If we believe in "America" and Democracy -- we should stick with treating people equally. Back when this was something we did with pride -- we had a lot of people defect. Now we've got Americans selling out for a buck and a lot of "espionage" is done by buying databases from contractors with the US Gov -- go check out a wikileaks document dump sometime and get back with me if you doubt this.
By using drones instead of diplomacy. By cracking down on "Arab looking" rather than bad acting. By being police state pricks instead of a nation of ideals: we are alienating the next Einstein rather than offering him refuge from a country that abuses power, demonizes a "type" of person, and tries to use enforcement rather than empathy.
Going after the obvious "you look Chinese so get out of the party" will only cause the committed "bad guy" to jump through another hoop and do the same thing -- while alienating the allies who "are Chinese" that might have helped you. We've got corporate espionage going on because it's profitable -- not because the world has Chinese looking people.
It's amazing that "barring Chinese" is even considered an idea worthy of discussion.
You say that as if anything would have been different 14 years ago. Obama and ICE are still deporting lots of people. We still have a border with Mexico so it's a good way to sneak in.
The comment you made is lazy and stupid and has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
You can provide a lot of links to support this notion -- but I'm fairly sure that SuperKendall has never researched anything before taking a strong stand.
Domestic surveillance is a great way to control who gets in office, and selective law enforcement when everyone is breaking the law is a great way to quell the public trying to change the status quo.
But we don't need domestic spying to uncover Conservatives and if making them quiet were the goal -- they've failed on both counts.
I don't respect the scientists who ever even hint that we are "reaching the end of science".
These scientists obviously don't want your respect, because they've been very naughty. Just push them down with your leathered heal and tell them they are bad boys. Also, we want their names in case any of them are not from Harvard, which is the only place you can get a "know-it-all" permit.
Not even a poncho? There's some ionizing radiation that can be stopped by a sheet of paper. Sure the hard stuff is bad - but most of it is going to be carried in physics dust. From what I've read, if you aren't getting too many neutrinos a few miles from the blast, you have to avoid the dust. Wait a few weeks and use a bulldozer to scrape off the top layer and you can use that earth for crops.
Things may suck for a while, but it's not like Newt Gingrich or Bush is President again -- so we've got that going for us.
After learning how to walk and talk, I haven't learned anything that complicated, and that includes quantum physics.
I am not a nuclear scientist, but I can easily understand; "Ground Zero -- doesn't matter what you do" and "duck and cover for debris." I'm fairly certain that most people in this country can. Those that can't have given up on live anyway -- so do big deal.
The shocking thing I've found as I've grown up and met people not in a workplace, is that most people are fairly smart about what they need to understand and they are only stupid in large groups. We explained the exact same nuance in surviving tornadoes -- it's condescending military and government planners who think "you can't handle the truth" -- really, only liars think other people can't handle the truth.
OK, and then there are some people actively avoiding truth and they call that a religion -- but your tossing dice on any public announcement with them. They'll immunize and not believe in evolution -- so you never know how they react even when they are perfectly intelligent but illogical.
Hookers and drug dealers actually do more to help our economy than Billionaires on Wall Street. Most hookers don't move their money to offshore tax havens, or support a leverage buyout carpet bagger for public office. For instance; had Allen Greenspan been a pimp instead of in oversight of Wall Street -- we'd be $14 trillion richer as a nation.
We need more hookers and less brokers, more schools and fewer churches -- only then is there hope for America.
"Which is pretty much bollocks. Debt is one of the most powerful economic tools ever invented, rivaling money itself"
People who make sense don't get cookies -- people who say the same garbage as come out of corporate think tanks get promoted. The Egyptian empire existed for a couple thousand years without debt. America has had about 4 economic crashes.
Plus the example given is a very simplistic example of banking. Before our 2008 economic crash -- Financial Services accounted for 40% of all profits. Making money on "financial devices" and not on actually making things was the most profitable endeavor. Because of the ability for banks to factor and leverage, they kept bundling Credit Default Swaps with insurance and used them as deposits to bet again. This used to be illegal before Sarbanes-Oxley got destroyed.
We have inflation because the government borrows in the form of Federal Notes from the Federal Reserve (a group of banks). This makes a lot of sense because paying 3% to an organization year over year for doing something we could have just done ourselves makes a lot of sense -- because people who think this way get a cookie.
Everyone with their head up their ass gets a pat on the head.
