Consider how we've now made it possible that a computer (given equal time and information) can outperform humans at top games like poker, chess and go.
Now apply this to international relations. If we can properly program a computer to consider how to control foreign country's governments through super advanced analysis, you may be able to manipulate situations and slowly gain an edge the way the casino turns a 50.5% edge into bankruptcy for the player if applied over a sufficient period of time (if the player can't leave the table, in international relations, you would have to cease to exist).
Apply the same methodology to military decision making. If you could build a supercomputer that could guarantee victory (or gave you a feeling that you were certain even if it were only a false certainty), would the odds of going to war increase or decrease? If you are going to win, why not, right?
What if all sides think they have an edge? Again, each side will be willing meaning you are more likely to get into war, and then when it doesn't go well, you will escalate towards greater means to prevent loss.
What if you think you have an edge, but think it's going away? Better to go to war than wait for the enemy to come up with something better than whatever you have that you think is unbeatable.
Right now, a lot of people in China are trying to move money offshore, and Bitcoin is the way to do it with the least losses, heck right now, you get an increase while you hold the bitcoin before you get the money into it's destination currency. Since there are a limited number of Bitcoins, and a huge amount of money that is being moved, the extremely high cost of the Bitcoin is actually a feature because it allows a much greater amount of currency to be moved through Bitcoin. If this continues to be the case, Bitcoin will probably go down when the Chinese figure out how to stop individuals from getting their money into Bitcoin, or the Chinese economic bubble bursts, and nobody has the money they want to move out of China.
If you put a small vacuum machine (powered by covering the tube with solar panels, which also power your propulsion) on every 10' of track, I imagine they could probably get most of the vacuum restored within 10-30 minutes. And you probably don't even need a perfect vacuum. Just cutting the air in the tube by 80-90% would be enough to severely reduce air resistance without putting too much pressure on the tube.
Rediculous. I have six and only just jumped to 60k a year in salary. Without any government money other than my child tax credits (I net about (k-1)*1000 in tax return/year with none withheld). The way we budget, the kids' food costs a bit more than the tax refund. I do hear that this may change as they get older, but we have difficulty getting most of them to eat much due to my wife's insistence on feeding them healthy food.
Considering an explosion would have a significant impact on the atmosphere, and the first A of NASA is Aeronautics which has to do with Atmosphere (hence, NASA's involvement in climate research), it seem there is a tie in.
I saw a video on Youtube that claimed to show the best time to buy a car was 2 years after manufacture considering the cost / remaining useful life. But in our experence,
We've bought 3 used cars in the last 12 years.
#1: My father-in-law's used car, purchased at the price the dealership offered for trade in ($6600). Just sold it back to him after 11 years for ($1200). Net cost, $500 / year + maintenance.
#2: Purchased a 5 year old minivan, currently owned for 8.5 years, for $9900. Approaching the point where the vehicle cost will be less than 1000/yr, but the vehicle acts like it will drive for another 10.
#3: Purchased a very lightly used vehicle, 9yo, 48k miles for 11grand in almost impeccable condition. Expect the vehicle to run for at least 20 years and 200,000 miles.
If your concern is cost, spend enough to get something that will last, and then take good care of it, and you can save a lot of money compared to many alternatives.
Where we were, was overcast, but only lightly, so we could see the corona through the cloud cover. Just a minute before totality, I pointed out that the eclipse was surrounded by a rainbow ring which was a cool consolation prize.
But then your load would be stuck during recharging if you ever needed to recharge before unloading. Perhaps it would work well with short routes assuming your customer didn't mind providing you a recharge station. I suppose Walmart, Target and other companies with their own trucks would be fine with charging during unloading, but they may not get a full recharge in the time that they unload, and then the dock is occupied by a trailer that still needs to charge.
But why do these have to go the whole way? Let's say you want run a shipment by truck from LA to Denver. Put one of these on the road in LA, take it to Las Vegas (270 mi). Unhitch, and have a ready to go replacement waiting in LV, and first truck starts charging, maybe to run the next run toward Denver for the next shipment or some other route. The second truck runs to Richfield UT, where the process repeats, then on to Grand Junction, CO, repeat and then run to Denver.
