Those Aussies are ruthless! They even wired kangaroos with explosives... come hopping in the camp and knock out ten guys!
You know, the Americans already knew about this Aussie tactic.
Yes blogs are more biased. But they wear their bias openly on their sleeve. I greatly prefer that to a writer that pretends (even to him/herself) that they have no bias and writes what they think is "Objective" but always has a slant. I can read a right-wing blog and know where they are comign from. I can read a left-wing blog and knw where thety are coming from. If you range widley you can get a pretty good picture of what is going on, and a lot of interesting stories that the real media just pass right by or else make light notice of.
Personally, I find it a bit sad that objectivity is no longer considered a reasonable demand to ask of the media, and that having a mix of left-biased and right-biased reporting is considered the least worst option. It's getting to the point that people are forgetting that information don't always have to be contaminated with some sort of agenda.
At least projects like Wikipedia and
Wikinews are giving this objectivity thing
a chance. Sure, it's not perfect, but I think it's a step in the right direction. (Not that this opinion is in any way objective.;-).
They really use the American manufacturing industry to support their claims? Last I checked steel was reeling, textiles were dead, auto manufacturing had been reduced to a self-supporting welfare state and chip fab was happening in Asia.
While it is true that employment in these industries has declined dramatically, it's not really true that the industries themselves are in trouble. American steel output, for instance, has been stable or generally increasing in the last thirty years. What's really happened is that technological improvements have made the production of steel much more efficient; for instance, a steel worker in 1987 could make 472 tons of steel a year, while in 1997 the same worker could make 947 tons of steel a year. Modern steel mini-mills are actually thriving; it is the old steel firms who have to deal with the leacy of massive pension costs from the days when they had to hire many times more workers than they need to today who are in trouble. The situation is much the same for autos and textiles; it is the transition from low productivity technology to high productivity technology, not so much competiton from imports, which is causing the bulk of the dislocation.
You're right, some things get cheaper with truly open markets. So far those things seem to mostly be plastic trinkets at WalMart. The cost of education continues to outpace inflation, healthcare costs are spiralling out of control and the housing and real estate markets are heavily overvalued, at least in my part of the country. Bargain-basement cars may be marginally cheaper, and of course electronics always get less expensive, but those are the only two durable goods I can think of that have become significantly less expensive.
Strangely enough, health care, education, and real estate are the components of our economy which are NOT generally outsourced overseas. Connect the dots yourself...
Basically polynomials of several variables is what they are, as far as I can tell. y = x^2 (which is a parabola) is a simple example.
So Hilbert was asking about the "shape" of algebraic curves (I think).
Yeah, that's pretty much the first part of
Hilbert's 16th problem. For example, just by
using quadratic equations, one can
obtain a single infinite curve (like a parabola
y = x^2), a single closed curve (like a circle
x^2 + y^2 = 1), two disjoint infinite curves (like a hyperbola x^2 - y^2 = 1), or two intersecting infinite curves (like the pair of lines x^2 = y^2). That's about all you can do with quadratics. With cubics, you can get more complicated things (like a closed loop together with another infinite curve - look up "elliptic curve" for some examples), and so on and so
forth. The first part of Hilbert's 16th is to
classify all the possible numbers of loops
and infinite curves that an algebraic equation
of a fixed degree can generate, as well as their
relative position (if an equation generates
two loops, are they disjoint, or intersecting,
or is one contained inside the other? etc.)
The second half of Hilbert's 16th is similar,
but deals with curves that are not solved by
algebraic equations, but rather by differential
equations. For instance, the differential
equation dy/dx = y gives exponential curves
such as y = e^x. Sometimes these curves
converge to a periodic loop known as
a "limit cycle"; Hilbert's problem is then
to count how many limit cycles there are and
how they are positioned.
Oxenhielm's paper can be found here. It seems that she hasn't solved Hilbert's 16th problem for all differential equations, which would be absolutely amazing, but only for a specific class of such equations, although this does still seem to be a substantial achievement.
Then they started building factories, and told us that we could get rich by making things, even though lots of people got hurt or killed, the air and water got fouled, and the pay wasn't really that good after all. Then we got together and fought for better conditions, and the people that had only been consuming what we made got strong enough to build factories of their own, and the factories picked up and left.
Then they told us, "Don't worry about the factories leaving! The future is in services and intellectual property creation!" So they trained two generations of us to use computers and write memos and move paper around (at our great expense) so we could work in their service industries.
But the service industries didn't have any factories or other major infrastructural investments, so when the consumers of our software code and financial products got well-educated enough to do those things themselves, the service industries had an even easier time of it and ran for the hills.
Now they're not telling us where we're supposed to work, and not telling us how we're supposed to put our expensive educations to use, only that it'll get better some day. But what's left? No farms, no factories, empty office buildings, and even the production of the very food we eat and the houses we live in is restricted to illegal immigrants because no one is willing to pay living wages. There are some jobs that can't be moved easily - construction, machining, auto repair, but how are we supposed to support an entire economy with this?
