Capitalism can and should be sandboxed, so its insatiable hunger for liquidity doesn't affect billions when the gambling schemes go wrong, as in the most recent financial crisis.
The word you are looking for is "profit" or "wealth" not "liquidity" which merely means amount of trading activity from the point of view of buying or selling large quantities of goods, particularly securities.
We should create more public money to backstop the living standards of individuals, instead of the bonuses of corporate traders.
Creating money isn't going to make anyone wealthier (or as you put it, "backstop" their "living standards"). Further, why should we do so? It's not that important to backstop living standards especially when it's clear that most people have low standards for standards of living.
The point of the anthropic principle is that you can't discount theories on the basis that they are unlikely to generate the present state. Also I notice you are treating a supernatural thing, "divine presence or action" as an empirical thing while your name implies some sort of interest in empiricism. Merely insisting reality is divine is merely redefining what is meant by divine. It doesn't help us understand what we can understand any better. I think that Occasionalism and similar things are way off base precisely because they equate supernatural and natural phenomena. But we can see that there is considerable mileage to be gained from just considering what we can observe.
Okay, I'm waiting... booooooooooring, I'll do something else for two minutes while I wait. Two minutes end up being ten and the dish goes to hell.
That's what a kitchen timer is for. Takes less time to set mine for two minutes than it took to type your first sentence (pick up, three button pushes, set down). My time management has improved considerably just by getting one of these things.
Yes it does. Maybe this guys stories do reflect his upbringing and indoctrination by Chinese stated media. That is the point. it shows another perspective. It does not mean he is a bad writer, it does not pose any value judgement on that perspective. It is just that, another perspective. If anything, that should be appealing to SciFi lovers.
In other words, he's Arthur C. Clarke, if Clarke were hobbled by a pathological ideology.
And for what it is worth, planned economies are best. In fact, there are no economies without at least some planning. The question is how much planning is best.
No, the question is who does the planning. The key problem with planned economies is that the planning is done by people without either the capability or knowledge to do competent panning nor an absence of conflict of interest.
When one speaks of a planned economy, one doesn't speak of the planning that the various participants in the economy do (which would be how the planning would be distributed in a nearly pure capitalist society), but of centralized authorities.
It is quite clear that pure capitalist systems are 100% sure to fail. Like 100% pure any type of system for that matter... it is just not how people function and therefor the way we run our civilization can also not funtion like that.
The difference is that civilizations with a lot of capitalism do better than civilizations with a lot of central planning. For example, all of the supposed problems with a capitalist society, such as greed, externalities, economic crashes and booms, and monopolies/oligopolies, happen with planned economies (the central planning authority in particular is a far more powerful monopoly than anything a pure capitalist society would have, its externalities are far less addressable, its ability to ignore reality, and it would be a lot more capable vehicle of greed).
I despise these quasi "anthropic principle" arguments that explain precisely why they are wrong, and then triumphantly declare thereby they are right.
They are typical examples of truisms. Effect happened, so causes of the effect happened.
Nobody, ever, thought that a direct intervention of a god was needed for fire to cook their food, for water to roll downhill, or for a knife to cut something.
Let me introduce you to Occasionalism, which has as a primary precept that everything happens due to the will of God.
What is the step count cutoff on complexity? Please quantify that for me. If you can't give me a formula that works across the board (you, after all, are using CS in a discussion about biology), it's subjective.
The subjectivity is bound by a constant factor. That's why big O notation works in the first place.
I disagree. Complexity is effectively the shortest description of something using a given, sufficiently expressive language with finite words. While relatively complexity can vary between languages a little, the variance in complexity is bounded by a finite amount, the description of translating between the two languages. That makes complexity an objective measure.
So what if you "said" that? I'm pointing out the obvious. This wasn't a small bill and I doubt she had much of a clue what was actually in the bill.
FY2007's omnibus budget bill was 1400 pages. You're using an absolute number that is shocking with nothing for comparison. Either you knew that, and are being disingenuous, or you didn't, and now you do.