Let's say you get 50% usage from each truck (50% on the road, 50% recharging, that's got to be an improvement over man driven trucks which probably average less than 25% (40/168 hours a week).
The run from LA to Denver would take 2 drivers, or 1 man two days. We've really replaced 2 drivers with 1 truck each (considering we were already going to replace the truck the driver was driving anyway at some point). And, we get our shipment there in 16 hours (much faster than the single driver option, and a little faster than the two driver option since they'd still need to stop for fuel, meal and maybe a couple of other stops), and at a much lower cost (save the entirety of the driver's pay).
If anything criminal is done, follow this proceedure. Start at the top. If they claim ignorance, get them to hand over whoever had authority to authorize the decisions that approved the action, and they must show they were reasonably ignorant of the actions taken (emails or other communication between subordinates that they were hiding info from their bosses should suffice). If they can't provide the necessary party, then they are the ones who will be held responsible. If the company puts in a reward structure that results in thousands of employees breaking the law, then each employee and whoever created and approved the reward structure shall face the necessary legal penalties.
Additionally, the corporation will reimburse customers affected any profits from the activity x 10 + the costs of actually fixing the problem or reimbursing the purchase price. The Corporation will also pay the lawyers fees of any class action lawsuit brought against them separate on top of any settlement.
This combination of penalties should put an end to corporations acting badly.
I have a cousin who is a manager of some sort in the Kansas lottery system. Her mom told me that she and her husband are not allowed to play lottery games due to their relationship to her.
It makes sense. If they win a big lottery, how can you guarantee that the employee didn't have a conflict of interest where they rigged a game, her parents win a lottery, and they share the money with her either now, or later if she gets any inheritance?
No, there is a minimum wage, which is why there is so much fighting about how minimum wage isn't a living wage, because the one wage is for everybody except commission sales people and some other exempt work. The minimum wage is largely for students, people with less than a high school degree, and people with no skills, including people with families trying to live at the poverty line. So, if you read the right stuff, people who don't want minimum wage increases say that it will price young workers out of the market, etc. Of course, if you set the student wage at 7 and a living wage at 10, you'll have people complaining that kids are taking the jobs of somebody who could be earning the extra $3.
You know what, my wife and I kicked the cable subscription almost 2 years ago. Our primary source of entertainment is checking out seasons of TV shows we are interested in on DVD from our library. It does mean that we have to wait until the next season starts and our turn in the checkout queue to get to watch. We don't discuss the shows we watch with anybody else, and we don't track the shows on the internet/facebook, so spoilers and the like aren't a problem, and the show is just as enjoyable when we get around to watching it. Since we are waiting for last year's shows, we've picked out a couple of old shows that she's never seen, and are watching them. We are 75% of the way through one and 25% of the way through another. In another month or two, we'll start to splice in our current shows into our checkout routine.
If we were to go to a paid streaming route, unfortunately, two of the four shows we like going into this fall are on CBS, and I don't plan on getting the CBS plan for 2 shows, and Hulu isn't really an option for the other two shows. But, last night, my wife asked me about getting homeschooling classes onto our TV. Unfortunately, all of the classes are designed to work on PC, but not on our Roku. So I'm starting to look at building an HTPC that could run those classes. It should have the side benefit that we would be able to get all of those shows directly from their website, with commercials but for free. Or we could continue to wait for the DVDs the next year, and watch them commercial free.
I will say that waiting does have the benefit of being able to see which shows are good enough to survive the season and try out the ones that look decent. In the past we've watched and like shows that ended sooner than we liked. I guess we still liked them, but 2 shows in one year that were cancelled in mid-winter was a bit disappointing. Likewise, there is a show we like that we initially decided not to watch because when we watched the pilot, the cast seemed to lack chemistry. But then, surprised when the show was still on TV 7 seasons later, we decided to watch a recent set of episodes and decide it was worth watching. If we had been able to watch the entire season a decade ago, we may have stuck with the show initially, and been able to enjoy it all this time.
