If you are willing to excuse Hillary Clinton for this kind of egregious lawbreaking, then you will have no moral right to complain later when President Trump does something just as bad.
Morality as well as objectivity goes out the window with politics. Instead, we should be asking, would we want our worst enemies to get away with what Clinton did? Ten years from now do we want every stooge and crony to have their own personal servers and absolutely no accountability for all the resulting emails that are never archived by the government?
If your team gets away with something, then anyone can do the same. And there are some real nasty pieces of work out there.
but you are confusing those who "own" the work (as defined by the 62) vs those who did the work.
So what? A certain amount of elitism naturally appears here. Most people don't employ other people. Hence, their ability to create employment or value for others ends with their reach - their labor and their wallet. As I noted before, employers are more important than employees because they are far scarcer, have considerably more value, and have an effect far in excess of their personal labor.
It's too bad that you think I am merely "confusing" employers and employees. I am not. I just see labor as not being valuable in itself without someone directing it. Digging up grubs and shoots is just as hard work as any modern labor, but it's far less productive and useful.
Yes, and with the PDO returning to a positive phase there's a chance we will see warming like we had in the 1980s and 1990s rather than the warming of the 2000s.
Which will still be below those predictions, let us note.
The instability there is well documented.
It might even exist too.
That doesn't mean it's going to happen but it's also not something you can say won't happen.
This is what we call the argument from ignorance fallacy. Why does what you're ignorant of matter less than what I'm ignorant of?
All I have to say on this matter is that if there really is something that needs to be done about global warming in the near future, they will soon have actual evidence of this urgency rather than decade after decade of these games.
2015 and 2016 (once the final numbers are in) are solidly in the middle of the 2 sigma predictions. Over short time periods natural variability can overwhelm the signal of global warming but in the long run (30 years or longer) the signal of global warming wins.
In other words, current extreme years. There will be more years than just 2015 and 2016.
My perception of the Hansen paper was that it's impossible to rule out large non-linear changes in sea level rise due to ice sheet dynamics that we don't understand too well, not that it would absolutely happen. Many other scientists have made more linear predictions. The future will tell. Meanwhile sea level is rising faster than earlier linear predictions so far.
Anything can be true when you're ignorant. I note that sea level may be rising faster than some predictions, but not faster than other predictions.
I knew what you mean, and my statement still applies. Almost anything you do or not do would make things worse.
You continue to make that error that you claim you are not making. "Make things worse" than what? I think it's enlightening to consider the normal definition of suicidal.
wanting to kill yourself : showing a desire to kill yourself
extremely dangerous : likely to cause your death : likely to cause great harm to yourself
No matter what choices we make, we are likely to die inside of a few decades. But not all choices we make are considered suicidal because they aren't likely to cause your death in the near future. Everyone dies, but some people die much faster due to the choices they make.
Just because the US is operating at a long term labor cost disadvantage which will result in a decline in living standards, doesn't mean that all choices are equal. Passing laws that discourage employment and creation/expansion of business, or which make people poorer make things much worse in the way that they are getting worse than laws which don't do that.
Just because we will experience worse times in the future doesn't mean that there aren't suicidal choices which can make those worse times much worse.
I don't think you understand what I mean by controlling the supply. Control doesn't mean you can't have growth. Sometimes you can add more. Sometimes you subtract. Sometimes you keep the direction of change but you reduce the rate of change.
I think you don't understand what you mean by "controlling the supply". You explicitly spoke of growth control measures. But wars historically are terrible for that purpose and often actually result in increased population growth which I think was actually the case during most of the age you referred to.
we built a bunch of vibrant societies
Yes, we built a bunch of societies. We didn't preserve the old ones. Them buggy whip makers thought they were developed society. We told them to take a hike, rolled over their developed society, and built a new society.
That is quite irrelevant since we don't have to throw away societies which worked.
There has been a massive improvement in society which has nothing to do with our ability to cull people.
And those improvements have not helped preserve our developed society, as evident in how worried you are today that we might not be able to continue being a developed society.
To the contrary, our society continues to exist in large part due to the technological improvements we've made over the centuries. That doesn't prevent societies from choosing paths which are destructive rather than constructive.