You're not helping your case here. An omnibus budget bill, covering a lot more stuff, just happened to be considerably smaller than the bill Pelosi was speaking of.
Ehhhhh, I'm not going to argue that the PPACA passage wasn't a massive circus, but you are taking her comments pretty far out of context.
I don't think so. It's doubtful she had a clue what was in it aside from a broad overview of the key parts. It was after all over 2,000 pages, right? It was a glib assurance which we see in hindsight was unjustified.
The people making a massive deal of that soundbite also have 2 possibilities: They're woefully ignorant of how the US Congress works, or they're trying to capitalize off of a poorly worded statement by turning it into something it's not.
Or they aren't at all ignorant of how US Congress works, where each congresscritter come with its own reality deflection system, and things, like the actual content of bills, don't really matter.
As I understand it, the complaint is really about arcane regulations on what firearms can be shipped by mail. Here, the specialized CNC mill makes what is called a "lower receiver" for the AR 15, a common rifle used by the US armed forces. The lower receiver houses both the trigger mechanism and the magazine so it is a critical part of the gun, required in order to operate the weapon.
I believe what they really want is to ship firearms via mail without interference from the feds.
Things were nice and peaceful and respectful, until some jackass wearing hunting camo and leather two sashes covered in shotgun shells came in carrying a pump-action twelve gauge. Any goodwill that the previous firearms enthusiasts created was utterly destroyed by one jerk that decided to push the limits.
Or it was staged. It's not that hard to find someone to play the jerk and you don't have to tell anyone else you're doing it.
What's really changed about military technology? Most of the high end gear requires a ridiculous supply chain. Sure, I grant that most people probably shouldn't have nuclear weapons which in theory one can own without requiring a fancy supply chain to maintain it in working order and can cause damage far in excess of any conceivable use, including the overthrow of a tyrannical government. But I just don't see the problem for typical military hardware, be it assault rifles, artillery, or patrol boats.
The US allowed a lot of crazy stuff over the years, and it just hasn't caused much problems, especially given the firepower we're speaking of.
Who really wants the regulation to "work"? There's a bigger issue here than just a bunch of people wanting to simplify firearm manufacturing regulation. What's the real problem here is that you have a bear who when poked has the power to make a new stupid regulation. Do something about the bear.
Whoa there, Reductive Jack... we also value the ease of mind rule of law provides when it sets _enormous_ disincentives to doing illegal Nazi experiments on unwilling or duped participants, for just one example. It's that rule of law that would give me the courage to go Socratic method on you at a dinner party, until you either said, "Uncle", or tried to weasel out of your love letter to the Tuskegee Experiment by claiming you didn't really say that thing you really said.
I don't see anything above in the form of Socratic questioning. So let's start this off properly with the questions you should have asked instead:
What do I think is the purpose of medical care?
To help us live longer and better given the constraints of the world we live in - particularly the economic constraints. We have frail bodies and minds. I also will point out at this time that medical care does help. This means the whole exercise is not pointless.
What do I think is the purpose of medical research?
Medical care is deeply imperfect. There is no physical reason (as in thermodynamics, rather than trying to wring out an indefinite life span from our current crude knowledge) that we can't live in a healthy, vigorous state for as long as we desire. And I don't rule out radical medical care such as completely redesigning the human body or uploading human minds into a computer.
What do I think is wrong with current medical research?
I'll discuss that third question in a minute.
Now, in your post, aside from the tiresome and baseless bragging, there are two interesting aspects. First, why mention "rule of law"? Is it somehow physically impossible for legislators to pass laws allowing forced experimentation on human test subjects? Or are you implying that because they exist, the current laws must be best possible and any backsliding on these laws quickly slides down the slope to complete lawlessness?
Second, why mention "ease of mind", but not whether medical care and research actually works? Is it more important that my mind is "eased" rather than if I'm living a vastly longer, better life? Is it more important than whether or not humanity loses a war with the machines?