So, what if the parents want to edit their child's genes to make them economically successful, but it's also going to result in the kid being a sociopath? Who gets to say if its good or bad? I'll tell you, the parents paying the money and if this doctor says no, some other will say yes, and eventually, we'll end up with a society of 75% Donald Trumps.
None of what you said will address the cause of all of this which is a shortage of supply of good medical professionals. We require students to pass an exam to become students who are learning to become doctors. What if this exam has eliminated thousands of great doctors-to-be from getting the education that would allow them to become great doctors, increase the supply of good doctors, and put a downward pressure or prices through increased competition.
We are undergoing a huge demographic shift where in 30 years, half of the population will be senior citizens. That will significantly increase demand for medical care, which will greatly increase the costs of medical care unless we encourage and enable millions of more young people to become medical professionals to provide the care we will need when we are older. Every other issue in the medical industry debate is peanuts compared to the demographic and supply and demand portions of the equations.
Some of you may think I'm advocating for allowing inferior doctors into the field, but all I'm saying decrease the costs of the education, and allow far more students to study to the point of taking the final exam.
I'm a fan of pro sports. Talent assessment is a huge deal. For instance, every year, something like 30% of first round players wash out. And every year dozens of good players, and even a few all stars go undrafted. In the medical field, those are the guys who would be eliminated by the MCAT.
Additionally, we also have a legal medical cartel inflating prices, something we wouldn't allow in almost any other field, but when you have money, and the law makers are going to eventually find themselves on your operating table, perhaps you have the leverage to get away with highway robbery.
What percentage goes to running a private school? Is a better education than US public school an act of charity? I know in my church, the biggest item in the budget is the school, and while the parents do pay some of the cost, they don't pay all of it.
Firefox has the option to keep the tab but not actually load the page when you open the browser after closing it. So, If I have a hundred tabs, and close and reopen the browser, the only page that is loaded is the current one. When I close the current tab, or select a different one, the newly selected tab will load. If I want to activate several tabs so I don't have to wait, I can click on them in succession and let them load up and read them when I'm ready.
But in this case, (if the MPAA's traditional argument is followed) they can cut off your access to the internet and fine you thousands of times the economic impact of the offence for something that's not actually theft.
For a company making a movie, the equivalent in this case would be being locked out of theaters and BILLIONS in fines.
I'm usually a live and let live kind of guy, but when somebody abuses the court system, using a high quantity of lawyers and delaying tactics to break opponents who have no chance of a fair day in court, I wouldn't mind seeing the same abuse heaped up on them as they've done to others in the past.
If you read the story, it explains how employers are using part time on call employment, and individuals who are working part time are no longer considered unemployed, so their are less unemployed, because instead of hiring full time employees with benefits, employers have switched to hiring more part timers. If you do the math on all of the people who are making the minimum wage, there are fewer total hours being worked such that individual employees are working less and making less even after the increase of hours.
If your pay goes up 20% but your hours go down 20%, you end up worse off than before. (compare 40*10=400 v 32*12=384)
It might be more effective to point out that a modern example would be to attribute the success of Microsoft to paying employees in the 1980s & 1990s enough to buy the company's products. Employee purchases could never be more than a drop in the bucket of a companies revenue. Unless all of an employee's paycheck was spent on the company's products, each sale to an employee would result in less new revenue paid out in salaries.
You know, I shut it down when I log on to let my wife use the machine. When I login and launch, I get back all of my tabs, but I set the setting that does not load all of the tabs, so most of them don't use any memory, other than having a tab and knowing the URL. I periodically go back, and decide I'm never going to use many of those tabs and close them without reading them, but other than being clutter, they don't really impact my browser usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider how we've now made it possible that a computer (given equal time and information) can outperform humans at top games like poker, chess and go.