Read the "Web of Debt" and understand that debt-based economics always fails. We have history to prove it. It seems all the people who are enamored with unfettered capitalism only look between 1940 and 1980 as if all the rest of our history were invisible.
So does that mean anyone who has a gap or is nearing 50 years old should either work retail or just put a bullet in their head and speed up the process?
This is all pretty harsh and sad, and the concept that people who have a hiccup in their life --- well, those are people who may have no problems and no creativity. The rest of us look for meaning, and occasionally have to deal with our spiritual side. Whatever the reason -- people don't have a problem until they have a problem.
How the Hell can society function for people who want to make a living and raise a family if this black mark ends your career?
When someone says "you have the diabetes" -- that's a reference to the pronunciation of Wilford Brimley and his stern message on the topic; https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So the person was being cute -- not ignorant. And it isn't an issue for people to give an ID (Internet Diagnosis) -- it's an issue if people accept it and start boiling their shorts in garlic and whacking their head with a large Halibut because someone on the internet told them to.
I suspect that you are in the "lucky bacteria club." Your stomach bacteria manage to break down sugar at a sufficient rate. Most people are not so adapted and hence sugar acts pretty muck like a toxin to them.
Now if this were 10,000 years ago, you would have died off as humans seem to have mutated a long time ago to have a large brain and subsist on less food than it would take an animal with a normal metabolism. Pound for pound, humans are one of the weakest mammals -- and I believe the trade off was just for this reason. We are also the 2nd coolest Mammal temperature wise.
It has been show over and over that a little "Nanny state" regulation can do a lot to improve health in the general population. If someone can eat glass at a carnival, we don't just "allow glass" in food do we? If someone has a thick scull, we don't just say; "everyone has to wear seat belts but you get a pass."
I don't want the state to tell me what to do -- but corporations that might impact the health of the population? If it's a good idea -- we should try it. Letting people "just be" doesn't seem to a great society. Yes; education is ideal and awareness -- but we've ceded a lot of that to corporations with profit motives and we've lowered taxes so now we can't afford to "hope that everyone is just smart" -- that's not the USA anymore.
I agree; the psychopathy evident here is a group that is more interested in gaining more power, rather than following their anecdotally proclaimed motivation in protecting America.
They let America's infrastructure be the bait. Just like in their pervasive spying they likely came across a lot of banking irregularities, and crimes -- which they did nothing about. For instance if they noticed a lot of this "metadata" connecting banks with Drug Cartels and Terrorists Cells -- it appears no banks have been harmed in the process of protecting America from some existential threat.
What is a worse threat to America than the rot and decay of the current status quo?
I agree with you about the quantum processes. It's kind of like attaching "nano" to anything small including chemistry. Quantum processes might be part of every-day and ordinary events like using a compass to find the magnetic north pole -- in fact, Quantum has to be part of nature because everything is built on it by necessity.
And there are many organic processes that while complex, are not efficient. Wires can transmit signals many times faster than our nervous system for instance.
I'm in no hurry for a Sentient Machine however -- we've already got Database technology and mass communications being abused by an Oligarchy to preserve their status quo. Every military advancement I now witness, I worry more about it being used on me -- not defending my precious Citizen status.
Until we can create a just society where some Billionaire doesn't have MORE JUSTICE than I do -- I'm not sure I want Artificial Intelligence in the hands of psychopaths. So while I want to make a living, I'm thinking that the really smart people need to stop helping billionaires and start helping themselves.
To bolster the appreciation of organic processes -- I'll say that one cell in the human body has more capabilities and complexity than any single factory on the planet yet created by man.
Grab a few million base pairs while folding and copying the blueprints, construct any one of a million organic molecules, repair itself, and then requisition more materials all on the head of a pin with room for a few thousand more factories? Oh, and while protecting itself from countless biological saboteurs and access attempts by nature trying to disrupt it's processes. It's like having a factory tour where every guest could be strapped with a bomb -- talk about distractions.
You are making good points here -- but nobody was arguing them on this thread.
I'm glad you are really good at cybernetician. It seems like you've been waiting a LONG time to pounce on someone stepping on your turf.
the attempt to dissuade interested CS folk from becoming cyberneticians would be equally as foolish as decommissioning the Large Hadron Collider before discovering the Higgs boson. I'll bet anyone a dollar that the Large Hadron Collider will not discover the Higgs boson. And anyone dissuaded from being a cybernetician based on someone saying; "Neurons are not simple threshold computation devices" is going to be dissuaded by other things on a regular basis.