I don't see the point of your assertions. A casual review of modern societies indicate that your arguments have nothing to do with their success.
The same report asserts that the top 62 individuals own as much as the poorest 50% of the world. That is a staggering level of inequality and far beyond any justifiable level of reward for service rendered, and, as I have pointed out, creates trouble for consumer capital.
I disagree of course. For example, those 62 people employ a vast number of people over many decades as well as creating far more wealth than they own.
those that just make money by having money
Reality doesn't work that way. There are no investments that are zero risk.
There already is the laws about corporate personhood that adequately prepare for AI lunacy.
I figured someone would bring this up. Superficially, they do appear the same with a legal analogy to existing law (so why again is code reuse bad in law, but not bad anywhere else?). The difference is that corporate personhood both addresses serious problems and comes up with an analogy that both serves an important public utility (the protection of the democratic rights of the various parties that make up a typical corporation) and makes corporate law much less complex.
Meanwhile, that's not happening with this proposed regulation of automation. The governments of the EU might need more tax revenue in order to provide the services expected of them. But getting that funding by taking from those who employ and those who produce will be a long term disaster in the making, creating Ayn Rand-style dystopias. Further, there's no value to the "electronic person" legal fiction since it doesn't actually have anything in common with the legal treatment of people.
As they phase out all their human components, we'll be left with strong AI which is legally a person.
While that may be true, it remains that it's not actually happening that way in the real world.
We've been trying the concept of the path to wealth is via having as many people as possible as poor as possible here since the early 1980s.
Not true. Even India has been getting wealthier at the individual level and has a declining fertility. I think a huge part of the problem in this area are the myths. Economics is a positive sum game and the path to wealth is not as you describe.
Secondly, today's automation is entirely unlike past advances in technology. We've gone from giving a worker better tools, so he can do more work, to tools that don't need a worker at all.
Sure it is. What's going on here is that there are large non-wage costs to employing people in the developed world. Businesses don't try this hard to remove people from the equation in the developing world.
Temperature rises have been within the 2 sigma range of temperature predictions, sea level rise has generally been greater than predicted.
Temperature rise is at the low end of those "2 sigma" predictions, consistent with a lower than hyped temperature forcing from CO2.
As to sea level rise, I don't buy that it is "greater than predicted". For example, we have this prediction from James Hansen:
The studyâ"written by James Hansen, NASAâ(TM)s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fieldsâ"concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop in the ocean near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate. Hansen, who is known for being alarmist and also right, acknowledges that his study implies change far beyond previous consensus estimates. In a conference call with reporters, he said he hoped the new findings would be âoesubstantially more persuasive than anything previously published.â I certainly find them to be.
Nah, what's happening is that free markets have made developed world labor expensive. It's simple supply and demand. Globalization greatly increased the supply of labor. That will pressure wages to go down regardless of what the people or policy makers in the developed world do or not do. Almost every method would be suicidal.
First, I don't think you get what I mean by suicidal. I don't mean a choice that doesn't have a universally positive option. I mean a policy or behavior that makes a situation much worse to the point that it threatens the existence of the society.
Here, we have as you say a huge increase in supply of labor. Would it then make sense to make developed world labor even more expensive and even harder to employ? And then, when your policies have made the situation much worse, would it make sense to double down and strengthen those very policies?
The one tried and true method that isn't is to control the labor supply. And by control, that usually means culling people every once in a while. That's why the developed world peaked during the age of Imperialism, when countries have little problem starting wars every once in a while, throwing people into the meat grinder.
The one tried and true method is business creation. Those wars and such you refer to did little to diminish the supply of labor and there was a lot more labor available after the age of Imperialism than before due to massive population growth.
Instead, we built a bunch of vibrant societies that allowed for the relatively free employment of people by others. Most of the jobs that exist now didn't exist a century ago. There has been a massive improvement in society which has nothing to do with our ability to cull people.
No, but wages do go down, because there's less demand for labour.
Shouldn't there be evidence of this, if it were true? Instead, we see that two thirds of the world has increasing wages which indicates that there is increasing demand for labor.