Now apply this to international relations. If we can properly program a computer to consider how to control foreign country's governments through super advanced analysis, you may be able to manipulate situations and slowly gain an edge the way the casino turns a 50.5% edge into bankruptcy for the player if applied over a sufficient period of time (if the player can't leave the table, in international relations, you would have to cease to exist).
Apply the same methodology to military decision making. If you could build a supercomputer that could guarantee victory (or gave you a feeling that you were certain even if it were only a false certainty), would the odds of going to war increase or decrease? If you are going to win, why not, right?
What if all sides think they have an edge? Again, each side will be willing meaning you are more likely to get into war, and then when it doesn't go well, you will escalate towards greater means to prevent loss.
What if you think you have an edge, but think it's going away? Better to go to war than wait for the enemy to come up with something better than whatever you have that you think is unbeatable.
Right now, a lot of people in China are trying to move money offshore, and Bitcoin is the way to do it with the least losses, heck right now, you get an increase while you hold the bitcoin before you get the money into it's destination currency. Since there are a limited number of Bitcoins, and a huge amount of money that is being moved, the extremely high cost of the Bitcoin is actually a feature because it allows a much greater amount of currency to be moved through Bitcoin. If this continues to be the case, Bitcoin will probably go down when the Chinese figure out how to stop individuals from getting their money into Bitcoin, or the Chinese economic bubble bursts, and nobody has the money they want to move out of China.
If you put a small vacuum machine (powered by covering the tube with solar panels, which also power your propulsion) on every 10' of track, I imagine they could probably get most of the vacuum restored within 10-30 minutes. And you probably don't even need a perfect vacuum. Just cutting the air in the tube by 80-90% would be enough to severely reduce air resistance without putting too much pressure on the tube.
Rediculous. I have six and only just jumped to 60k a year in salary. Without any government money other than my child tax credits (I net about (k-1)*1000 in tax return/year with none withheld). The way we budget, the kids' food costs a bit more than the tax refund. I do hear that this may change as they get older, but we have difficulty getting most of them to eat much due to my wife's insistence on feeding them healthy food.
Considering an explosion would have a significant impact on the atmosphere, and the first A of NASA is Aeronautics which has to do with Atmosphere (hence, NASA's involvement in climate research), it seem there is a tie in.
Considering I made more than double minimum wage in college delivering pizza, I had no complaints about being a delivery guy.
I saw a video on Youtube that claimed to show the best time to buy a car was 2 years after manufacture considering the cost / remaining useful life. But in our experence,
We've bought 3 used cars in the last 12 years.
#1: My father-in-law's used car, purchased at the price the dealership offered for trade in ($6600). Just sold it back to him after 11 years for ($1200). Net cost, $500 / year + maintenance.
#2: Purchased a 5 year old minivan, currently owned for 8.5 years, for $9900. Approaching the point where the vehicle cost will be less than 1000/yr, but the vehicle acts like it will drive for another 10.
#3: Purchased a very lightly used vehicle, 9yo, 48k miles for 11grand in almost impeccable condition. Expect the vehicle to run for at least 20 years and 200,000 miles.
If your concern is cost, spend enough to get something that will last, and then take good care of it, and you can save a lot of money compared to many alternatives.
Where we were, was overcast, but only lightly, so we could see the corona through the cloud cover. Just a minute before totality, I pointed out that the eclipse was surrounded by a rainbow ring which was a cool consolation prize.
But then your load would be stuck during recharging if you ever needed to recharge before unloading. Perhaps it would work well with short routes assuming your customer didn't mind providing you a recharge station. I suppose Walmart, Target and other companies with their own trucks would be fine with charging during unloading, but they may not get a full recharge in the time that they unload, and then the dock is occupied by a trailer that still needs to charge.
But why do these have to go the whole way? Let's say you want run a shipment by truck from LA to Denver. Put one of these on the road in LA, take it to Las Vegas (270 mi). Unhitch, and have a ready to go replacement waiting in LV, and first truck starts charging, maybe to run the next run toward Denver for the next shipment or some other route. The second truck runs to Richfield UT, where the process repeats, then on to Grand Junction, CO, repeat and then run to Denver.
