in Cyanogenmod-based builds. LG worked hard to lock the phone down, and this has slowed the modding community quite a bit.