Provide supporting evidence for this alleged requirement for rigor or GTFO.
For a long time, wealth was considered a consequence of genetic superiority or divine favor. Entire wars have been fought over this question and caste systems have been built around it.
So what? I see this argument as completely irrelevant.
The robot uprising angle, while humorous, has already happened.
I note that you don't actually give an example of this alleged uprising.
It's worth remembering here that most jobs done by robots and other machines would not in their absence be done by people. We wouldn't have an internet powered by people in the absence of sophisticated machines (many much more sophisticated than the robots in your hypothetical factory). We wouldn't have a zillion people with buckets in the absence of our considerably automated public sanitation systems. We wouldn't have an army of mentats performing vast mind numbing calculations in the absence of computers to do the same.
We wouldn't have remotely operated robotics to perform such hazardous and onerous duties as swapping nuclear fuel rods, deep sea construction, and Solar System exploration.
Those 5,000 skilled welders are mostly retired now, but with no one replacing them there are 5,000 fewer excellent paying jobs in the region.
There are more of other excellent paying jobs. For example, the technicians who maintain this equipment. Or the people who are employed because the car company produces cheaper, higher quality cars.
But that example pales in comparison to the true conflicts of interest
I see that you don't actually give a reason it "pales". 7% of the total population is still rather large even when compared to 15%.
So sorry, the hypothetical "government workers" case doesn't cut it against the real-life cases that are actually true and are actually costing us tons of money as taxpayers.
Medicare beneficiaries cost the US an average of $9,500 per. In comparison, I see that public employees at the state and local level apparently receive around $42 per hour in total compensation (of which only two thirds was wages). At full time (2000 hours a year) that would be around $80k of compensation a year, which is around a factor of 8 higher than the average medicare recipient.
Where does it end?
I'm not seeing the problem with denying a vote to people who take in more from government than they pay out.
In the grand scheme of things, gravity wells are for noobs.
I apologize for the lateness of this second reply, but we are noobs in space. Building on Mars means that we can transplant most of our technologies and systems wholesale. It also has all the elements we need for survival. So we can build a civilization on Mars which could be sustainable even in the absence of any off world support.
Down the road, Mars can generate a second market for space-based goods as well.
"Millions of people play the lottery, but only a few get rich. "Obviously", there must be a degree of selection for the people who can successfully buy a lottery ticket and get rich off it."
Ok, that happens to be a completely random process for getting a few people extremely wealthy. It also happens to have generated zero billionaires.
Sorry, you're just waving your hands.
Well, there isn't a high level of rigor required here. You can go ahead and claim that getting extremely wealthy is like winning the lottery. But it isn't. Sure there is a factor that is random luck. But it's also obvious that someone somewhere turned that luck into considerable wealth.
We blew over a million dollars in the course of about 18 months
I saw a start up do 70 million in a similar length of time. It was obscene, but more entertaining to watch than the usual train wreck. I think the business plan went something like:
1) Come up with a great idea and get 70 million dollars.
2) Ok, let's hire a few hundred college grads, pack them in our styling Silicon Valley cube farm, and party!
3) Here comes the investors. Everyone look busy!
4) Shit. We need actual product. Better hire some contractors to write that crap.
5) I rock at ping pong!
6) We'll have the weekly "performance review" at my house. I just installed a new jacuzzi with built in bar.
I've never seen any evidence that the wealthy as a population are particularly different psychologically from other people with similar levels of education. If you know of any evidence, do share it.
They have the money. Now they might have obtained that money by amazing inventions, by robbing a million widows at a time, or by being related to someone wealthy. But the point is that there is a degree of selection among the very wealthy for people who can accumulate and financially manage a billion dollars.
I imagine you'll find it hilarious then that members of the US Congress were able to legally insider trade until 2012 (and that's a story about a recent law limiting scope of that insider trading provision).
government can be inefficient, we should scrap all rules which keep corporations from committing outright theft"?
Well, would you invest in such a market? I doubt it. But you might, if dear, ole, inefficient Uncle Sam promised that this time (really, he means it!), he'll get those robbers rather than bail them out once again. The lulling of our sense of caution is one of the primary duties of government regulation of the stock markets.