Let's say you get 50% usage from each truck (50% on the road, 50% recharging, that's got to be an improvement over man driven trucks which probably average less than 25% (40 /168 hours a week).
The run from LA to Denver would take 2 drivers, or 1 man two days. We've really replaced 2 drivers with 1 truck each (considering we were already going to replace the truck the driver was driving anyway at some point). And, we get our shipment there in 16 hours (much faster than the single driver option, and a little faster than the two driver option since they'd still need to stop for fuel, meal and maybe a couple of other stops), and at a much lower cost (save the entirety of the driver's pay).
If anything criminal is done, follow this proceedure. Start at the top. If they claim ignorance, get them to hand over whoever had authority to authorize the decisions that approved the action, and they must show they were reasonably ignorant of the actions taken (emails or other communication between subordinates that they were hiding info from their bosses should suffice). If they can't provide the necessary party, then they are the ones who will be held responsible. If the company puts in a reward structure that results in thousands of employees breaking the law, then each employee and whoever created and approved the reward structure shall face the necessary legal penalties.
Additionally, the corporation will reimburse customers affected any profits from the activity x 10 + the costs of actually fixing the problem or reimbursing the purchase price. The Corporation will also pay the lawyers fees of any class action lawsuit brought against them separate on top of any settlement.
This combination of penalties should put an end to corporations acting badly.
I have a cousin who is a manager of some sort in the Kansas lottery system. Her mom told me that she and her husband are not allowed to play lottery games due to their relationship to her.
It makes sense. If they win a big lottery, how can you guarantee that the employee didn't have a conflict of interest where they rigged a game, her parents win a lottery, and they share the money with her either now, or later if she gets any inheritance?
No, there is a minimum wage, which is why there is so much fighting about how minimum wage isn't a living wage, because the one wage is for everybody except commission sales people and some other exempt work. The minimum wage is largely for students, people with less than a high school degree, and people with no skills, including people with families trying to live at the poverty line. So, if you read the right stuff, people who don't want minimum wage increases say that it will price young workers out of the market, etc. Of course, if you set the student wage at 7 and a living wage at 10, you'll have people complaining that kids are taking the jobs of somebody who could be earning the extra $3.
You know what, my wife and I kicked the cable subscription almost 2 years ago. Our primary source of entertainment is checking out seasons of TV shows we are interested in on DVD from our library. It does mean that we have to wait until the next season starts and our turn in the checkout queue to get to watch. We don't discuss the shows we watch with anybody else, and we don't track the shows on the internet/facebook, so spoilers and the like aren't a problem, and the show is just as enjoyable when we get around to watching it. Since we are waiting for last year's shows, we've picked out a couple of old shows that she's never seen, and are watching them. We are 75% of the way through one and 25% of the way through another. In another month or two, we'll start to splice in our current shows into our checkout routine.
If we were to go to a paid streaming route, unfortunately, two of the four shows we like going into this fall are on CBS, and I don't plan on getting the CBS plan for 2 shows, and Hulu isn't really an option for the other two shows. But, last night, my wife asked me about getting homeschooling classes onto our TV. Unfortunately, all of the classes are designed to work on PC, but not on our Roku. So I'm starting to look at building an HTPC that could run those classes. It should have the side benefit that we would be able to get all of those shows directly from their website, with commercials but for free. Or we could continue to wait for the DVDs the next year, and watch them commercial free.
I will say that waiting does have the benefit of being able to see which shows are good enough to survive the season and try out the ones that look decent. In the past we've watched and like shows that ended sooner than we liked. I guess we still liked them, but 2 shows in one year that were cancelled in mid-winter was a bit disappointing. Likewise, there is a show we like that we initially decided not to watch because when we watched the pilot, the cast seemed to lack chemistry. But then, surprised when the show was still on TV 7 seasons later, we decided to watch a recent set of episodes and decide it was worth watching. If we had been able to watch the entire season a decade ago, we may have stuck with the show initially, and been able to enjoy it all this time.
