So, you worked for the government at a job that paid for most of your higher education via taxpayer money? Clearly, you're just a dirty Socialist.
In all seriousness, I'm not really knocking you, but the whole "I did it all on my own" thing generally does turn out to be something of a myth when examined.
Equal pay regardless of work
I'm pretty sure this is something you just made up and applied to them, rather than what most of them actually want.
That said, I'm in favor of something along the lines of a guaranteed minimum income, as ever larger numbers of the population are likely to become essentially economically unecessary due to automation, and it's better than locking them up for turning to the illegal sector. And even I'd never say that people shouldn't be able to earn more than that doing whatever they could get paid for, or that all pay should be the same. Hell, I think more people would be accepting of laissez-faire free markets with their large income inqualities if they weren't dependent on them for basic living standards. A GMI is more of a long term thing though, I'm not sure if it's even economically viable at our current automation/productivity levels. More-socialized systems of healthcare and education (the latter of which you experienced a form of) are probably more important at the moment.
You realize this is a remarkably stupid statement, right? The changes scientists are worried about are far more sudden than the naturally-occurring climate cycles we've been able to infer. Do you really think a climatologist is going to read this post, smack their foreheads, and go "Oh, shit! Natural climate variations! Why didn't we think of that and take it into account in all our extensive modeling? This random uninformed internet commenter has certainly schooled us, back to the drawing board guys!" Regardless of your politics, you have no place on a site like/, that ostensibly concerns itself with science, if that's the kind of argument you're going to construct.
Also, joke all you want, but the atmosphere was pretty much created in its current form by biological life, so yes, the plants, animals, and microbes of millions of years ago were deeply involved in climate change. They just didn't have an industrial society to greatly exacerbate the amount of their natural byproducts.
E=mc^2, so there's no "fundamental reason" why a big enough nuclear explosion can't spontaneously turn into a fluffy pink unicorn.
Yes there is, it's called statistics. No similar barrier has yet appeared for AI. We already have conciousnesses made of matter as a starting inspiration/template.
I'm curious as to whether you'd say the same if 99% of current human employment was made economically unfeasable by automation. Presumably you'd be infavor of mass incarceration and/or extermination of the majority of the populace (including yourself) by the minority of land owning, robot-controlling overlords?
I mean, why have a relative utopia where everyone is free to pursue their own interests instead of having to work to survive, when we can have self-imposed genocide instead? It's better than something that could be labelled Socialism, that's for sure! (Based on current demographic trends, you don't get to invoke overpopulation as an argument against said utopianish society, btw)
Of course, I doubt you thought through your position in terms of the subject at hand, you just wanted to sound hard-nosed and tough. Online. In a forum for nerds. This is my problem wiht Internet Sociopaths (TM) - they're basically just trolls in Ayn Rand's clothing.
The concept of AI is beyond the scope of this article, but I believe the consensus is that it is not truelly achievable
Where did you get that consensus from, aside from pulling it out of your ass? Roger Penrose probably made the best recent stab at that argument, and even he was basically saying a complicated version of "brains are really special and totally don't work by known laws of physics guys!!", which isn't quite Cartesian Dualism, but often seems to stem from similar impulses.
Basically, if you're willing to admit that humans are in fact made of matter like the rest of the known universe, there's no fundamental barrier to eventual AI of some sort.
Why do people shouting the "poor people don't pay (income) taxes" meme always leave out the other taxes they do pay? It's pretty much universal, and seems rather disingenuous.
It's almost as bad as the confusion of "pay x% rate of income tax" versus "pay x% rate of income tax only for income over y amount", which can be a rather significant difference, although at least that's often an honest misunderstanding.
What does that even begin to mean? If something is invisible it's invisible, whether the light goes straight through it or is channelled around it somehow. "Pretending to be invisible to pressure" seems less like a fun concept and more like a nonsensical one. What properties of a material exist aside from the "purely physical level" ones?
I mean yes, if it's just sci-fi, you can say a substance lets you fly, defy gravity, deflect laser beams and produce chocolate mousse, but that doesn't have much to do with even speculative materials science.
Are you sincerely indifferent to whether your neighborhood becomes a war zone?