I think this "ease of mind" cuts to the core of what is wrong with modern medicine. We have many regulators of medical research. But they only get in trouble, if something bad happens to research subjects on their watch. They have no responsibility or incentive to care about what didn't happen due to the constraints they impose. That's why I said:
That's because we value the lives of the few people who could be exposed to harm in a medical experiment more than the billions of people whose lives could be improved greatly by the results of the medical experiments.
Because the people we delegated this responsibility to have those incentives. And a lot of the problems of modern medical care, such as its extreme cost, lack of competition, and glacial pace of progress are due to that fundamental obstruction.
I am also currently at the point of thinking it's better to destroy the current internet and rebuild it
What would be the point? You'd have the same people on the internet, you'd have the same people running it. And nothing keeping people from making their own internet right now.
And what does the guy with the ax have to contribute? He's just another problem. These trends will continue. If we want to beat the machines then we need to become better as well.
What i'm wondering most, you start off by calling them crazy, but are they?
For starters, if we get into a war with the machines, we're going to need heavier firepower than an ax. Even a sledgehammer or a hacksaw would be better. Second, this sort of Luddite behavior is a terrible strategy. It only keeps you from being able to compete/fight with machines. Any side which wins such a war is going to be a heavy technology player.
Third, this sort of thinking has already resulted in a considerable disparity to humanity's disadvantage. After all, there's almost no regulatory and cultural obstacles to improving machines (or for that matter a variety of lab animals) provided by human societies, but there's a vast number of obstacles to improving humans. That's because we value the lives of the few people who could be exposed to harm in a medical experiment more than the billions of people whose lives could be improved greatly by the results of the medical experiments.
I agree with mi. There isn't a significant difference here between the FCC and the US Marshals. They have the same sort of people and the same leadership.
No, I agree with the earlier poster, skam240. Your observation about "There's always plenty of work" just means that capitalism can always be applied, contrary to skam240's assertion that somehow we can run out of work. A job is just some amount of work done by a human.
Reality doesn't conform to your theory. Foxconn is in relatively obstacle free China, with relatively low labor costs, and this story is telling us they too are looking to reduce human jobs.
That's not in the story. What is actually in the story is that they are automating some jobs which are particularly amenable to automation. I imagine the degree of automation is probably being exaggerated as well. But in a fluid society like China, the people who no longer work for Foxconn, can now get work elsewhere. And because they've worked for Foxconn, they're now more experienced and skilled than before.
But in a more static, employer hostile society like most of the developed world, where are the new jobs going to come from when automation replaces jobs? I see this story being misused as a rationalization for not bothering to fix the problems of the developed world where considerable effort to make workers' lives better has backfired terribly. You can't encourage a trade such as employment by heavily favoring one side.
And I think it's only a short jump from idealistic but clueless top-down efforts to attempt to improve workers' lives to the creation of massive, multinational, oligopolistic corporations, the only forms of businesses that can survive such a hostile environment. A centralized mechanism for improving the lives of workers is far easier to derail and corrupt. It also creates a massive economy of scale since huge businesses can exploit such revenue streams to incredible lengths.
Or we could figure out a better way to distribute resources. Capitalism works great when there's plenty of work to do. Not so well when there isnt.
Or we could find a way to make plenty of work. A huge part of the problem is the many obstacles thrown in the way of creating new businesses and employing people. I'll take complaints about unemployment seriously, when someone treats it like a serious issue.
Or to put it another way, "past performance is not indicative of future results."
There's a big reason this doesn't apply. In the financial world, having a really good year means a higher likelihood of having a poor year next. There's no well above average investment that can stay that way. And that's really the only reason for the caution. After all, nobody will dump money into a losing investment on the hopes that it will continue to lose money.
When we get to technology development, past performance is indicative of future results. The strategies for developing new technology remain more or less the same, the same economics that don't zero out the value of human labor remain in play, and we still have increasing productivity of human labor as a consequence of technology development.
People must accept the idea that the age of the working class and the middle class is over.
Sorry, but we don't have to accept things that aren't true. There's vast creation of these "classes" throughout the developing world, you just choose not to recognize it.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism can and should be sandboxed, so its insatiable hunger for liquidity doesn't affect billions when the gambling schemes go wrong, as in the most recent financial crisis.