Automation is the primary tool by which demand for labour is reduced. That, by law of supply and demand, makes labour less valuable.
That hasn't happened in practice over the past few centuries. The primary tool by which we make labor less valuable is regulation and taxation.
Hire people to do what, exactly speaking? Manufacture products and services you can't actually sell because everyone's busy trying to minimize their consumption (which is what "reducing their living standards" means in practice)?
Typical demand-side drivel. Who's going to optimize for consuming less when they don't need to? That's silly. And when are you going to be concerned by employers' growing inability to employ? That's an important form of demand that is completely ignored here.
How about we instead drastically reduce the proportion of income going to the 1% and redistribute it to everyone else? That should increase the demand for consumer products a lot, thus pulling the economy back up to speed. It also means nobody needs to live in the gutter.
Because society isn't smart enough to do that without completely fucking everything up. If everyone is unemployed or has a grossly inefficient job (because you messed up society's ability to employ people), then they aren't going to have that income to support the consumption you seem to think is important.
IMHO, we should heavily reward employers (including some of the "1%") who productively employ people. We should encourage new employers (who may some day join the 1%) as well. But fantasizing over imaginary benefits of a one-time taking of wealth from a small class of people? That's a waste of our time. They aren't that wealthy and wealth is not in itself that useful.
And I would be right too. What does, for example, regulation of jay walking have to do with preparing for AI?
Even if we were to restrict our attention to laws dealing with automation and such, this law stands out as being a problem. What is a robot? Does a robot the size of a mountain count as much as a robot the size of a small ant? The attempt to put all robots under the ineffectual label of "electronic people", which has nothing to do either with actual people or with attempts to make a larger theory of law to deal with automation or AI, is a glaring sign of bad law.
And of course, there is the relatively large incentive to move automation out of the country, which seems rather high even for regulation of automation.
Or you just don't know enough to properly judge how well predictions by climate scientists are doing. (That's probably mostly because you fail to understand the time scales the scientists put on their predictions.) So far from my perspective most of the predictions are pretty good.
1) These are the same sort of rationalizations you see in economics and many other fields where people are wrong, but not so wrong that they are ignored forever.
2) The time scales are conveniently far enough out that one doesn't have to be embarrassed by being that degree of wrong.
Themselves, of course. Actual labor doesn't go away just because there is automation.
Seriously why have a country producing product that the majority of it's own citizens can not afford, to export it to another country whose citizens are rapidly losing employment and soon will also no longer be able to afford that product and then you want to ramp up that collapse with robots and no one can afford anything any more and to survive, what, they will have to hunt and eat the rich (robots are not edible).
That's quite the run on sentence. The obvious rebuttal is that process isn't happening in the real world. What's happening is that the developed world has made its human labor expensive and now seeks via rather suicidal methods to maintain a developed world lifestyle without a developed world economy.
You do see that the current game is a dead end, an inescapable dead end, unless radical changes occur.
Of course. The problem here is that the very people who make the problem, the "inescapable dead end", are the same ones proposing we tax automation now. Employers are more valuable than employees in this situation. They are the far more scarce creatures. Sure, they are "greedy", but so is everyone else. At least, employers provide employment which is a huge benefit not just to the employee, but also to society as a whole.
Rather than throwing yet another layer of disincentive on employment (after all, automation is the primary tool by which we make human labor more valuable rather than less), we should be looking at ways to encourage existing and new employers to hire people - even if that means we would need to reduce for a few decades the living standards and powers of developed world labor.
But will the developed world do that or will we continue to spiral down the "dead end" of our own making?
It's probably just as old as humanity to double down on something that isn't working on the theory that you aren't trying hard enough.
Do you seriously expect to shift your productivity source from humans to machines and not be taxed? Because that's what the entire concept is - taking a share of the productive output of the nation, and using it for things that are deemed to be in the public good. We can argue what the rate should be, or what it should be spent on, but that's pretty much how it works. And this is exactly what governments are going to have to do.
What do you think will happen when you punish and tax productivity and employment? This will just increase the attractiveness of moving production to places that won't heavily parasitize the output for some dubious theory of public good.