The Office Suite and the XBOX are both made by MS?
So, what if the parents want to edit their child's genes to make them economically successful, but it's also going to result in the kid being a sociopath? Who gets to say if its good or bad? I'll tell you, the parents paying the money and if this doctor says no, some other will say yes, and eventually, we'll end up with a society of 75% Donald Trumps.
None of what you said will address the cause of all of this which is a shortage of supply of good medical professionals. We require students to pass an exam to become students who are learning to become doctors. What if this exam has eliminated thousands of great doctors-to-be from getting the education that would allow them to become great doctors, increase the supply of good doctors, and put a downward pressure or prices through increased competition.
We are undergoing a huge demographic shift where in 30 years, half of the population will be senior citizens. That will significantly increase demand for medical care, which will greatly increase the costs of medical care unless we encourage and enable millions of more young people to become medical professionals to provide the care we will need when we are older. Every other issue in the medical industry debate is peanuts compared to the demographic and supply and demand portions of the equations.
Some of you may think I'm advocating for allowing inferior doctors into the field, but all I'm saying decrease the costs of the education, and allow far more students to study to the point of taking the final exam.
I'm a fan of pro sports. Talent assessment is a huge deal. For instance, every year, something like 30% of first round players wash out. And every year dozens of good players, and even a few all stars go undrafted. In the medical field, those are the guys who would be eliminated by the MCAT.
Additionally, we also have a legal medical cartel inflating prices, something we wouldn't allow in almost any other field, but when you have money, and the law makers are going to eventually find themselves on your operating table, perhaps you have the leverage to get away with highway robbery.
What percentage goes to running a private school? Is a better education than US public school an act of charity? I know in my church, the biggest item in the budget is the school, and while the parents do pay some of the cost, they don't pay all of it.
Firefox has the option to keep the tab but not actually load the page when you open the browser after closing it. So, If I have a hundred tabs, and close and reopen the browser, the only page that is loaded is the current one. When I close the current tab, or select a different one, the newly selected tab will load. If I want to activate several tabs so I don't have to wait, I can click on them in succession and let them load up and read them when I'm ready.
But in this case, (if the MPAA's traditional argument is followed) they can cut off your access to the internet and fine you thousands of times the economic impact of the offence for something that's not actually theft.
For a company making a movie, the equivalent in this case would be being locked out of theaters and BILLIONS in fines.
I'm usually a live and let live kind of guy, but when somebody abuses the court system, using a high quantity of lawyers and delaying tactics to break opponents who have no chance of a fair day in court, I wouldn't mind seeing the same abuse heaped up on them as they've done to others in the past.
Check your library. My library has the previous seasons on disc.
If you read the story, it explains how employers are using part time on call employment, and individuals who are working part time are no longer considered unemployed, so their are less unemployed, because instead of hiring full time employees with benefits, employers have switched to hiring more part timers. If you do the math on all of the people who are making the minimum wage, there are fewer total hours being worked such that individual employees are working less and making less even after the increase of hours.
If your pay goes up 20% but your hours go down 20%, you end up worse off than before. (compare 40*10=400 v 32*12=384)
It might be more effective to point out that a modern example would be to attribute the success of Microsoft to paying employees in the 1980s & 1990s enough to buy the company's products. Employee purchases could never be more than a drop in the bucket of a companies revenue. Unless all of an employee's paycheck was spent on the company's products, each sale to an employee would result in less new revenue paid out in salaries.
When I was considering becoming a priest, I was told the starting salary was 14k after earning 2 masters degrees. Moneyed priesthood indeed.
You know, I shut it down when I log on to let my wife use the machine. When I login and launch, I get back all of my tabs, but I set the setting that does not load all of the tabs, so most of them don't use any memory, other than having a tab and knowing the URL. I periodically go back, and decide I'm never going to use many of those tabs and close them without reading them, but other than being clutter, they don't really impact my browser usage.