Even if he isn't, he can never admit it because he's an Internet Sociopath (TM). It's like being an Internet Tough Guy, only even more pathetic. They're fairly common in Slashdot discussions, maybe because of the site's libertarian leanings. He doesn't actually have anything to contribute to the discussion, he just wants to make sure everyone knows how tough and coldly rational he supposedly is, unlike the rest of you sheeple with your "ethics" and "caring about others".
Do not fret. There are big plans, and many of us private citizens have them and have been working on them for many years, but simply do not trust the Obama administration. If we reveal the plans and projects, it will simply be given away to some other country, or corporation, and we believe America needs to come first.
...
What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Are you high right now?
And no, I don't believe you have a secret starship already built just waiting for a Republican to get in office and make some minor adjustment to marginal tax rates.
Or this crazy idea liberals have that humans are more powerful than the Sun and seem to forget the climate of the earth has changed many times before man even arrived.
That's an utter nonsense statement, which you yourself already know if you would think about it for more than 2 seconds. Saying "they think humans are more powerful than the Sun" is meaningless in this context, as it's not about the energy release of humans vs. Sun, it's about relatively minor changes in how energy is contained in the atmosphere that could have a major impact from a human perspective. There are nearly 7 billion humans on the planet, along with all their attendant industries, cultivated fauna, and machines, so it's hardly unthinkable that they might have some cumulative impact on the atmosphere. If the Sun's output were to vary by say 10% in either direction, that would obviously overshadow any change humans could make at present, but even taking sunspots, solar flares etc, into account, average Solar output just doesn't change that much. The Earth's climate has indeed changed plenty of times in the past (including times influenced by the atmosphere, which was created in its current form by *gasp* the biological life you seem to dismiss), the changes the scientists are currently worried about seem to be shorter-term and not part of a larger natural cycle.
I don't actually have any definitive opinion on anthropogenic climate change/warming, as I haven't looked into it particularly deeply and mostly just know it from general media stories, which are notoriously poor at science reporting (I do get the impression it's all fairly speculative- even if most relevant scientists agree on the likely outcomes, that doesn't speak to their degree of certainty). I just think your comments are remarkably stupid, to anyone with a working brain and the wherewithal to look up basic facts.
(Also, the article you linked is an opinion piece by a shill for a conservative think tank, making it even less reliable than the media's usual well-intentioned, if inept and sensationalized science reporting, although the study referenced is interesting, and possibly good news if it means the worst of the projected outcomes will be avoided.)
You're assuming FLT travel (which there's no way to achieve within the currently understood laws of physics, and Star Trek is not a textbook), I take it? Because "exploring the galaxy" isn't remotely doable on human timescales otherwise.
The vast majority of residents leaving Manchester that night made their support for the actions clear.
Are you serious? The people whose homes and business were being burned and looted were in support of people doing those things? Did you ask them in front of large crowds of said angry folks, perhaps?
My political beliefs are the only sustainable political beliefs in existence.
Your political beliefs are the ones that generally get co-opted into millions of deaths to purge those "on the side of capital" and other undesirables, and the setting up of oligarchies to replace the old ones, just with a different set of slogans (Unless I'm totally off about yours, which I doubt). Ideals don't mean much without a means to implementation that doesn't end up betraying most of them.
Also, everyone says the same about their political beliefs, that's why they're called beliefs.
My own are that while roughly pyramid-shaped societies are probably inevitable at this stage of our technological development, they should be kept relatively flat, with the base raised as high as possible, both for humanitarian reasons and for the practical ones that it's easier in the long run the more people have an actual stake in society. Globalization has increased the steepness of the pyramid currently, since the top levels are fairly mobile with their money. Increasing automation of even things like service jobs is eventually going to force us to either lock up/dispose of ever larger portions of the population, or give up the idea of needing to work to live a decent life*. I'd like to think it'll be the latter, but there will probably be some horrible period of an in-between state (you could argue this process is already well underway, but different regional levels of technological development muddy it a bit). I'll admit I'm counting long term on even people near the top not being entirely innate sociopaths (as opposed to functional sociopaths who behave as such to get ahead), which some would argue.
