For some reason people these days always seem to want to "disrupt" things. It's not enough to create something new; you have to destroy everything that came before you to be considered a success. I think Intel's drone show looks nice - it's very serene and calm - but fireworks are explosions. This is not necessarily worse or better, it's just a different thing from fireworks, and doesn't look like it'd create the same atmosphere.
On a semi-related note, those who like fireworks might this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... It's a daytime fireworks show that uses colored smoke trails, as well as microcontrollers to synchronize detonations. Some very cool effects.
It depends how you measure it. The US is the biggest export destination of UK goods, but by far more stuff gets imported from Germany than the US:
The UK exports $51 billion to, and imports $44.4 billion from, the US. The UK exports $46.5 billion to, and imports $100 billion from, Germany. http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/...
And if you combine the rest of the EU, it is far bigger than the US, in terms of trade with the UK.
But anyway, that's missing the point. His point of his comment was that the UK should expand trade to countries which aren't similar to the UK in terms of desktop-vs-mobile usage, which are places beyond both the EU and the US, like India.
iMessage does more than SMS - it supports things like encryption, photos, group chat, continuity (start a conversation on one device, and continue on another), etc. If an iMessage user talks to a non-iMessage user, then you're right, it does route the message over SMS, but with reduced functionality.
Now here's where Apple got clever (or evil, if you're an Android user like me). Normally the messages that you receive are drawn inside blue bubbles. But when you're talking to a non-iMessage user, their messages appear in green bubbles, to let you know that some functionality won't be available. To an iOS user, another way of viewing this is: the person you're talking to has a shitty phone which doesn't support all the awesome things that an iPhone does.
This is particularly noticeable when you're in a group chat. If one of the people is a "green bubble", then the whole group chat is routed over SMS and therefore functionality gets degraded to support them. The Android user essentially drags everyone with them back to the dark ages of SMS, and Apple subtly shames them with green bubbles. The Android user doesn't even notice this, but every iPhone user does.
For just basic functional messaging, this doesn't matter - SMS gets the job done. But for social chatting, it can be a problem. When kids these days want to start a group chat using a feature that isn't supported by SMS, they'll have to decide whether to forget about that feature, or just not invite the Android user.
I've spoken to one iOS-using college student who says that even though Android phones are on par with iPhones (not better, just on par), iMessage is the one thing that keeps her from even considering Android. If you're in college trying to make new friends, your choice of phone can get in the way of your social life!
No, I wouldn't implement this today. My point was that it could be a plausible option in the future, based on back-of-the-envelope calculations on today's numbers.
Also, the average social security payment is more like $14k per year, $24k is close to the maximum payout that only gets given to high-income people.
We could give everyone a UBI of at least $5k today, possibly even $10k, without costing anyone an extra dollar. There may or may not be moral hazards, although recent surveys from Sweden suggest that these are not as bad a people initially think. And this might sound harsh, but the sort of people that would stop working after receiving a $5k or $10k UBI are probably not really contributing that much to society anyway, so it might not be that big of a loss to the rest of us if they drop out of the economy.
But anyway, here's how the math would work:
The population of the US is 319 million.
Of those, 122 million pay federal income tax (source: https://www.reference.com/gove...) Suppose that for those 122 million people, we gave them a tax hike of exactly $5k Under a UBI, they could get an extra $5k, which exactly offsets this tax hike
So there are 192 million people left Keep in mind that UBI replaces existing welfare payments, like social security and food stamps Social security taxes bring in $920 billion (source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS...) Food stamps cost us $74.1 billion (source: http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/sup...) That's enough to pay just over $5k to each of those remaining 192 million people
I haven't bothered to look into how much we're spending in admin costs to apply means testing to these welfare systems, and I haven't looked into how much money the various state governments are spending on various welfare schemes - all of this would become unnecessary under a UBI.
However the Cato Institute has looked into this, and they think we're spending $1 trillion per year on "welfare" (source: http://www.cato.org/publicatio...). I'm not sure I fully trust their analysis, but I'll take this as an estimate of the upper bound of what we could afford. So this, combined with social security revenue, would add up to $2 trillion per year to share amongst the 192 million non-taxpayers, which would give a UBI of just over $10k.