I'd say that was a fair assertion based on the simple limits of our algorithms. If you have a calculator and you make it a billion times faster -- it's no closer to sentience. Brute force computing power is good for databases and expert systems -- but if they cannot derive "human like" in a billion years or 4 seconds -- it makes no difference.
Computation power can help simulations, and then if you have enough simulations you might get a neural net to choose better over time -- but that's not yet an AI no matter how fast it is.
So I'll agree; computational approaches ALONE will not create an AI -- we have to come up with a different way for a computer to process. And I'll say my own instinct is that it requires processing with more than one type of signal. Whether that's frequencies of light, proteins, or some other multi-phase signal technique -- it doesn't matter. But I don't think consciousness is a binary process -- and computers are stuck as being binary machines.
I'm glad you brought up Glial sells. It's also possible the brain uses protein folding for memory storage and more than "binary" based signaling considering there are so many different neurotransmitters with different functions and an Axon can detect more than a few. Couple that with the possibility that the brain does holographic processing (my theory) -- based on evidence on hypothalamus signals to store memories -- the signal is broadcast throughout the brain to record the pattern of brain activity with the memory -- not just the data. Allowing for a "big data" -- like associative memory recall.
On the other hand, a lot of the brain processing is dealing with organic issues of keeping the body alive -- a very complex process. And it also computes certain things like distance and geometry in a poor fashion relative to computers with much less processing power.
In order for computers to think like people -- they are going to have to get beyond Binary -- not just get faster. But on the other hand, humans suck at certain things like math, trig, geometry and keeping facts straight where computers kick our butts. Most of our education seems to focus more on rewarding skills that a $10 computer can do, rather than what humans are really good at; "Logic and Creative Solutions."
Funny how I keep going back and forth on this -- but it's still amazing to get to 1/1,000th of the processing power of the human brain without economies of scale on a demo unit. The iPhone is about a 1,000 times more powerful than the first desktop computers -- so with merely ham fisted scaling of this new kind of processor, one could imagine 20 years until we have a box with the brute force computing power of a human. Then again, a computer may be able to simulate and surpass us on some skills we have way before that, because our organic nature is inefficient in certain ways.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that she flatly rejected claims that retail investors are being fleeced by high-frequency traders
I'd make a bet with anyone that someone is going to be "shocked and surprised" one day that there was rigging going on just like Allan Greenspan. And just like Allan Greenspan, a certain SEC Chair is going to be miraculously a very wealthy bitch when she retires from a government oversight job.
Of course, I feel compelled to let you know that the betting process is rigged in my favor.
USPS is also hamstrung by government regulations and is not allowed to directly compete against UPS and FedEx. They can't set up a Kinkos in their locations or add banking (as they used to have a long time ago before we made the huge mistake of privatizing banking and making it a source of "profits" -- and now we spend a lot of money bailing them out).
Rand Paul also helped push the measure that forced them to fund their pensions for 75 years in the future. If that wasn't an effort to bankrupt them -- I'm not sure of the logic.
If the USPS could be run as a business, then FedEx and UPS would be crushed in about a year, and then we'd be talking about breaking up a monopoly -- because after that they'd be the ONLY game in town.
So either we support a non-business model with something so important, or we "free market it" and then if we don't regulate it -- we end up with another Ma Bell dictating prices.
People who think UPSS should die because it's not perfect haven't really thought out what would happen if we did not have a US postal service.
I just want a real accounting of Nuclear Power. I suspect that all the people who crunch the numbers for the value of nuclear, don't include the secondary impacts of digging it up, processing, and decommissioning. Nobody has to sit around and guard a used up solar panel for generations later.
If Nuclear power were such a great bang for the buck -- you'd think there would be a private company that could make a reactor without the government insuring them and backstopping them every step of the way.
It's funny; one of the things America still does the best is Coal plants. Our tech is the wonder of the world and we export expertise in putting these things together.
Why is it so awesome? Evil government regulation. All the stuff we avoided with the cars and the trains so that we can be competitive by improving cup holders in the GM cars.
The one industry that got beat up the most ends up being the one that is growing the most -- go figure.
But for those of us who pay attention to why conservation makes sense (or cents if you want to be marketing savvy) -- it's not much of a surprise at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this.
If we believe in "America" and Democracy -- we should stick with treating people equally. Back when this was something we did with pride -- we had a lot of people defect. Now we've got Americans selling out for a buck and a lot of "espionage" is done by buying databases from contractors with the US Gov -- go check out a wikileaks document dump sometime and get back with me if you doubt this.