* Anyone worried about overpopulation without literal starvation to keep numbers down is being both cruel and uninformed, as a look at birthrate demographics in industrialized countries shows. The best way to keep people from having 15 kids on average (easily absorbed outliers aside) is to give them comfortable middle-class lifestyles and access to birth control.
I probably don't even disagree with a lot of your thinking on the origins of the riots, just with your tendency towards hyperbole and binary thinking. Thing is, you could rally the entire underclass, throw out the oppressors, and end up back where you started in a few years. Because the only difference between the rich/powerful and the poor/underrepresented is that the former have more money and influence, so I'm not sure where the idea comes from that the latter would behave any better were their positions swapped. You could probably wipe the planet of all humans and repopulate it with identical clones of the same age, and still develop the same hierarchical structures (the people at the top who got lucky would still consider their positions the result of innate qualities, of course).
Your premises are flawed, and I don't think you're actually interested in the answers to your questions (which aren't really that hard to understand), Are there entire forums where people with no knowledge of structural mechanics keep repeating the same misinformation to each other ad nauseum, or something?
I mean, you seem to have good intentions, but believing everything you read on the internet just because it reinforces your worldview in some way leads to madness. That's how you get people thinking Bush was a shapeshifting lizard alien, just because it works with him being evil.
The monarchy's been stripped of any real power, though. If they tried to use the nominal duties they still have to actually affect policy, those would be removed very quickly.
Congress already passed the budget, this is just attempting to renege on commitments already made. If they want to cut spending, this is the wrong way to go about it. The whole "debt ceiling" concept was just a bit of politcal convenience to free Congress from having to vote on every bond issue while still nominally maintaining their control of borrowing. We should have probably just passed an amendment to give the power to Treasury directly and leave Congress to control the spending side. Refusing to pay our bills is about to wreck the US's credit rating for the foreseeable future, which will make the interest rates on our debt higher, making it even harder to pay back, so, great job conservatives! By analogy, their solution to someone with a large student loan debt would presumably be to tell them to stop paying their bills and become homeless. This, plus the fact that they seem to think the Laffer Curve peaks somewhere around 0% tax for rich people means I probably won't be voting for a Republican anytime soon.
Libertarianism seems fine as an abstract ideal (like most such things), but trying to bring it about by wrecking the existing society and returning to Feudalism seems as misguided as the Marxists who tried to bring about a perfect egalitarian society by setting up hierarchical dictatorships.
Realistically, Pakistan needs to be nuked to ensure all of their nukes are destroyed. If the US backed government falls, chances are very high a terrorist nuke will originate from Pakistan. Pragmatically, nuking Pakistan isn't an option though realistically, its likely the best option to ensure the minimal number of innocent (as in peace loving, non-extremists) people actually get nuked.
Fuck you.
No, I'm not elaborating on that and I don't particularly care about the karma, just wanted to get that said.
No, I don't see why there's such a thing as a Marine Corps computer programmer, and the idea of a Marine with that kind of cognitive capacity makes me think of a dog that can operate a radio, or a fist with a cerebellum.
As a non-Marine, I'm still going to agree that you've got your head way up your ass. Do you think our wars are still fought with sharpened sticks and smoke signals or something?
Oh look, it's an Internet Sociopath (TM)! Hi, Internet Sociopath (TM), yes, you are very tough and super rational, and everyone is in awe of your hard-nosed, simpleminded self-interest!
Now go away, Internet Sociopath (TM), the grownups are trying to talk.
Are you just congenitally incapable of reading your own links, or what?
"Births to teenagers increased during the 1960s and peaked in 1971 at 50.6 per thousand of the population. Since 1971 they have gradually fallen to their lowest level since the mid Fifties."
breeding is a natural human instinct, and absolutely nothing that anyone can possibly do could ever hope to suppress it at the scale that would be necessary to make any real difference.
You're apparently unfamiliar with birthrate trends in modern idustrialized societies. You're also kind of an idiot, for making such definitive statements when talking out your ass.
Honestly, it takes real effort and drive towards the goal to be as wrong as you are.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you worked for the government at a job that paid for most of your higher education via taxpayer money? Clearly, you're just a dirty Socialist.
In all seriousness, I'm not really knocking you, but the whole "I did it all on my own" thing generally does turn out to be something of a myth when examined.