And once the taxes from robotic production are high enough, they can just switch to providing a minimum basic income for the humans, so there's still enough demand/money to buy the goods the robots produce, and the labor markets don't just implode from scarcity.
This seems to me the endgame of all this mess. A bunch of people starving on some grossly inadequate basic income while the rest of the world moves on.
The rest of the world doesn't have this problem. Automation continues to create new, more valuable jobs just as it has for centuries.
You appear to be assuming the low end of the range is most likely. That's probably a bad bet too. Even 1.5C of warming is significant.
It's dishonest to imply that such a large difference in this parameter doesn't change much. For example, if this parameter is 1.5 C per doubling instead of 3 C per doubling as claimed by the IPCC, then that's 30 years that we have just to get to the point where IPCC claims we are now (at current growth rate in CO2 emissions).
Even if we ignore that all of the predictions are similarly pushed back by many decades and that the IPCC consistently exaggerates how harmful climate change is supposed to be, that means we can grow human societies to become far more wealthy just in those three decades before adverse problems happen. For example, in the 1988-2008 period, two thirds of humanity had 30% or better improvement in net income, adjusted for inflation. This is a huge improvement in human well-being, unrivaled in human history.
We have an opportunity to end almost all global poverty. But that requires prioritizing other things over the climate. And that requires generating a realistic picture of the climate.
And my belief is that many scientists are that cheap. Let us keep in mind the nearest analogy, that of economics, which is one of the few fields of science which actually has similar order of magnitude stakes. There you have quite a few economists prostituting themselves to the rich and powerful.
Your analogy is BS. Economics is dependent to a large degree on human actions which aren't always that predictable. Some economists may be prostituting themselves to the rich and powerful but I don't see that they have been successful at predicting the future. For example the austerity mavens were predicting runaway inflation due to the Fed shoveling money into the economy but it never happened.
The hard sciences are dependent on the real world which has predictable reactions. The science has to conform to the real world or it is soon found to be wanting. The basic things that climate science has predicted are coming true. The world is getting warmer, ice is melting, sea level is rising and the oceans are acidifying. All this appears to be happening at a rate that is many times the rate of any period in the past (except maybe asteroid strikes). What will happen in the future is uncertain because we don't have any good examples from the past for this kind of change. You can assume it won't be that bad but what do you base that on, some personal feelings. I'd rather listen to the scientists.
I'll just note here that a) climate research also is failing to predict the future, b) it is also based on human behavior, and c) as I noted before, has similar stakes to economics which has these same problems. There's a reason a lot of us aren't buying in.
In general, most of our federal government is competent, efficient and non-corrupt, compared to most other federal governments around the world.
Boy, that's damning with faint praise. Let's also keep in mind that "federal government" means there is a lot of stuff that the government in question is not supposed to be doing at all, no matter how efficiently they might do it.
The incident then turned into a hostage situation.
In other words, interference by a single person with a gun stopped most of the potential for killing. I see this so much, often with examples used by gun control advocates. Shooting the shooter(s) is not the only possible positive contribution a gun wielder can do for an ongoing massacre. Getting the shooter to change their behavior to something that causes a lower body count is another positive contribution.
Of course you're betting that thousands of scientists are wrong and things won't be that bad.
Of course not. We need to keep in mind that my views are consistent with actual evidence in climate research. For example, a very low temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2 remains consistent with the IPCC's reports.
You think scientists are in it for money or some socialist agenda but they're smart enough to know if they are purposely distorting the science for aims like that someone will eventually show that and destroy their scientific reputations.
"Eventually" is many decades.
I doubt many scientists are willing to do that when they know reality can't be changed to fit some agenda (even your agenda).
And my belief is that many scientists are that cheap. Let us keep in mind the nearest analogy, that of economics, which is one of the few fields of science which actually has similar order of magnitude stakes. There you have quite a few economists prostituting themselves to the rich and powerful.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are willing to excuse Hillary Clinton for this kind of egregious lawbreaking, then you will have no moral right to complain later when President Trump does something just as bad.