I have to disagree with your assertion that this guy would behave the same. We have to remember that people who have a billion dollars typically obtained that through considerable effort and market advantage or by being related to someone who did. That rules out most people who aren't disciplined to save enough for a hundred thousand dollars much less a billion. This is a case of sample bias with strong correlation to the very issue at hand, managing a billion dollars.
but when it comes to large-scale energy storage, the priorities suddenly shift from compactness and cycling performance (at which Li-ion batteries excel) to low cost and environmental feasibility
Environmental feasibility is just an empty term. A lot of toxic substances are perfectly fine as long as they're properly contained. For example, the traditional lead acid battery fits the bill. It's low cost. And would you rather have that lead in the landfill instead of in a working battery?
If only the employers hadn't been dicks and cut hours
Well, you have to be firm or you won't keep a business. For example, 50 full-time employees means an additional $40k a year (it's $2k per employee above the first 30, but only after you pass the 50 employee mark) in costs over 67 30 hour a week employees just in minimal health care costs (that is, paying the penalty and dumping employees on the state exchanges). Similarly, 100 full-time employees is $140k more than 133 part-time employees for the same amount of work. That's a premium of $0.70 per hour (roughly).
But the capitalists are experts at optimizing profit at the expense of everything else.
At least, they're experts at something useful. The people who just made full time employees expensive enough to change the US labor market? They're experts at breaking society.
As I see it, US society is routing around the damage. The new normal will just have to be multiple part time jobs until such time as the regulations which led to this result are revoked or heavily improved.
Every American is the beneficiary of the government in some way or form so we all have conflicts of interest.
But these are particularly pernicious conflicts of interest in that they create a large group of people with an interest in expanding the extent and power of the various governments of the US.
It's not like these workers can somehow vote in a way that impacts their compensation
Actually, it is like that. 7% of the US and they all can vote. That's a lot of voting power especially given that elections can be decided by as few as 40% of voting age US citizens (which in turn is roughly two thirds of the US population). If they voted as a monolithic bloc, it would be very hard for a candidate to overcome that.
or that they are all that well paid compared to the private sector in the first place.
You ignore substantial non-monetary benefits such as job security and very generous benefits such as pensions and health care.
But once automation really sets in to the point where the middle class is not necessary for our modern economy
Why would that happen? The trend has been in the other direction since about the 15th century (which incidentally is more like 10% of recorded human history) towards higher valuation of human labor.
Here's the kicker: I left the company 3 years later when they were having financial troubles and I was hired with a 20% pay increase at another company... to start at the bottom rung even though I had a number of years of programming experience and ran the IT section of the small company.
What makes you think you did anything wrong here? My limited experience is that one can't just drop managers in and this second company apparently didn't want you for your management experience.
eventually (a few decades perhaps) machines will repair and maintain everything and all maintenance jobs will cease
And once such machines escape the control of their clueless human minders, we'll have the makings of a great Hollywood post-apocalyptic thriller. For example, what happens when a machine designed to fix and maintain a factory decides instead to fix and maintain a housing complex in the same manner?
Even in the case where humans have nothing to contribute, humans have to continue to occupy critical bottlenecks of control or risk getting obsoleted and perhaps deleted. it's a standard parasite problem.
Aside from the obvious abuse of power inherent in the absence of accountability of secret trials, there's the equally obvious problem of undocumented law and its considerable potential for abuse. Regulation is by definition documented. And one of the benefits of that is that one has some idea of the lines which shouldn't be crossed.
Secret rulings by unaccountable courts mean secret laws which can then be selectively enforced by the only people who know the contents of those rulings, including their features and context. I think it should be a broad principle that such secret courts should never exist in a democratic society.
Need I remind you that the traditional scenario of the broken window fallacy was very beneficial for the glass makers? What made it a fallacy was claiming that what was good for the glass maker was good for society.
Which doesn't change that you are still much more impacted by the things you mentioned than by AGW.
Well, I suppose that is true. But as I note above, impact is not the same as harm.
No, your defense here is the non sequitur. It doesn't matter that we don't have perfect knowledge, what matters is that you had enough knowledge to believe that issues you listed have more immediate need for attention than issues relating to AGW.
Again with the non sequiturs. Your assertions do not follow from your premises. For example, just because I don't believe that AGW is something we need to deal with now, doesn't mean that I always will feel that way. I think that dealing with "my" list of issues first will be better in the long run than doing anything significant about AGW. But that doesn't mean that I'll still advocate that strategy in fifty years or a century, should I live that long.
You're free to believe whatever you want. I was just explaining that what you believe you are and what people see you as are two different things.
Well, the problem here is not with me, but your perception of me. I can't fix that. Only you can.
To dispute your assertion, I showed that the things you listed don't really demonstrate you to be a future-caring guy. I showed that those issues actually have immediate benefits. You even AGREED that they do, even if technically
Again, this is a non sequitur. Just because something has a near future benefit, doesn't mean that it doesn't also have a far future benefit.