Equal pay regardless of work
I'm pretty sure this is something you just made up and applied to them, rather than what most of them actually want.
That said, I'm in favor of something along the lines of a guaranteed minimum income, as ever larger numbers of the population are likely to become essentially economically unecessary due to automation, and it's better than locking them up for turning to the illegal sector. And even I'd never say that people shouldn't be able to earn more than that doing whatever they could get paid for, or that all pay should be the same. Hell, I think more people would be accepting of laissez-faire free markets with their large income inqualities if they weren't dependent on them for basic living standards. A GMI is more of a long term thing though, I'm not sure if it's even economically viable at our current automation/productivity levels. More-socialized systems of healthcare and education (the latter of which you experienced a form of) are probably more important at the moment.
You realize this is a remarkably stupid statement, right? The changes scientists are worried about are far more sudden than the naturally-occurring climate cycles we've been able to infer. Do you really think a climatologist is going to read this post, smack their foreheads, and go "Oh, shit! Natural climate variations! Why didn't we think of that and take it into account in all our extensive modeling? This random uninformed internet commenter has certainly schooled us, back to the drawing board guys!" Regardless of your politics, you have no place on a site like /, that ostensibly concerns itself with science, if that's the kind of argument you're going to construct.
Also, joke all you want, but the atmosphere was pretty much created in its current form by biological life, so yes, the plants, animals, and microbes of millions of years ago were deeply involved in climate change. They just didn't have an industrial society to greatly exacerbate the amount of their natural byproducts.
You're, uh.... agreeing with me. Which is a reverse of the position I was responding to. Are you incapable of detecting sarcasm or something?
Yes there is, it's called statistics. No similar barrier has yet appeared for AI. We already have conciousnesses made of matter as a starting inspiration/template.
I'm curious as to whether you'd say the same if 99% of current human employment was made economically unfeasable by automation. Presumably you'd be infavor of mass incarceration and/or extermination of the majority of the populace (including yourself) by the minority of land owning, robot-controlling overlords?
I mean, why have a relative utopia where everyone is free to pursue their own interests instead of having to work to survive, when we can have self-imposed genocide instead? It's better than something that could be labelled Socialism, that's for sure! (Based on current demographic trends, you don't get to invoke overpopulation as an argument against said utopianish society, btw)
Of course, I doubt you thought through your position in terms of the subject at hand, you just wanted to sound hard-nosed and tough. Online. In a forum for nerds. This is my problem wiht Internet Sociopaths (TM) - they're basically just trolls in Ayn Rand's clothing.
The concept of AI is beyond the scope of this article, but I believe the consensus is that it is not truelly achievable
Where did you get that consensus from, aside from pulling it out of your ass? Roger Penrose probably made the best recent stab at that argument, and even he was basically saying a complicated version of "brains are really special and totally don't work by known laws of physics guys!!", which isn't quite Cartesian Dualism, but often seems to stem from similar impulses.
Basically, if you're willing to admit that humans are in fact made of matter like the rest of the known universe, there's no fundamental barrier to eventual AI of some sort.
Eh, it's a fair cop. (I blame society, myself)
Why do people shouting the "poor people don't pay (income) taxes" meme always leave out the other taxes they do pay? It's pretty much universal, and seems rather disingenuous.
It's almost as bad as the confusion of "pay x% rate of income tax" versus "pay x% rate of income tax only for income over y amount", which can be a rather significant difference, although at least that's often an honest misunderstanding.
What does that even begin to mean? If something is invisible it's invisible, whether the light goes straight through it or is channelled around it somehow. "Pretending to be invisible to pressure" seems less like a fun concept and more like a nonsensical one. What properties of a material exist aside from the "purely physical level" ones?
I mean yes, if it's just sci-fi, you can say a substance lets you fly, defy gravity, deflect laser beams and produce chocolate mousse, but that doesn't have much to do with even speculative materials science.
Are you sincerely indifferent to whether your neighborhood becomes a war zone?
Even if he isn't, he can never admit it because he's an Internet Sociopath (TM). It's like being an Internet Tough Guy, only even more pathetic. They're fairly common in Slashdot discussions, maybe because of the site's libertarian leanings. He doesn't actually have anything to contribute to the discussion, he just wants to make sure everyone knows how tough and coldly rational he supposedly is, unlike the rest of you sheeple with your "ethics" and "caring about others".