By using drones instead of diplomacy. By cracking down on "Arab looking" rather than bad acting. By being police state pricks instead of a nation of ideals: we are alienating the next Einstein rather than offering him refuge from a country that abuses power, demonizes a "type" of person, and tries to use enforcement rather than empathy.
Going after the obvious "you look Chinese so get out of the party" will only cause the committed "bad guy" to jump through another hoop and do the same thing -- while alienating the allies who "are Chinese" that might have helped you. We've got corporate espionage going on because it's profitable -- not because the world has Chinese looking people.
It's amazing that "barring Chinese" is even considered an idea worthy of discussion.
"Under the Obama administration"
You say that as if anything would have been different 14 years ago. Obama and ICE are still deporting lots of people. We still have a border with Mexico so it's a good way to sneak in.
The comment you made is lazy and stupid and has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
More Conservative than Reagan and Nixon.
You can provide a lot of links to support this notion -- but I'm fairly sure that SuperKendall has never researched anything before taking a strong stand.
Domestic surveillance is a great way to control who gets in office, and selective law enforcement when everyone is breaking the law is a great way to quell the public trying to change the status quo.
But we don't need domestic spying to uncover Conservatives and if making them quiet were the goal -- they've failed on both counts.
I don't respect the scientists who ever even hint that we are "reaching the end of science".
These scientists obviously don't want your respect, because they've been very naughty. Just push them down with your leathered heal and tell them they are bad boys. Also, we want their names in case any of them are not from Harvard, which is the only place you can get a "know-it-all" permit.
Not even a poncho? There's some ionizing radiation that can be stopped by a sheet of paper. Sure the hard stuff is bad - but most of it is going to be carried in physics dust. From what I've read, if you aren't getting too many neutrinos a few miles from the blast, you have to avoid the dust. Wait a few weeks and use a bulldozer to scrape off the top layer and you can use that earth for crops.
Things may suck for a while, but it's not like Newt Gingrich or Bush is President again -- so we've got that going for us.
After learning how to walk and talk, I haven't learned anything that complicated, and that includes quantum physics.
I am not a nuclear scientist, but I can easily understand; "Ground Zero -- doesn't matter what you do" and "duck and cover for debris." I'm fairly certain that most people in this country can. Those that can't have given up on live anyway -- so do big deal.
The shocking thing I've found as I've grown up and met people not in a workplace, is that most people are fairly smart about what they need to understand and they are only stupid in large groups. We explained the exact same nuance in surviving tornadoes -- it's condescending military and government planners who think "you can't handle the truth" -- really, only liars think other people can't handle the truth.
OK, and then there are some people actively avoiding truth and they call that a religion -- but your tossing dice on any public announcement with them. They'll immunize and not believe in evolution -- so you never know how they react even when they are perfectly intelligent but illogical.
So true. Would anyone pay $250,000 for an education if they couldn't take out a loan? It isn't worth that.
Hookers and drug dealers actually do more to help our economy than Billionaires on Wall Street. Most hookers don't move their money to offshore tax havens, or support a leverage buyout carpet bagger for public office. For instance; had Allen Greenspan been a pimp instead of in oversight of Wall Street -- we'd be $14 trillion richer as a nation.
We need more hookers and less brokers, more schools and fewer churches -- only then is there hope for America.
"Which is pretty much bollocks. Debt is one of the most powerful economic tools ever invented, rivaling money itself"
People who make sense don't get cookies -- people who say the same garbage as come out of corporate think tanks get promoted. The Egyptian empire existed for a couple thousand years without debt. America has had about 4 economic crashes.
Plus the example given is a very simplistic example of banking. Before our 2008 economic crash -- Financial Services accounted for 40% of all profits. Making money on "financial devices" and not on actually making things was the most profitable endeavor. Because of the ability for banks to factor and leverage, they kept bundling Credit Default Swaps with insurance and used them as deposits to bet again. This used to be illegal before Sarbanes-Oxley got destroyed.
We have inflation because the government borrows in the form of Federal Notes from the Federal Reserve (a group of banks). This makes a lot of sense because paying 3% to an organization year over year for doing something we could have just done ourselves makes a lot of sense -- because people who think this way get a cookie.
Everyone with their head up their ass gets a pat on the head.
Read the "Web of Debt" and understand that debt-based economics always fails. We have history to prove it. It seems all the people who are enamored with unfettered capitalism only look between 1940 and 1980 as if all the rest of our history were invisible.