I think it more has to do with the ongoing superior energy density of hydrocarbons. Keep in mind that a) most portable energy storage mechanisms are limited by something proportional to chemical energy density, even physical energy storage methods like flywheels and b) hydrocarbons have the unusual property that they react with atmosphere and dump the reaction byproducts into atmosphere. There's a lot of mass saving that one can't get from batteries.
What I said was that:
1) the things you say don't affect you, actually do
2) as such, the other people are correct that you don't care for the future (thus the reason you keep being accused of such... the glove fits)
3) it is OK to not care so much for the future. You don't have to try to present yourself to care for the future.
Ok, so you said that. It is a remarkable waste of your time and effort to say things that are so divergent from reality, but hey, say whatever you want. I'll just remark on them briefly for your future personal betterment.
For point 1), slightly higher prices for goods is an effect, but not much of one. So yes, you are technically true that I am affected to some minuscule degree by everything bad that happens in the world. But the lion's share of the harm of these things falls on the people who are directly affected by them. Some of these things actually have their benefits. For example, impoverished labor is cheaper than labor that doesn't have to work hard to survive day to day. That can result in cheaper goods for me.
Point 2) is a non sequitur. No one can have perfect knowledge of the future, so there will always be something that affects us, but which we don't think will affect us. So everyone can in your logic be considered to not care about the future.
And further the act of caring about the future is independent of one's knowledge of the future which is what makes this a non sequitur.
As to point 3), I'm merely stating my beliefs on the matter. I care about the future and I'm more than capable of determining my beliefs on the matter. I find it puzzling that you make such vastly bad attempts to dispute that assertion.
Of course, he did. He was questioned more than once. In the adversarial language of the courts, that's three different versions no matter how consist they happen to be. So are those differences substantial enough to count as contradicting his own statements to police?
Slashdot Mirror
Starting businesses and hiring people is not a secret esoteric art or rare gift that has a disposition to fall upon the rich.
But it is an unusual skillset which is greatly overrepresented among the rich.
There is a great deal of rigor required.
Provide supporting evidence for this alleged requirement for rigor or GTFO.
For a long time, wealth was considered a consequence of genetic superiority or divine favor. Entire wars have been fought over this question and caste systems have been built around it.
So what? I see this argument as completely irrelevant.
The robot uprising angle, while humorous, has already happened.
I note that you don't actually give an example of this alleged uprising.
It's worth remembering here that most jobs done by robots and other machines would not in their absence be done by people. We wouldn't have an internet powered by people in the absence of sophisticated machines (many much more sophisticated than the robots in your hypothetical factory). We wouldn't have a zillion people with buckets in the absence of our considerably automated public sanitation systems. We wouldn't have an army of mentats performing vast mind numbing calculations in the absence of computers to do the same.
We wouldn't have remotely operated robotics to perform such hazardous and onerous duties as swapping nuclear fuel rods, deep sea construction, and Solar System exploration.
Those 5,000 skilled welders are mostly retired now, but with no one replacing them there are 5,000 fewer excellent paying jobs in the region.
There are more of other excellent paying jobs. For example, the technicians who maintain this equipment. Or the people who are employed because the car company produces cheaper, higher quality cars.
But that example pales in comparison to the true conflicts of interest
I see that you don't actually give a reason it "pales". 7% of the total population is still rather large even when compared to 15%.
So sorry, the hypothetical "government workers" case doesn't cut it against the real-life cases that are actually true and are actually costing us tons of money as taxpayers.
Medicare beneficiaries cost the US an average of $9,500 per. In comparison, I see that public employees at the state and local level apparently receive around $42 per hour in total compensation (of which only two thirds was wages). At full time (2000 hours a year) that would be around $80k of compensation a year, which is around a factor of 8 higher than the average medicare recipient.
Where does it end?
I'm not seeing the problem with denying a vote to people who take in more from government than they pay out.
In the grand scheme of things, gravity wells are for noobs.
I apologize for the lateness of this second reply, but we are noobs in space. Building on Mars means that we can transplant most of our technologies and systems wholesale. It also has all the elements we need for survival. So we can build a civilization on Mars which could be sustainable even in the absence of any off world support.
Down the road, Mars can generate a second market for space-based goods as well.
"Millions of people play the lottery, but only a few get rich. "Obviously", there must be a degree of selection for the people who can successfully buy a lottery ticket and get rich off it."