The word you are looking for is "profit" or "wealth" not "liquidity" which merely means amount of trading activity from the point of view of buying or selling large quantities of goods, particularly securities.
We should create more public money to backstop the living standards of individuals, instead of the bonuses of corporate traders.
Creating money isn't going to make anyone wealthier (or as you put it, "backstop" their "living standards"). Further, why should we do so? It's not that important to backstop living standards especially when it's clear that most people have low standards for standards of living.
The point of the anthropic principle is that you can't discount theories on the basis that they are unlikely to generate the present state. Also I notice you are treating a supernatural thing, "divine presence or action" as an empirical thing while your name implies some sort of interest in empiricism. Merely insisting reality is divine is merely redefining what is meant by divine. It doesn't help us understand what we can understand any better. I think that Occasionalism and similar things are way off base precisely because they equate supernatural and natural phenomena. But we can see that there is considerable mileage to be gained from just considering what we can observe.
Okay, I'm waiting... booooooooooring, I'll do something else for two minutes while I wait. Two minutes end up being ten and the dish goes to hell.
That's what a kitchen timer is for. Takes less time to set mine for two minutes than it took to type your first sentence (pick up, three button pushes, set down). My time management has improved considerably just by getting one of these things.
Yes it does. Maybe this guys stories do reflect his upbringing and indoctrination by Chinese stated media. That is the point. it shows another perspective. It does not mean he is a bad writer, it does not pose any value judgement on that perspective. It is just that, another perspective. If anything, that should be appealing to SciFi lovers.
In other words, he's Arthur C. Clarke, if Clarke were hobbled by a pathological ideology.
And for what it is worth, planned economies are best. In fact, there are no economies without at least some planning. The question is how much planning is best.
No, the question is who does the planning. The key problem with planned economies is that the planning is done by people without either the capability or knowledge to do competent panning nor an absence of conflict of interest.
When one speaks of a planned economy, one doesn't speak of the planning that the various participants in the economy do (which would be how the planning would be distributed in a nearly pure capitalist society), but of centralized authorities.
It is quite clear that pure capitalist systems are 100% sure to fail. Like 100% pure any type of system for that matter... it is just not how people function and therefor the way we run our civilization can also not funtion like that.
The difference is that civilizations with a lot of capitalism do better than civilizations with a lot of central planning. For example, all of the supposed problems with a capitalist society, such as greed, externalities, economic crashes and booms, and monopolies/oligopolies, happen with planned economies (the central planning authority in particular is a far more powerful monopoly than anything a pure capitalist society would have, its externalities are far less addressable, its ability to ignore reality, and it would be a lot more capable vehicle of greed).
I despise these quasi "anthropic principle" arguments that explain precisely why they are wrong, and then triumphantly declare thereby they are right.
They are typical examples of truisms. Effect happened, so causes of the effect happened.
Nobody, ever, thought that a direct intervention of a god was needed for fire to cook their food, for water to roll downhill, or for a knife to cut something.
Let me introduce you to Occasionalism, which has as a primary precept that everything happens due to the will of God.
What is the step count cutoff on complexity? Please quantify that for me. If you can't give me a formula that works across the board (you, after all, are using CS in a discussion about biology), it's subjective.
The subjectivity is bound by a constant factor. That's why big O notation works in the first place.
"Complexity" is a very subjective thing.
I disagree. Complexity is effectively the shortest description of something using a given, sufficiently expressive language with finite words. While relatively complexity can vary between languages a little, the variance in complexity is bounded by a finite amount, the description of translating between the two languages. That makes complexity an objective measure.
FY2007's omnibus budget bill was 1400 pages. You're using an absolute number that is shocking with nothing for comparison. Either you knew that, and are being disingenuous, or you didn't, and now you do.
You're not helping your case here. An omnibus budget bill, covering a lot more stuff, just happened to be considerably smaller than the bill Pelosi was speaking of.