We aren't raising them correctly?
Those countries where the 16-year-old's are raising families all suck.
Give me a mommy state over a dead beat daddy state any day of the week!
"no gaps more than 3 months long in 5 years"
So does that mean anyone who has a gap or is nearing 50 years old should either work retail or just put a bullet in their head and speed up the process?
This is all pretty harsh and sad, and the concept that people who have a hiccup in their life --- well, those are people who may have no problems and no creativity. The rest of us look for meaning, and occasionally have to deal with our spiritual side. Whatever the reason -- people don't have a problem until they have a problem.
How the Hell can society function for people who want to make a living and raise a family if this black mark ends your career?
A courtesy message about "the diabetus":
When someone says "you have the diabetes" -- that's a reference to the pronunciation of Wilford Brimley and his stern message on the topic;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
So the person was being cute -- not ignorant.
And it isn't an issue for people to give an ID (Internet Diagnosis) -- it's an issue if people accept it and start boiling their shorts in garlic and whacking their head with a large Halibut because someone on the internet told them to.
IANAID (I Am Not An Internet Doctor)
I suspect that you are in the "lucky bacteria club." Your stomach bacteria manage to break down sugar at a sufficient rate. Most people are not so adapted and hence sugar acts pretty muck like a toxin to them.
Now if this were 10,000 years ago, you would have died off as humans seem to have mutated a long time ago to have a large brain and subsist on less food than it would take an animal with a normal metabolism. Pound for pound, humans are one of the weakest mammals -- and I believe the trade off was just for this reason. We are also the 2nd coolest Mammal temperature wise.
It has been show over and over that a little "Nanny state" regulation can do a lot to improve health in the general population. If someone can eat glass at a carnival, we don't just "allow glass" in food do we? If someone has a thick scull, we don't just say; "everyone has to wear seat belts but you get a pass."
I don't want the state to tell me what to do -- but corporations that might impact the health of the population? If it's a good idea -- we should try it. Letting people "just be" doesn't seem to a great society. Yes; education is ideal and awareness -- but we've ceded a lot of that to corporations with profit motives and we've lowered taxes so now we can't afford to "hope that everyone is just smart" -- that's not the USA anymore.
I agree; the psychopathy evident here is a group that is more interested in gaining more power, rather than following their anecdotally proclaimed motivation in protecting America.
They let America's infrastructure be the bait. Just like in their pervasive spying they likely came across a lot of banking irregularities, and crimes -- which they did nothing about. For instance if they noticed a lot of this "metadata" connecting banks with Drug Cartels and Terrorists Cells -- it appears no banks have been harmed in the process of protecting America from some existential threat.
What is a worse threat to America than the rot and decay of the current status quo?
I agree with you about the quantum processes. It's kind of like attaching "nano" to anything small including chemistry. Quantum processes might be part of every-day and ordinary events like using a compass to find the magnetic north pole -- in fact, Quantum has to be part of nature because everything is built on it by necessity.
And there are many organic processes that while complex, are not efficient. Wires can transmit signals many times faster than our nervous system for instance.
I'm in no hurry for a Sentient Machine however -- we've already got Database technology and mass communications being abused by an Oligarchy to preserve their status quo. Every military advancement I now witness, I worry more about it being used on me -- not defending my precious Citizen status.
Until we can create a just society where some Billionaire doesn't have MORE JUSTICE than I do -- I'm not sure I want Artificial Intelligence in the hands of psychopaths. So while I want to make a living, I'm thinking that the really smart people need to stop helping billionaires and start helping themselves.
To bolster the appreciation of organic processes -- I'll say that one cell in the human body has more capabilities and complexity than any single factory on the planet yet created by man.
Grab a few million base pairs while folding and copying the blueprints, construct any one of a million organic molecules, repair itself, and then requisition more materials all on the head of a pin with room for a few thousand more factories? Oh, and while protecting itself from countless biological saboteurs and access attempts by nature trying to disrupt it's processes. It's like having a factory tour where every guest could be strapped with a bomb -- talk about distractions.
You are making good points here -- but nobody was arguing them on this thread.
I'm glad you are really good at cybernetician. It seems like you've been waiting a LONG time to pounce on someone stepping on your turf.
the attempt to dissuade interested CS folk from becoming cyberneticians would be equally as foolish as decommissioning the Large Hadron Collider before discovering the Higgs boson.