Go look up what an "orbit" is, and how they have different degress of stability.
Just because you're ignorant about something doesn't mean it makes no sense.
Do not fret. There are big plans, and many of us private citizens have them and have been working on them for many years, but simply do not trust the Obama administration. If we reveal the plans and projects, it will simply be given away to some other country, or corporation, and we believe America needs to come first.
...
What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Are you high right now?
And no, I don't believe you have a secret starship already built just waiting for a Republican to get in office and make some minor adjustment to marginal tax rates.
Or this crazy idea liberals have that humans are more powerful than the Sun and seem to forget the climate of the earth has changed many times before man even arrived.
That's an utter nonsense statement, which you yourself already know if you would think about it for more than 2 seconds. Saying "they think humans are more powerful than the Sun" is meaningless in this context, as it's not about the energy release of humans vs. Sun, it's about relatively minor changes in how energy is contained in the atmosphere that could have a major impact from a human perspective. There are nearly 7 billion humans on the planet, along with all their attendant industries, cultivated fauna, and machines, so it's hardly unthinkable that they might have some cumulative impact on the atmosphere. If the Sun's output were to vary by say 10% in either direction, that would obviously overshadow any change humans could make at present, but even taking sunspots, solar flares etc, into account, average Solar output just doesn't change that much. The Earth's climate has indeed changed plenty of times in the past (including times influenced by the atmosphere, which was created in its current form by *gasp* the biological life you seem to dismiss), the changes the scientists are currently worried about seem to be shorter-term and not part of a larger natural cycle.
I don't actually have any definitive opinion on anthropogenic climate change/warming, as I haven't looked into it particularly deeply and mostly just know it from general media stories, which are notoriously poor at science reporting (I do get the impression it's all fairly speculative- even if most relevant scientists agree on the likely outcomes, that doesn't speak to their degree of certainty). I just think your comments are remarkably stupid, to anyone with a working brain and the wherewithal to look up basic facts.
(Also, the article you linked is an opinion piece by a shill for a conservative think tank, making it even less reliable than the media's usual well-intentioned, if inept and sensationalized science reporting, although the study referenced is interesting, and possibly good news if it means the worst of the projected outcomes will be avoided.)
You're assuming FLT travel (which there's no way to achieve within the currently understood laws of physics, and Star Trek is not a textbook), I take it? Because "exploring the galaxy" isn't remotely doable on human timescales otherwise.
Yes, I understood that, chiefly because I've got a 3-figure IQ.
And the emotional maturity of a 10-year-old, apparently. Just sayin'.
The vast majority of residents leaving Manchester that night made their support for the actions clear.
Are you serious? The people whose homes and business were being burned and looted were in support of people doing those things? Did you ask them in front of large crowds of said angry folks, perhaps?
My political beliefs are the only sustainable political beliefs in existence.
Your political beliefs are the ones that generally get co-opted into millions of deaths to purge those "on the side of capital" and other undesirables, and the setting up of oligarchies to replace the old ones, just with a different set of slogans (Unless I'm totally off about yours, which I doubt). Ideals don't mean much without a means to implementation that doesn't end up betraying most of them.
Also, everyone says the same about their political beliefs, that's why they're called beliefs.
My own are that while roughly pyramid-shaped societies are probably inevitable at this stage of our technological development, they should be kept relatively flat, with the base raised as high as possible, both for humanitarian reasons and for the practical ones that it's easier in the long run the more people have an actual stake in society. Globalization has increased the steepness of the pyramid currently, since the top levels are fairly mobile with their money. Increasing automation of even things like service jobs is eventually going to force us to either lock up/dispose of ever larger portions of the population, or give up the idea of needing to work to live a decent life*. I'd like to think it'll be the latter, but there will probably be some horrible period of an in-between state (you could argue this process is already well underway, but different regional levels of technological development muddy it a bit). I'll admit I'm counting long term on even people near the top not being entirely innate sociopaths (as opposed to functional sociopaths who behave as such to get ahead), which some would argue.