Ehhhhh, I'm not going to argue that the PPACA passage wasn't a massive circus, but you are taking her comments pretty far out of context.
I don't think so. It's doubtful she had a clue what was in it aside from a broad overview of the key parts. It was after all over 2,000 pages, right? It was a glib assurance which we see in hindsight was unjustified.
The people making a massive deal of that soundbite also have 2 possibilities: They're woefully ignorant of how the US Congress works, or they're trying to capitalize off of a poorly worded statement by turning it into something it's not.
Or they aren't at all ignorant of how US Congress works, where each congresscritter come with its own reality deflection system, and things, like the actual content of bills, don't really matter.
Mod parent up. It probably would break people who actually know some Greek though.
As I understand it, the complaint is really about arcane regulations on what firearms can be shipped by mail. Here, the specialized CNC mill makes what is called a "lower receiver" for the AR 15, a common rifle used by the US armed forces. The lower receiver houses both the trigger mechanism and the magazine so it is a critical part of the gun, required in order to operate the weapon.
I believe what they really want is to ship firearms via mail without interference from the feds.
Things were nice and peaceful and respectful, until some jackass wearing hunting camo and leather two sashes covered in shotgun shells came in carrying a pump-action twelve gauge. Any goodwill that the previous firearms enthusiasts created was utterly destroyed by one jerk that decided to push the limits.
Or it was staged. It's not that hard to find someone to play the jerk and you don't have to tell anyone else you're doing it.
What's really changed about military technology? Most of the high end gear requires a ridiculous supply chain. Sure, I grant that most people probably shouldn't have nuclear weapons which in theory one can own without requiring a fancy supply chain to maintain it in working order and can cause damage far in excess of any conceivable use, including the overthrow of a tyrannical government. But I just don't see the problem for typical military hardware, be it assault rifles, artillery, or patrol boats.
The US allowed a lot of crazy stuff over the years, and it just hasn't caused much problems, especially given the firepower we're speaking of.
Who really wants the regulation to "work"? There's a bigger issue here than just a bunch of people wanting to simplify firearm manufacturing regulation. What's the real problem here is that you have a bear who when poked has the power to make a new stupid regulation. Do something about the bear.
Whoa there, Reductive Jack... we also value the ease of mind rule of law provides when it sets _enormous_ disincentives to doing illegal Nazi experiments on unwilling or duped participants, for just one example. It's that rule of law that would give me the courage to go Socratic method on you at a dinner party, until you either said, "Uncle", or tried to weasel out of your love letter to the Tuskegee Experiment by claiming you didn't really say that thing you really said.
I don't see anything above in the form of Socratic questioning. So let's start this off properly with the questions you should have asked instead:
What do I think is the purpose of medical care?
To help us live longer and better given the constraints of the world we live in - particularly the economic constraints. We have frail bodies and minds. I also will point out at this time that medical care does help. This means the whole exercise is not pointless.
What do I think is the purpose of medical research?
Medical care is deeply imperfect. There is no physical reason (as in thermodynamics, rather than trying to wring out an indefinite life span from our current crude knowledge) that we can't live in a healthy, vigorous state for as long as we desire. And I don't rule out radical medical care such as completely redesigning the human body or uploading human minds into a computer.
What do I think is wrong with current medical research?
I'll discuss that third question in a minute.
Now, in your post, aside from the tiresome and baseless bragging, there are two interesting aspects. First, why mention "rule of law"? Is it somehow physically impossible for legislators to pass laws allowing forced experimentation on human test subjects? Or are you implying that because they exist, the current laws must be best possible and any backsliding on these laws quickly slides down the slope to complete lawlessness?
Second, why mention "ease of mind", but not whether medical care and research actually works? Is it more important that my mind is "eased" rather than if I'm living a vastly longer, better life? Is it more important than whether or not humanity loses a war with the machines?
I think this "ease of mind" cuts to the core of what is wrong with modern medicine. We have many regulators of medical research. But they only get in trouble, if something bad happens to research subjects on their watch. They have no responsibility or incentive to care about what didn't happen due to the constraints they impose. That's why I said:
That's because we value the lives of the few people who could be exposed to harm in a medical experiment more than the billions of people whose lives could be improved greatly by the results of the medical experiments.