I'll bet anyone a dollar that the Large Hadron Collider will not discover the Higgs boson. And anyone dissuaded from being a cybernetician based on someone saying; "Neurons are not simple threshold computation devices" is going to be dissuaded by other things on a regular basis.
I'd say that was a fair assertion based on the simple limits of our algorithms. If you have a calculator and you make it a billion times faster -- it's no closer to sentience. Brute force computing power is good for databases and expert systems -- but if they cannot derive "human like" in a billion years or 4 seconds -- it makes no difference.
Computation power can help simulations, and then if you have enough simulations you might get a neural net to choose better over time -- but that's not yet an AI no matter how fast it is.
So I'll agree; computational approaches ALONE will not create an AI -- we have to come up with a different way for a computer to process. And I'll say my own instinct is that it requires processing with more than one type of signal. Whether that's frequencies of light, proteins, or some other multi-phase signal technique -- it doesn't matter. But I don't think consciousness is a binary process -- and computers are stuck as being binary machines.
I'm glad you brought up Glial sells. It's also possible the brain uses protein folding for memory storage and more than "binary" based signaling considering there are so many different neurotransmitters with different functions and an Axon can detect more than a few. Couple that with the possibility that the brain does holographic processing (my theory) -- based on evidence on hypothalamus signals to store memories -- the signal is broadcast throughout the brain to record the pattern of brain activity with the memory -- not just the data. Allowing for a "big data" -- like associative memory recall.
On the other hand, a lot of the brain processing is dealing with organic issues of keeping the body alive -- a very complex process. And it also computes certain things like distance and geometry in a poor fashion relative to computers with much less processing power.
In order for computers to think like people -- they are going to have to get beyond Binary -- not just get faster. But on the other hand, humans suck at certain things like math, trig, geometry and keeping facts straight where computers kick our butts. Most of our education seems to focus more on rewarding skills that a $10 computer can do, rather than what humans are really good at; "Logic and Creative Solutions."
Funny how I keep going back and forth on this -- but it's still amazing to get to 1/1,000th of the processing power of the human brain without economies of scale on a demo unit. The iPhone is about a 1,000 times more powerful than the first desktop computers -- so with merely ham fisted scaling of this new kind of processor, one could imagine 20 years until we have a box with the brute force computing power of a human. Then again, a computer may be able to simulate and surpass us on some skills we have way before that, because our organic nature is inefficient in certain ways.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that she flatly rejected claims that retail investors are being fleeced by high-frequency traders
I'd make a bet with anyone that someone is going to be "shocked and surprised" one day that there was rigging going on just like Allan Greenspan. And just like Allan Greenspan, a certain SEC Chair is going to be miraculously a very wealthy bitch when she retires from a government oversight job.
Of course, I feel compelled to let you know that the betting process is rigged in my favor.
You are being generous, the OP wasn't right on ANY of this points.
USPS is also hamstrung by government regulations and is not allowed to directly compete against UPS and FedEx. They can't set up a Kinkos in their locations or add banking (as they used to have a long time ago before we made the huge mistake of privatizing banking and making it a source of "profits" -- and now we spend a lot of money bailing them out).
Rand Paul also helped push the measure that forced them to fund their pensions for 75 years in the future. If that wasn't an effort to bankrupt them -- I'm not sure of the logic.
If the USPS could be run as a business, then FedEx and UPS would be crushed in about a year, and then we'd be talking about breaking up a monopoly -- because after that they'd be the ONLY game in town.
So either we support a non-business model with something so important, or we "free market it" and then if we don't regulate it -- we end up with another Ma Bell dictating prices.
People who think UPSS should die because it's not perfect haven't really thought out what would happen if we did not have a US postal service.
I just want a real accounting of Nuclear Power. I suspect that all the people who crunch the numbers for the value of nuclear, don't include the secondary impacts of digging it up, processing, and decommissioning. Nobody has to sit around and guard a used up solar panel for generations later.
If Nuclear power were such a great bang for the buck -- you'd think there would be a private company that could make a reactor without the government insuring them and backstopping them every step of the way.
It's funny; one of the things America still does the best is Coal plants. Our tech is the wonder of the world and we export expertise in putting these things together.
Why is it so awesome? Evil government regulation. All the stuff we avoided with the cars and the trains so that we can be competitive by improving cup holders in the GM cars.
The one industry that got beat up the most ends up being the one that is growing the most -- go figure.
But for those of us who pay attention to why conservation makes sense (or cents if you want to be marketing savvy) -- it's not much of a surprise at all.