* Anyone worried about overpopulation without literal starvation to keep numbers down is being both cruel and uninformed, as a look at birthrate demographics in industrialized countries shows. The best way to keep people from having 15 kids on average (easily absorbed outliers aside) is to give them comfortable middle-class lifestyles and access to birth control.
I probably don't even disagree with a lot of your thinking on the origins of the riots, just with your tendency towards hyperbole and binary thinking. Thing is, you could rally the entire underclass, throw out the oppressors, and end up back where you started in a few years. Because the only difference between the rich/powerful and the poor/underrepresented is that the former have more money and influence, so I'm not sure where the idea comes from that the latter would behave any better were their positions swapped. You could probably wipe the planet of all humans and repopulate it with identical clones of the same age, and still develop the same hierarchical structures (the people at the top who got lucky would still consider their positions the result of innate qualities, of course).
Your premises are flawed, and I don't think you're actually interested in the answers to your questions (which aren't really that hard to understand), Are there entire forums where people with no knowledge of structural mechanics keep repeating the same misinformation to each other ad nauseum, or something?
I mean, you seem to have good intentions, but believing everything you read on the internet just because it reinforces your worldview in some way leads to madness. That's how you get people thinking Bush was a shapeshifting lizard alien, just because it works with him being evil.
The monarchy's been stripped of any real power, though. If they tried to use the nominal duties they still have to actually affect policy, those would be removed very quickly.
Congress already passed the budget, this is just attempting to renege on commitments already made. If they want to cut spending, this is the wrong way to go about it. The whole "debt ceiling" concept was just a bit of politcal convenience to free Congress from having to vote on every bond issue while still nominally maintaining their control of borrowing. We should have probably just passed an amendment to give the power to Treasury directly and leave Congress to control the spending side. Refusing to pay our bills is about to wreck the US's credit rating for the foreseeable future, which will make the interest rates on our debt higher, making it even harder to pay back, so, great job conservatives! By analogy, their solution to someone with a large student loan debt would presumably be to tell them to stop paying their bills and become homeless. This, plus the fact that they seem to think the Laffer Curve peaks somewhere around 0% tax for rich people means I probably won't be voting for a Republican anytime soon.
Libertarianism seems fine as an abstract ideal (like most such things), but trying to bring it about by wrecking the existing society and returning to Feudalism seems as misguided as the Marxists who tried to bring about a perfect egalitarian society by setting up hierarchical dictatorships.
Realistically, Pakistan needs to be nuked to ensure all of their nukes are destroyed. If the US backed government falls, chances are very high a terrorist nuke will originate from Pakistan. Pragmatically, nuking Pakistan isn't an option though realistically, its likely the best option to ensure the minimal number of innocent (as in peace loving, non-extremists) people actually get nuked.
Fuck you.
No, I'm not elaborating on that and I don't particularly care about the karma, just wanted to get that said.
No, I don't see why there's such a thing as a Marine Corps computer programmer, and the idea of a Marine with that kind of cognitive capacity makes me think of a dog that can operate a radio, or a fist with a cerebellum.
As a non-Marine, I'm still going to agree that you've got your head way up your ass. Do you think our wars are still fought with sharpened sticks and smoke signals or something?
Oh look, it's an Internet Sociopath (TM)! Hi, Internet Sociopath (TM), yes, you are very tough and super rational, and everyone is in awe of your hard-nosed, simpleminded self-interest!
Now go away, Internet Sociopath (TM), the grownups are trying to talk.
Are you just congenitally incapable of reading your own links, or what?
"Births to teenagers increased during the 1960s and peaked in 1971 at 50.6 per thousand of the population. Since 1971 they have gradually fallen to their lowest level since the mid Fifties."
breeding is a natural human instinct, and absolutely nothing that anyone can possibly do could ever hope to suppress it at the scale that would be necessary to make any real difference.
You're apparently unfamiliar with birthrate trends in modern idustrialized societies. You're also kind of an idiot, for making such definitive statements when talking out your ass.
Honestly, it takes real effort and drive towards the goal to be as wrong as you are.
Congratulations on proving his point beautifully.
(Hint: Mottoes do not become really scary just because they're in Latin, except to stupid people)