Because the people we delegated this responsibility to have those incentives. And a lot of the problems of modern medical care, such as its extreme cost, lack of competition, and glacial pace of progress are due to that fundamental obstruction.
She did something useful. Let's keep that in mind.
I am also currently at the point of thinking it's better to destroy the current internet and rebuild it
What would be the point? You'd have the same people on the internet, you'd have the same people running it. And nothing keeping people from making their own internet right now.
And what does the guy with the ax have to contribute? He's just another problem. These trends will continue. If we want to beat the machines then we need to become better as well.
What i'm wondering most, you start off by calling them crazy, but are they?
For starters, if we get into a war with the machines, we're going to need heavier firepower than an ax. Even a sledgehammer or a hacksaw would be better. Second, this sort of Luddite behavior is a terrible strategy. It only keeps you from being able to compete/fight with machines. Any side which wins such a war is going to be a heavy technology player.
Third, this sort of thinking has already resulted in a considerable disparity to humanity's disadvantage. After all, there's almost no regulatory and cultural obstacles to improving machines (or for that matter a variety of lab animals) provided by human societies, but there's a vast number of obstacles to improving humans. That's because we value the lives of the few people who could be exposed to harm in a medical experiment more than the billions of people whose lives could be improved greatly by the results of the medical experiments.
I agree with mi. There isn't a significant difference here between the FCC and the US Marshals. They have the same sort of people and the same leadership.
To be pedantic, it's jobs, not work.
No, I agree with the earlier poster, skam240. Your observation about "There's always plenty of work" just means that capitalism can always be applied, contrary to skam240's assertion that somehow we can run out of work. A job is just some amount of work done by a human.
Reality doesn't conform to your theory. Foxconn is in relatively obstacle free China, with relatively low labor costs, and this story is telling us they too are looking to reduce human jobs.
That's not in the story. What is actually in the story is that they are automating some jobs which are particularly amenable to automation. I imagine the degree of automation is probably being exaggerated as well. But in a fluid society like China, the people who no longer work for Foxconn, can now get work elsewhere. And because they've worked for Foxconn, they're now more experienced and skilled than before.
But in a more static, employer hostile society like most of the developed world, where are the new jobs going to come from when automation replaces jobs? I see this story being misused as a rationalization for not bothering to fix the problems of the developed world where considerable effort to make workers' lives better has backfired terribly. You can't encourage a trade such as employment by heavily favoring one side.
And I think it's only a short jump from idealistic but clueless top-down efforts to attempt to improve workers' lives to the creation of massive, multinational, oligopolistic corporations, the only forms of businesses that can survive such a hostile environment. A centralized mechanism for improving the lives of workers is far easier to derail and corrupt. It also creates a massive economy of scale since huge businesses can exploit such revenue streams to incredible lengths.
Or we could figure out a better way to distribute resources. Capitalism works great when there's plenty of work to do. Not so well when there isnt.
Or we could find a way to make plenty of work. A huge part of the problem is the many obstacles thrown in the way of creating new businesses and employing people. I'll take complaints about unemployment seriously, when someone treats it like a serious issue.
Or to put it another way, "past performance is not indicative of future results."
There's a big reason this doesn't apply. In the financial world, having a really good year means a higher likelihood of having a poor year next. There's no well above average investment that can stay that way. And that's really the only reason for the caution. After all, nobody will dump money into a losing investment on the hopes that it will continue to lose money.
When we get to technology development, past performance is indicative of future results. The strategies for developing new technology remain more or less the same, the same economics that don't zero out the value of human labor remain in play, and we still have increasing productivity of human labor as a consequence of technology development.
People must accept the idea that the age of the working class and the middle class is over.
Sorry, but we don't have to accept things that aren't true. There's vast creation of these "classes" throughout the developing world, you just choose not to recognize it.
Let's get the post-scarcity technology first before we implement the post-scarcity society.