Morality as well as objectivity goes out the window with politics. Instead, we should be asking, would we want our worst enemies to get away with what Clinton did? Ten years from now do we want every stooge and crony to have their own personal servers and absolutely no accountability for all the resulting emails that are never archived by the government?
If your team gets away with something, then anyone can do the same. And there are some real nasty pieces of work out there.
but you are confusing those who "own" the work (as defined by the 62) vs those who did the work.
So what? A certain amount of elitism naturally appears here. Most people don't employ other people. Hence, their ability to create employment or value for others ends with their reach - their labor and their wallet. As I noted before, employers are more important than employees because they are far scarcer, have considerably more value, and have an effect far in excess of their personal labor.
It's too bad that you think I am merely "confusing" employers and employees. I am not. I just see labor as not being valuable in itself without someone directing it. Digging up grubs and shoots is just as hard work as any modern labor, but it's far less productive and useful.
Yes, and with the PDO returning to a positive phase there's a chance we will see warming like we had in the 1980s and 1990s rather than the warming of the 2000s.
Which will still be below those predictions, let us note.
The instability there is well documented.
It might even exist too.
That doesn't mean it's going to happen but it's also not something you can say won't happen.
This is what we call the argument from ignorance fallacy. Why does what you're ignorant of matter less than what I'm ignorant of?
All I have to say on this matter is that if there really is something that needs to be done about global warming in the near future, they will soon have actual evidence of this urgency rather than decade after decade of these games.
It's a civil liberty not a civil right.
They aren't mutually exclusive. The grandparent was correct.
2015 and 2016 (once the final numbers are in) are solidly in the middle of the 2 sigma predictions. Over short time periods natural variability can overwhelm the signal of global warming but in the long run (30 years or longer) the signal of global warming wins.
In other words, current extreme years. There will be more years than just 2015 and 2016.
My perception of the Hansen paper was that it's impossible to rule out large non-linear changes in sea level rise due to ice sheet dynamics that we don't understand too well, not that it would absolutely happen. Many other scientists have made more linear predictions. The future will tell. Meanwhile sea level is rising faster than earlier linear predictions so far.
Anything can be true when you're ignorant. I note that sea level may be rising faster than some predictions, but not faster than other predictions.
I knew what you mean, and my statement still applies. Almost anything you do or not do would make things worse.
You continue to make that error that you claim you are not making. "Make things worse" than what? I think it's enlightening to consider the normal definition of suicidal.
wanting to kill yourself : showing a desire to kill yourself
extremely dangerous : likely to cause your death : likely to cause great harm to yourself
No matter what choices we make, we are likely to die inside of a few decades. But not all choices we make are considered suicidal because they aren't likely to cause your death in the near future. Everyone dies, but some people die much faster due to the choices they make.
Just because the US is operating at a long term labor cost disadvantage which will result in a decline in living standards, doesn't mean that all choices are equal. Passing laws that discourage employment and creation/expansion of business, or which make people poorer make things much worse in the way that they are getting worse than laws which don't do that.
Just because we will experience worse times in the future doesn't mean that there aren't suicidal choices which can make those worse times much worse.
I don't think you understand what I mean by controlling the supply. Control doesn't mean you can't have growth. Sometimes you can add more. Sometimes you subtract. Sometimes you keep the direction of change but you reduce the rate of change.
I think you don't understand what you mean by "controlling the supply". You explicitly spoke of growth control measures. But wars historically are terrible for that purpose and often actually result in increased population growth which I think was actually the case during most of the age you referred to.
we built a bunch of vibrant societies
Yes, we built a bunch of societies. We didn't preserve the old ones. Them buggy whip makers thought they were developed society. We told them to take a hike, rolled over their developed society, and built a new society.
That is quite irrelevant since we don't have to throw away societies which worked.
There has been a massive improvement in society which has nothing to do with our ability to cull people.
And those improvements have not helped preserve our developed society, as evident in how worried you are today that we might not be able to continue being a developed society.
To the contrary, our society continues to exist in large part due to the technological improvements we've made over the centuries. That doesn't prevent societies from choosing paths which are destructive rather than constructive.
I don't see the point of your assertions. A casual review of modern societies indicate that your arguments have nothing to do with their success.