Ok, that happens to be a completely random process for getting a few people extremely wealthy. It also happens to have generated zero billionaires.
Sorry, you're just waving your hands.
Well, there isn't a high level of rigor required here. You can go ahead and claim that getting extremely wealthy is like winning the lottery. But it isn't. Sure there is a factor that is random luck. But it's also obvious that someone somewhere turned that luck into considerable wealth.
We blew over a million dollars in the course of about 18 months
I saw a start up do 70 million in a similar length of time. It was obscene, but more entertaining to watch than the usual train wreck. I think the business plan went something like:
1) Come up with a great idea and get 70 million dollars.
2) Ok, let's hire a few hundred college grads, pack them in our styling Silicon Valley cube farm, and party!
3) Here comes the investors. Everyone look busy!
4) Shit. We need actual product. Better hire some contractors to write that crap.
5) I rock at ping pong!
6) We'll have the weekly "performance review" at my house. I just installed a new jacuzzi with built in bar.
7) Where did the money go?
I've never seen any evidence that the wealthy as a population are particularly different psychologically from other people with similar levels of education. If you know of any evidence, do share it.
They have the money. Now they might have obtained that money by amazing inventions, by robbing a million widows at a time, or by being related to someone wealthy. But the point is that there is a degree of selection among the very wealthy for people who can accumulate and financially manage a billion dollars.
I imagine you'll find it hilarious then that members of the US Congress were able to legally insider trade until 2012 (and that's a story about a recent law limiting scope of that insider trading provision).
government can be inefficient, we should scrap all rules which keep corporations from committing outright theft"?
Well, would you invest in such a market? I doubt it. But you might, if dear, ole, inefficient Uncle Sam promised that this time (really, he means it!), he'll get those robbers rather than bail them out once again. The lulling of our sense of caution is one of the primary duties of government regulation of the stock markets.
When the greater good requires putting limits on the wealth-acquisition abilities of the currently wealthy
Protip: it doesn't.
I have to disagree with your assertion that this guy would behave the same. We have to remember that people who have a billion dollars typically obtained that through considerable effort and market advantage or by being related to someone who did. That rules out most people who aren't disciplined to save enough for a hundred thousand dollars much less a billion. This is a case of sample bias with strong correlation to the very issue at hand, managing a billion dollars.
but when it comes to large-scale energy storage, the priorities suddenly shift from compactness and cycling performance (at which Li-ion batteries excel) to low cost and environmental feasibility
Environmental feasibility is just an empty term. A lot of toxic substances are perfectly fine as long as they're properly contained. For example, the traditional lead acid battery fits the bill. It's low cost. And would you rather have that lead in the landfill instead of in a working battery?
If only the employers hadn't been dicks and cut hours
Well, you have to be firm or you won't keep a business. For example, 50 full-time employees means an additional $40k a year (it's $2k per employee above the first 30, but only after you pass the 50 employee mark) in costs over 67 30 hour a week employees just in minimal health care costs (that is, paying the penalty and dumping employees on the state exchanges). Similarly, 100 full-time employees is $140k more than 133 part-time employees for the same amount of work. That's a premium of $0.70 per hour (roughly).
But the capitalists are experts at optimizing profit at the expense of everything else.
At least, they're experts at something useful. The people who just made full time employees expensive enough to change the US labor market? They're experts at breaking society.
As I see it, US society is routing around the damage. The new normal will just have to be multiple part time jobs until such time as the regulations which led to this result are revoked or heavily improved.
Every American is the beneficiary of the government in some way or form so we all have conflicts of interest.
But these are particularly pernicious conflicts of interest in that they create a large group of people with an interest in expanding the extent and power of the various governments of the US.
It's not like these workers can somehow vote in a way that impacts their compensation
Actually, it is like that. 7% of the US and they all can vote. That's a lot of voting power especially given that elections can be decided by as few as 40% of voting age US citizens (which in turn is roughly two thirds of the US population). If they voted as a monolithic bloc, it would be very hard for a candidate to overcome that.
or that they are all that well paid compared to the private sector in the first place.
You ignore substantial non-monetary benefits such as job security and very generous benefits such as pensions and health care.
But once automation really sets in to the point where the middle class is not necessary for our modern economy
Why would that happen? The trend has been in the other direction since about the 15th century (which incidentally is more like 10% of recorded human history) towards higher valuation of human labor.
Here's the kicker: I left the company 3 years later when they were having financial troubles and I was hired with a 20% pay increase at another company... to start at the bottom rung even though I had a number of years of programming experience and ran the IT section of the small company.