No need to tap into our Medicare funds, or cut any of our other expenses. We could continue to pay medical expenses, pensions, fund NASA and wage unnecessary and expensive wars around the world.
So that's where we're at today. In the future, there could be technological advances that make us more productive, and mean that we can lower our labor participation rate. The OP asks us whether UBI is the way to go in the future, and I'd say it's a plausible option.
Live comments are the problem, not live streaming. This time the live feed is being mixed in with live comments like "WHY THERE IS NO SHOOTING, EXPLOSION. I WANT TO WATCH A WAR” and emoticons.
I disagree that a utilitarian car should sacrifice the pedestrian.
Every car on the road creates some amount of risk to the safety of the general public (which is why we're having this discussion in the first place) whereas the risk that pedestrians create for others is negligible.
Programming cars to always sacrifice the pedestrian would send a strong message to society that it's safer to be a passenger in a self-driving car than a pedestrian, and encourage people to create more risk (which is then offloaded onto the rest of society).
This game has been around for a long time, when I was in school it was called "chicken". Adults are programmed to stop for children, and it's not considered a bug or a design flaw. The people playing the game are the ones that need to change, and there are ways to do that without having cars run over people on purpose.
What do you mean by this, are you saying that people "fell for the marketing" because they didn't expect to get ill from it? How is this different from any other food poisoning outbreak?
You can patent the design of a paper bag though. This doesn't stop people making paper bags in general, but it does stop others from using the exact same design.
This is called a "design patent". Utility patents, which are probably what you're thinking of, are the ones that require novelty and non-obviousness.
The submitter and/or editor are either ignorant of this or being intentionally misleading.
The toothpaste companies were asked to prove that Triclosan was effective and were able to point out studies showing that it helped to prevent gingivitis.
The hand soap companies were given a year and weren't able point to anything.
+1. Many years ago my brother worked as a pizza delivery driver for a bit of extra income. We sat down and worked out the expenses, and found out he was basically breaking even. Most people have no idea how expensive it is to operate a car. I suspect Uber and Lyft drivers are in the same boat.
It's common, at least in the US, for internal emails to be used as evidence in court. Some well publicized cases from the top of my head are the recent Oracle vs Google case and the Microsoft antitrust case. I don't know why source code would be treated differently.
I agree. The article conflates two separate issues: 1) the hacking of voting machines and 2) the leaking of DNC emails. The first is a real problem that needs to be avoided because it is a direct attack on a democracy.
But the hacking of the DNC servers led to more transparency and a more informed public, who were made aware of corruption within the Democratic Party. These are good things. Hopefully future DNC leaders will think twice before acting this way, and if they continue to do these things, hopefully there will be more leaks. The long-term result is that it makes the Democrats, and the US political system in general, better.
Sure, the DNC leak was a "biased" attack on one party, but so is any news article. Why does it matter if the information came from Russian hackers, an internal whistleblower, or the free press?
You're thinking from a company's point of view. The user's point of view is the direct opposite of what you said. Losers use what monopolists give them, winners use what they choose.
Counter-aguments to policy proposals would also fall under the same rules. So for example the idea of putting everyone in jail would easily be shot down by someone explaining that this would destroy economic output (and individual liberty, and many other things obviously). Neither the argument for the proposal, nor the counter-argument against it, need to be based on religious texts.
Actually I have read the Old Testament. Sorry to say but I would not want to be part of a society based on its teachings. Have you ever read the Book of Deuteronomy? I honestly think that many ideas in it are morally disgusting.
Religion doesn't need to provide the basis for any policy argument. The Old Testament isn't entirely bad, but any good social policy that it describes can be justified without resorting to "it's good because this book says so". If a policy argument is entirely based on the Talmud, then we've got a problem.
The same thing holds true for public policy. Do you want "most lives saved?" Do you want "greatest economic output?" Do you want "Least tax burden?"
So independent of any other consideration, there is huge judgement and therefore huge variation when trying to conduct 'rational policy' by what you choose as your utility function.
It sure would be nice to have a universal utility function for all public policy. But in the meantime, what if we just said that any of those (lives saved, economic output, lower tax burden) are an acceptable foundation for you to base an argument on, but "because my ancient book of sacred texts says so" isn't?