The same report asserts that the top 62 individuals own as much as the poorest 50% of the world. That is a staggering level of inequality and far beyond any justifiable level of reward for service rendered, and, as I have pointed out, creates trouble for consumer capital.
I disagree of course. For example, those 62 people employ a vast number of people over many decades as well as creating far more wealth than they own.
those that just make money by having money
Reality doesn't work that way. There are no investments that are zero risk.
There already is the laws about corporate personhood that adequately prepare for AI lunacy.
I figured someone would bring this up. Superficially, they do appear the same with a legal analogy to existing law (so why again is code reuse bad in law, but not bad anywhere else?). The difference is that corporate personhood both addresses serious problems and comes up with an analogy that both serves an important public utility (the protection of the democratic rights of the various parties that make up a typical corporation) and makes corporate law much less complex.
Meanwhile, that's not happening with this proposed regulation of automation. The governments of the EU might need more tax revenue in order to provide the services expected of them. But getting that funding by taking from those who employ and those who produce will be a long term disaster in the making, creating Ayn Rand-style dystopias. Further, there's no value to the "electronic person" legal fiction since it doesn't actually have anything in common with the legal treatment of people.
As they phase out all their human components, we'll be left with strong AI which is legally a person.
While that may be true, it remains that it's not actually happening that way in the real world.
We've been trying the concept of the path to wealth is via having as many people as possible as poor as possible here since the early 1980s.
Not true. Even India has been getting wealthier at the individual level and has a declining fertility. I think a huge part of the problem in this area are the myths. Economics is a positive sum game and the path to wealth is not as you describe.
Secondly, today's automation is entirely unlike past advances in technology. We've gone from giving a worker better tools, so he can do more work, to tools that don't need a worker at all.
Sure it is. What's going on here is that there are large non-wage costs to employing people in the developed world. Businesses don't try this hard to remove people from the equation in the developing world.
Temperature rises have been within the 2 sigma range of temperature predictions, sea level rise has generally been greater than predicted.
Temperature rise is at the low end of those "2 sigma" predictions, consistent with a lower than hyped temperature forcing from CO2.
As to sea level rise, I don't buy that it is "greater than predicted". For example, we have this prediction from James Hansen:
The studyâ"written by James Hansen, NASAâ(TM)s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fieldsâ"concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop in the ocean near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate. Hansen, who is known for being alarmist and also right, acknowledges that his study implies change far beyond previous consensus estimates. In a conference call with reporters, he said he hoped the new findings would be âoesubstantially more persuasive than anything previously published.â I certainly find them to be.
Nah, what's happening is that free markets have made developed world labor expensive. It's simple supply and demand. Globalization greatly increased the supply of labor. That will pressure wages to go down regardless of what the people or policy makers in the developed world do or not do. Almost every method would be suicidal.
First, I don't think you get what I mean by suicidal. I don't mean a choice that doesn't have a universally positive option. I mean a policy or behavior that makes a situation much worse to the point that it threatens the existence of the society.
Here, we have as you say a huge increase in supply of labor. Would it then make sense to make developed world labor even more expensive and even harder to employ? And then, when your policies have made the situation much worse, would it make sense to double down and strengthen those very policies?
The one tried and true method that isn't is to control the labor supply. And by control, that usually means culling people every once in a while. That's why the developed world peaked during the age of Imperialism, when countries have little problem starting wars every once in a while, throwing people into the meat grinder.
The one tried and true method is business creation. Those wars and such you refer to did little to diminish the supply of labor and there was a lot more labor available after the age of Imperialism than before due to massive population growth.
Instead, we built a bunch of vibrant societies that allowed for the relatively free employment of people by others. Most of the jobs that exist now didn't exist a century ago. There has been a massive improvement in society which has nothing to do with our ability to cull people.
No, but wages do go down, because there's less demand for labour.
Shouldn't there be evidence of this, if it were true? Instead, we see that two thirds of the world has increasing wages which indicates that there is increasing demand for labor.
Automation is the primary tool by which demand for labour is reduced. That, by law of supply and demand, makes labour less valuable.