What makes you think you did anything wrong here? My limited experience is that one can't just drop managers in and this second company apparently didn't want you for your management experience.
eventually (a few decades perhaps) machines will repair and maintain everything and all maintenance jobs will cease
And once such machines escape the control of their clueless human minders, we'll have the makings of a great Hollywood post-apocalyptic thriller. For example, what happens when a machine designed to fix and maintain a factory decides instead to fix and maintain a housing complex in the same manner?
Even in the case where humans have nothing to contribute, humans have to continue to occupy critical bottlenecks of control or risk getting obsoleted and perhaps deleted. it's a standard parasite problem.
Aside from the obvious abuse of power inherent in the absence of accountability of secret trials, there's the equally obvious problem of undocumented law and its considerable potential for abuse. Regulation is by definition documented. And one of the benefits of that is that one has some idea of the lines which shouldn't be crossed.
Secret rulings by unaccountable courts mean secret laws which can then be selectively enforced by the only people who know the contents of those rulings, including their features and context. I think it should be a broad principle that such secret courts should never exist in a democratic society.
That's a broken window fallacy.
Need I remind you that the traditional scenario of the broken window fallacy was very beneficial for the glass makers? What made it a fallacy was claiming that what was good for the glass maker was good for society.
Which doesn't change that you are still much more impacted by the things you mentioned than by AGW.
Well, I suppose that is true. But as I note above, impact is not the same as harm.
No, your defense here is the non sequitur. It doesn't matter that we don't have perfect knowledge, what matters is that you had enough knowledge to believe that issues you listed have more immediate need for attention than issues relating to AGW.
Again with the non sequiturs. Your assertions do not follow from your premises. For example, just because I don't believe that AGW is something we need to deal with now, doesn't mean that I always will feel that way. I think that dealing with "my" list of issues first will be better in the long run than doing anything significant about AGW. But that doesn't mean that I'll still advocate that strategy in fifty years or a century, should I live that long.
You're free to believe whatever you want. I was just explaining that what you believe you are and what people see you as are two different things.
Well, the problem here is not with me, but your perception of me. I can't fix that. Only you can.
To dispute your assertion, I showed that the things you listed don't really demonstrate you to be a future-caring guy. I showed that those issues actually have immediate benefits. You even AGREED that they do, even if technically
Again, this is a non sequitur. Just because something has a near future benefit, doesn't mean that it doesn't also have a far future benefit.
I think it more has to do with the ongoing superior energy density of hydrocarbons. Keep in mind that a) most portable energy storage mechanisms are limited by something proportional to chemical energy density, even physical energy storage methods like flywheels and b) hydrocarbons have the unusual property that they react with atmosphere and dump the reaction byproducts into atmosphere. There's a lot of mass saving that one can't get from batteries.
What I said was that: 1) the things you say don't affect you, actually do
2) as such, the other people are correct that you don't care for the future (thus the reason you keep being accused of such... the glove fits)
3) it is OK to not care so much for the future. You don't have to try to present yourself to care for the future.
Ok, so you said that. It is a remarkable waste of your time and effort to say things that are so divergent from reality, but hey, say whatever you want. I'll just remark on them briefly for your future personal betterment.
For point 1), slightly higher prices for goods is an effect, but not much of one. So yes, you are technically true that I am affected to some minuscule degree by everything bad that happens in the world. But the lion's share of the harm of these things falls on the people who are directly affected by them. Some of these things actually have their benefits. For example, impoverished labor is cheaper than labor that doesn't have to work hard to survive day to day. That can result in cheaper goods for me.
Point 2) is a non sequitur. No one can have perfect knowledge of the future, so there will always be something that affects us, but which we don't think will affect us. So everyone can in your logic be considered to not care about the future.
And further the act of caring about the future is independent of one's knowledge of the future which is what makes this a non sequitur.
As to point 3), I'm merely stating my beliefs on the matter. I care about the future and I'm more than capable of determining my beliefs on the matter. I find it puzzling that you make such vastly bad attempts to dispute that assertion.
He told three different versions to police.
Of course, he did. He was questioned more than once. In the adversarial language of the courts, that's three different versions no matter how consist they happen to be. So are those differences substantial enough to count as contradicting his own statements to police?
Maybe this is a call to privatize the functions of JPL and other national labs? I could get behind that.
Uh, witnesses' testimony?
I asked for testimony that contradicts Zimmerman's claims.
BTW, Zimmerman has not testified.
Yet. He has given extensive statements to the police. I considered that (incorrectly) to be testimony.