This wouldn't lead to 100% logical consistency in policy, but it would surely be an improvement over the current system, don't you think?
The exploitability thing is an interesting problem, but that's not what the article is about. It specifically talks about a "no-win situation" where the car has to choose between innocent pedestrians and innocent passengers. It also has a well-defined definition of ethics - utilitarian - which they found matches up well with what most of their survey respondents consider to be ethical.
I never said that nothing could go wrong, I said that the problem raised by the article is a non-problem.
So most people think that it's good to sacrifice a passenger in order to save many pedestrians, but they wouldn't want the car to sacrifice them. It's clear then that if they were the driver in their own car, they would choose to save themselves rather than the 10 pedestrians they are about to mow down.
There are two future possibilities then:
1. Self-driving cars will sacrifice the driver, which means they will be programmed to be more ethical than they are today. 2. Self-driving cars will sacrifice the pedestrians, which is the same as what drivers do today.
Either way we're not any worse off, so what's the problem?
The P position in an automatic gearbox engages what is known as a "parking pawl". The handbrake is the primary brake, and the parking pawl is the secondary brake, in case the handbrake fails.
Parking pawls are flimsy, and constant use will wear out transmission components, making it even more dangerous to rely on. Use your handbrake!
Not that anyone's going to read this now, but OK sure.
There were 12,253 murders in 2013, which gives a murder rate of 3.8 per 100,000 per year. 441 were in Chicago, 333 in Detroit. That leaves 11,479 in the rest of the country, for a rate of 3.6. That's still 3x France's murder rate of 1.2.
Actually they do protect Paris, a lot. Mass shootings don't happen nearly every day in France, but they do in the US.
I think the source of your confusion is that you're comparing two countries by looking at two rare events that were both essentially statistical anomalies. France's firearm-related death rate is 2.83 per 100,000 people per year, vs 10.54 in the US. And their overall murder rate is also less than a third of what it is here.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised TFA doesn't have a video. This is what they're talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
For some reason people these days always seem to want to "disrupt" things. It's not enough to create something new; you have to destroy everything that came before you to be considered a success. I think Intel's drone show looks nice - it's very serene and calm - but fireworks are explosions. This is not necessarily worse or better, it's just a different thing from fireworks, and doesn't look like it'd create the same atmosphere.
On a semi-related note, those who like fireworks might this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... It's a daytime fireworks show that uses colored smoke trails, as well as microcontrollers to synchronize detonations. Some very cool effects.
It depends how you measure it. The US is the biggest export destination of UK goods, but by far more stuff gets imported from Germany than the US:
The UK exports $51 billion to, and imports $44.4 billion from, the US.
The UK exports $46.5 billion to, and imports $100 billion from, Germany.
http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/...
And if you combine the rest of the EU, it is far bigger than the US, in terms of trade with the UK.
But anyway, that's missing the point. His point of his comment was that the UK should expand trade to countries which aren't similar to the UK in terms of desktop-vs-mobile usage, which are places beyond both the EU and the US, like India.
They're offering up to $650. My not-very-old Retina Macbook Pro is only worth $475, and I do not a $899 Surface Pro to be trading "up".
iMessage does more than SMS - it supports things like encryption, photos, group chat, continuity (start a conversation on one device, and continue on another), etc. If an iMessage user talks to a non-iMessage user, then you're right, it does route the message over SMS, but with reduced functionality.
Now here's where Apple got clever (or evil, if you're an Android user like me). Normally the messages that you receive are drawn inside blue bubbles. But when you're talking to a non-iMessage user, their messages appear in green bubbles, to let you know that some functionality won't be available. To an iOS user, another way of viewing this is: the person you're talking to has a shitty phone which doesn't support all the awesome things that an iPhone does.
This is particularly noticeable when you're in a group chat. If one of the people is a "green bubble", then the whole group chat is routed over SMS and therefore functionality gets degraded to support them. The Android user essentially drags everyone with them back to the dark ages of SMS, and Apple subtly shames them with green bubbles. The Android user doesn't even notice this, but every iPhone user does.
For just basic functional messaging, this doesn't matter - SMS gets the job done. But for social chatting, it can be a problem. When kids these days want to start a group chat using a feature that isn't supported by SMS, they'll have to decide whether to forget about that feature, or just not invite the Android user.