That hasn't happened in practice over the past few centuries. The primary tool by which we make labor less valuable is regulation and taxation.
Hire people to do what, exactly speaking? Manufacture products and services you can't actually sell because everyone's busy trying to minimize their consumption (which is what "reducing their living standards" means in practice)?
Typical demand-side drivel. Who's going to optimize for consuming less when they don't need to? That's silly. And when are you going to be concerned by employers' growing inability to employ? That's an important form of demand that is completely ignored here.
How about we instead drastically reduce the proportion of income going to the 1% and redistribute it to everyone else? That should increase the demand for consumer products a lot, thus pulling the economy back up to speed. It also means nobody needs to live in the gutter.
Because society isn't smart enough to do that without completely fucking everything up. If everyone is unemployed or has a grossly inefficient job (because you messed up society's ability to employ people), then they aren't going to have that income to support the consumption you seem to think is important.
IMHO, we should heavily reward employers (including some of the "1%") who productively employ people. We should encourage new employers (who may some day join the 1%) as well. But fantasizing over imaginary benefits of a one-time taking of wealth from a small class of people? That's a waste of our time. They aren't that wealthy and wealth is not in itself that useful.
You would say that of any regulation.
And I would be right too. What does, for example, regulation of jay walking have to do with preparing for AI?
Even if we were to restrict our attention to laws dealing with automation and such, this law stands out as being a problem. What is a robot? Does a robot the size of a mountain count as much as a robot the size of a small ant? The attempt to put all robots under the ineffectual label of "electronic people", which has nothing to do either with actual people or with attempts to make a larger theory of law to deal with automation or AI, is a glaring sign of bad law. And of course, there is the relatively large incentive to move automation out of the country, which seems rather high even for regulation of automation.
Or you just don't know enough to properly judge how well predictions by climate scientists are doing. (That's probably mostly because you fail to understand the time scales the scientists put on their predictions.) So far from my perspective most of the predictions are pretty good.
1) These are the same sort of rationalizations you see in economics and many other fields where people are wrong, but not so wrong that they are ignored forever.
2) The time scales are conveniently far enough out that one doesn't have to be embarrassed by being that degree of wrong.
The question is, who will they export product to.
Themselves, of course. Actual labor doesn't go away just because there is automation.
Seriously why have a country producing product that the majority of it's own citizens can not afford, to export it to another country whose citizens are rapidly losing employment and soon will also no longer be able to afford that product and then you want to ramp up that collapse with robots and no one can afford anything any more and to survive, what, they will have to hunt and eat the rich (robots are not edible).
That's quite the run on sentence. The obvious rebuttal is that process isn't happening in the real world. What's happening is that the developed world has made its human labor expensive and now seeks via rather suicidal methods to maintain a developed world lifestyle without a developed world economy.
You do see that the current game is a dead end, an inescapable dead end, unless radical changes occur.
Of course. The problem here is that the very people who make the problem, the "inescapable dead end", are the same ones proposing we tax automation now. Employers are more valuable than employees in this situation. They are the far more scarce creatures. Sure, they are "greedy", but so is everyone else. At least, employers provide employment which is a huge benefit not just to the employee, but also to society as a whole.
Rather than throwing yet another layer of disincentive on employment (after all, automation is the primary tool by which we make human labor more valuable rather than less), we should be looking at ways to encourage existing and new employers to hire people - even if that means we would need to reduce for a few decades the living standards and powers of developed world labor.
But will the developed world do that or will we continue to spiral down the "dead end" of our own making?
Why is a law preparing for AI lunacy?
It's not "preparing for AI". It's providing a massive incentive to move automated commerce and industry to the developing world.
This is the future though.
It's probably just as old as humanity to double down on something that isn't working on the theory that you aren't trying hard enough.
Do you seriously expect to shift your productivity source from humans to machines and not be taxed? Because that's what the entire concept is - taking a share of the productive output of the nation, and using it for things that are deemed to be in the public good. We can argue what the rate should be, or what it should be spent on, but that's pretty much how it works. And this is exactly what governments are going to have to do.
What do you think will happen when you punish and tax productivity and employment? This will just increase the attractiveness of moving production to places that won't heavily parasitize the output for some dubious theory of public good.