I've spoken to one iOS-using college student who says that even though Android phones are on par with iPhones (not better, just on par), iMessage is the one thing that keeps her from even considering Android. If you're in college trying to make new friends, your choice of phone can get in the way of your social life!
There's plenty more "green bubble" hate if you search on Google. Here's an example: https://medium.com/message/its...
No, I wouldn't implement this today. My point was that it could be a plausible option in the future, based on back-of-the-envelope calculations on today's numbers.
Also, the average social security payment is more like $14k per year, $24k is close to the maximum payout that only gets given to high-income people.
We could give everyone a UBI of at least $5k today, possibly even $10k, without costing anyone an extra dollar. There may or may not be moral hazards, although recent surveys from Sweden suggest that these are not as bad a people initially think. And this might sound harsh, but the sort of people that would stop working after receiving a $5k or $10k UBI are probably not really contributing that much to society anyway, so it might not be that big of a loss to the rest of us if they drop out of the economy.
But anyway, here's how the math would work:
The population of the US is 319 million.
Of those, 122 million pay federal income tax (source: https://www.reference.com/gove...)
Suppose that for those 122 million people, we gave them a tax hike of exactly $5k
Under a UBI, they could get an extra $5k, which exactly offsets this tax hike
So there are 192 million people left
Keep in mind that UBI replaces existing welfare payments, like social security and food stamps
Social security taxes bring in $920 billion (source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS...)
Food stamps cost us $74.1 billion (source: http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/sup...)
That's enough to pay just over $5k to each of those remaining 192 million people
I haven't bothered to look into how much we're spending in admin costs to apply means testing to these welfare systems, and I haven't looked into how much money the various state governments are spending on various welfare schemes - all of this would become unnecessary under a UBI.
However the Cato Institute has looked into this, and they think we're spending $1 trillion per year on "welfare" (source: http://www.cato.org/publicatio...). I'm not sure I fully trust their analysis, but I'll take this as an estimate of the upper bound of what we could afford. So this, combined with social security revenue, would add up to $2 trillion per year to share amongst the 192 million non-taxpayers, which would give a UBI of just over $10k.
No need to tap into our Medicare funds, or cut any of our other expenses. We could continue to pay medical expenses, pensions, fund NASA and wage unnecessary and expensive wars around the world.
So that's where we're at today. In the future, there could be technological advances that make us more productive, and mean that we can lower our labor participation rate. The OP asks us whether UBI is the way to go in the future, and I'd say it's a plausible option.
Live comments are the problem, not live streaming. This time the live feed is being mixed in with live comments like "WHY THERE IS NO SHOOTING, EXPLOSION. I WANT TO WATCH A WAR” and emoticons.
I disagree that a utilitarian car should sacrifice the pedestrian.
Every car on the road creates some amount of risk to the safety of the general public (which is why we're having this discussion in the first place) whereas the risk that pedestrians create for others is negligible.
Programming cars to always sacrifice the pedestrian would send a strong message to society that it's safer to be a passenger in a self-driving car than a pedestrian, and encourage people to create more risk (which is then offloaded onto the rest of society).
This game has been around for a long time, when I was in school it was called "chicken". Adults are programmed to stop for children, and it's not considered a bug or a design flaw. The people playing the game are the ones that need to change, and there are ways to do that without having cars run over people on purpose.
What do you mean by this, are you saying that people "fell for the marketing" because they didn't expect to get ill from it? How is this different from any other food poisoning outbreak?
You can patent the design of a paper bag though. This doesn't stop people making paper bags in general, but it does stop others from using the exact same design.
This is called a "design patent". Utility patents, which are probably what you're thinking of, are the ones that require novelty and non-obviousness.
The submitter and/or editor are either ignorant of this or being intentionally misleading.
The toothpaste companies were asked to prove that Triclosan was effective and were able to point out studies showing that it helped to prevent gingivitis.
The hand soap companies were given a year and weren't able point to anything.
+1. Many years ago my brother worked as a pizza delivery driver for a bit of extra income. We sat down and worked out the expenses, and found out he was basically breaking even. Most people have no idea how expensive it is to operate a car. I suspect Uber and Lyft drivers are in the same boat.