And once the taxes from robotic production are high enough, they can just switch to providing a minimum basic income for the humans, so there's still enough demand/money to buy the goods the robots produce, and the labor markets don't just implode from scarcity.
This seems to me the endgame of all this mess. A bunch of people starving on some grossly inadequate basic income while the rest of the world moves on.
The rest of the world doesn't have this problem. Automation continues to create new, more valuable jobs just as it has for centuries.
You appear to be assuming the low end of the range is most likely. That's probably a bad bet too. Even 1.5C of warming is significant.
It's dishonest to imply that such a large difference in this parameter doesn't change much. For example, if this parameter is 1.5 C per doubling instead of 3 C per doubling as claimed by the IPCC, then that's 30 years that we have just to get to the point where IPCC claims we are now (at current growth rate in CO2 emissions).
Even if we ignore that all of the predictions are similarly pushed back by many decades and that the IPCC consistently exaggerates how harmful climate change is supposed to be, that means we can grow human societies to become far more wealthy just in those three decades before adverse problems happen. For example, in the 1988-2008 period, two thirds of humanity had 30% or better improvement in net income, adjusted for inflation. This is a huge improvement in human well-being, unrivaled in human history.
We have an opportunity to end almost all global poverty. But that requires prioritizing other things over the climate. And that requires generating a realistic picture of the climate.
And my belief is that many scientists are that cheap. Let us keep in mind the nearest analogy, that of economics, which is one of the few fields of science which actually has similar order of magnitude stakes. There you have quite a few economists prostituting themselves to the rich and powerful. Your analogy is BS. Economics is dependent to a large degree on human actions which aren't always that predictable. Some economists may be prostituting themselves to the rich and powerful but I don't see that they have been successful at predicting the future. For example the austerity mavens were predicting runaway inflation due to the Fed shoveling money into the economy but it never happened.
The hard sciences are dependent on the real world which has predictable reactions. The science has to conform to the real world or it is soon found to be wanting. The basic things that climate science has predicted are coming true. The world is getting warmer, ice is melting, sea level is rising and the oceans are acidifying. All this appears to be happening at a rate that is many times the rate of any period in the past (except maybe asteroid strikes). What will happen in the future is uncertain because we don't have any good examples from the past for this kind of change. You can assume it won't be that bad but what do you base that on, some personal feelings. I'd rather listen to the scientists.
I'll just note here that a) climate research also is failing to predict the future, b) it is also based on human behavior, and c) as I noted before, has similar stakes to economics which has these same problems. There's a reason a lot of us aren't buying in.
Sorry, don't see that. Instead, I recall it was hurt by the lack of trade.
In general, most of our federal government is competent, efficient and non-corrupt, compared to most other federal governments around the world.
Boy, that's damning with faint praise. Let's also keep in mind that "federal government" means there is a lot of stuff that the government in question is not supposed to be doing at all, no matter how efficiently they might do it.
The incident then turned into a hostage situation.
In other words, interference by a single person with a gun stopped most of the potential for killing. I see this so much, often with examples used by gun control advocates. Shooting the shooter(s) is not the only possible positive contribution a gun wielder can do for an ongoing massacre. Getting the shooter to change their behavior to something that causes a lower body count is another positive contribution.
What of South Africa?
Fine with me. I don't want to waste my time converting the willfully ignorant.
Of course you're betting that thousands of scientists are wrong and things won't be that bad.
Of course not. We need to keep in mind that my views are consistent with actual evidence in climate research. For example, a very low temperature forcing of a doubling of CO2 remains consistent with the IPCC's reports.
You think scientists are in it for money or some socialist agenda but they're smart enough to know if they are purposely distorting the science for aims like that someone will eventually show that and destroy their scientific reputations.
"Eventually" is many decades.
I doubt many scientists are willing to do that when they know reality can't be changed to fit some agenda (even your agenda).
And my belief is that many scientists are that cheap. Let us keep in mind the nearest analogy, that of economics, which is one of the few fields of science which actually has similar order of magnitude stakes. There you have quite a few economists prostituting themselves to the rich and powerful.