It's common, at least in the US, for internal emails to be used as evidence in court. Some well publicized cases from the top of my head are the recent Oracle vs Google case and the Microsoft antitrust case. I don't know why source code would be treated differently.
I agree. The article conflates two separate issues: 1) the hacking of voting machines and 2) the leaking of DNC emails. The first is a real problem that needs to be avoided because it is a direct attack on a democracy.
But the hacking of the DNC servers led to more transparency and a more informed public, who were made aware of corruption within the Democratic Party. These are good things. Hopefully future DNC leaders will think twice before acting this way, and if they continue to do these things, hopefully there will be more leaks. The long-term result is that it makes the Democrats, and the US political system in general, better.
Sure, the DNC leak was a "biased" attack on one party, but so is any news article. Why does it matter if the information came from Russian hackers, an internal whistleblower, or the free press?
To be fair, a dump of "19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments" almost certainly does contain some amount of malware.
You're thinking from a company's point of view. The user's point of view is the direct opposite of what you said. Losers use what monopolists give them, winners use what they choose.
Counter-aguments to policy proposals would also fall under the same rules. So for example the idea of putting everyone in jail would easily be shot down by someone explaining that this would destroy economic output (and individual liberty, and many other things obviously). Neither the argument for the proposal, nor the counter-argument against it, need to be based on religious texts.
Actually I have read the Old Testament. Sorry to say but I would not want to be part of a society based on its teachings. Have you ever read the Book of Deuteronomy? I honestly think that many ideas in it are morally disgusting.
Religion doesn't need to provide the basis for any policy argument. The Old Testament isn't entirely bad, but any good social policy that it describes can be justified without resorting to "it's good because this book says so". If a policy argument is entirely based on the Talmud, then we've got a problem.
The same thing holds true for public policy. Do you want "most lives saved?" Do you want "greatest economic output?" Do you want "Least tax burden?"
So independent of any other consideration, there is huge judgement and therefore huge variation when trying to conduct 'rational policy' by what you choose as your utility function.
It sure would be nice to have a universal utility function for all public policy. But in the meantime, what if we just said that any of those (lives saved, economic output, lower tax burden) are an acceptable foundation for you to base an argument on, but "because my ancient book of sacred texts says so" isn't?
This wouldn't lead to 100% logical consistency in policy, but it would surely be an improvement over the current system, don't you think?
The exploitability thing is an interesting problem, but that's not what the article is about. It specifically talks about a "no-win situation" where the car has to choose between innocent pedestrians and innocent passengers. It also has a well-defined definition of ethics - utilitarian - which they found matches up well with what most of their survey respondents consider to be ethical.
I never said that nothing could go wrong, I said that the problem raised by the article is a non-problem.
So most people think that it's good to sacrifice a passenger in order to save many pedestrians, but they wouldn't want the car to sacrifice them. It's clear then that if they were the driver in their own car, they would choose to save themselves rather than the 10 pedestrians they are about to mow down.
There are two future possibilities then:
1. Self-driving cars will sacrifice the driver, which means they will be programmed to be more ethical than they are today.
2. Self-driving cars will sacrifice the pedestrians, which is the same as what drivers do today.
Either way we're not any worse off, so what's the problem?
No!
The P position in an automatic gearbox engages what is known as a "parking pawl". The handbrake is the primary brake, and the parking pawl is the secondary brake, in case the handbrake fails.
Parking pawls are flimsy, and constant use will wear out transmission components, making it even more dangerous to rely on. Use your handbrake!
Not that anyone's going to read this now, but OK sure.
There were 12,253 murders in 2013, which gives a murder rate of 3.8 per 100,000 per year. 441 were in Chicago, 333 in Detroit. That leaves 11,479 in the rest of the country, for a rate of 3.6. That's still 3x France's murder rate of 1.2.
Actually they do protect Paris, a lot. Mass shootings don't happen nearly every day in France, but they do in the US.
I think the source of your confusion is that you're comparing two countries by looking at two rare events that were both essentially statistical anomalies. France's firearm-related death rate is 2.83 per 100,000 people per year, vs 10.54 in the US. And their overall murder rate is also less than a third of what it is here.