Well, firstly, there are a lot more immobile jobs than you might think. Health care (except maybe for lab tests) isn't going off shore any time soon, nor will education (even if distance learning really does take off, countries like a US will have a natural competitive advantage here). Curiously enough, these two sectors of the economy are booming right now. Huge parts of the public sector are more or less domestic by definition. Heck, even something as simple as getting a haircut can't be easily outsourced to cheaper countries.
Secondly, the key factor that allows this cycle to improve our economic situation is productivity. For instance, take the farmers. From 1900 to 2000, agricultural employment in the US dropped from 40% of the workforce to 2%. Yet we still export 12 billion$ more food than we import every year; indeed these 2% are producing far more food than the 40% did in 1900. (Arguably subsidies are a factor, but that's another issue). We don't have agricultural jobs any more because we don't need them; our productivity has improved by an order of magnitude. The same then happened to manufacturing, and currently to certain types of services; technological advances in productivity, rather than offshore outsourcing, are the real driver of the shift in jobs from more automatable jobs to the more labor-intensive ones. Even without trade with China and India, this trend would continue; the only main difference would be that a lot of the stuff we are accustomed to getting cheaply from overseas would now be somewhat more expensive.
If you've read this gentleman's writings, you'll glean that this isn't just another routine shift in employment - we're heading toward a watershed event, a singularity. In the past, as old industries became obsolete, the work force laid off from one profession got dumped into the "generic labor" pool... y'know, the Walmart greeter, etc. What Marshall Brain is arguing - quite insightfully - is that the "generic labor" pool itself will be obsolesced, which has never happened before. What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform? What happens to the 90% of the population who has no such skills and can't develop them?
Well, two things will happen:
If there are more (and better paid) skilled jobs than unskilled jobs, then people will get more education. It's not like skill is 100% genetic - it can be acquired. We will probably enter an age when tertiary education is as universal as secondary education is today (and don't forget, only a few generations ago - during the Depression, for instance - the average US citizen would have had only a primary education).
Robotics, like any other technological advance, will make it easier to perform skilled tasks as well as unskilled tasks, thus lowering the bar for entry. Scientific research, to name one example, has been made much more convenient by the advent of the computer and the internet; it's no longer so necessary to have massive resources such as an exhaustive library at a first-class university in order to keep up with the field. Presumably with further improvements in IT, such previously arcane fields will become accessible to people who are currently considered "unskilled".
Moreover, and even worse: People claim all the time that the economy has survived everything before it, and will adapt. But some trends, promoted by such shifts, have just continued to go in an unhealthy direction. One of them is the concentration of wealth: the increasing percentage of resources owned by a tiny fraction of society. Another is the shift in wealth from individuals to corporations - never before has the economy dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
Hmm, have you ever heard of the Dutch East India Company? I imagine as a relative proportion of
the world economy at the time, that
corporation was far larger than AOL-TW (which, by the way, is not that large of a company, compared with e.g. Wal-Mart). Besides, corporations
are ultimately owned by individuals, and incidentally also provide a large chunk of the tax revenues that keep government running. (Same
goes for the rich. The top 20% may have 50%
of the world's wealth, but is also paying 70-80%
of the world's income tax, and (more indirectly) also a similarly
large proportion of other taxes too).
The key thing is not so much income inequality,
but income mobility - how easily can an individual by dint of sheer achievement move
up the income ladder? The example of the Harry
Potter author in the article is a good example
of this. Unfortunately we don't have much
good data on income mobility, but it doesn't seem
significantly worse than in the past, and may
even be slightly better. Today's rich typically aren't coming from old-money families any more, but from the middle and even working classes.
I suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the working skilled and the unemployed masses. Already, these two groups exist and rarely interact, but the differences are growing more visible stark by the day.
I doubt it. Skill is a continuum, not a
boolean variable. Technology tends to shift this
continuum in one direction or another, but doesn't
have any particular tendency to tear it apart.
Another poster provided trinary computing tutorial. On one of the pages for the introduction, the author writes:
The basis for understanding Trinary Algebra begins with the way that it represents its numbers. They are used to represent two things: Whole and Fractional Numbers. To start with...in Trinary systems, bits are really called trits. Its short for Trinary Digits.
As if we didn't lack sufficient sexual jokes regarding current computer technology. Now we have to introduce "trits" into the fray. Now we're going to have to explaing to our mothers that they're using 32 trit computers. Or stop people from laughing when we mention we like lots of trits.
I propose we quickly abandon this system in favor of quarternery logic. The possibilities for abuse of a trinary logic system (and its trits) are simply too many.
Nah, if we did that then we'd have to call it qits.
000: page is spam. Ignore it.
001: page is porn. Porn is all the same, show porn page from disk.
010: page is pop-up ad. Block it.
011: page is a 404.
100: page has javascript. Show random javascript error.
101: page is Slashdot.
110: page is Slashdot.
111: page belongs to the.000001% of uncompressible pages, store it as is (full page follows).
I think your code for 110 is incorrect, it should be:
110: page is Slahdotted.
There are several reasons healthcare is so expensive.
1. Litigation.
2. CYA medicine
3. Failed accountability.
4. Complex and inefficient billing.
5. Secrecy.
6. Vested interests.
These are legitimate reasons, but they are not all due to malice or incompetence on the part of governments and health care companies. In part, they are what the consumer (especially the First World consumer) wants.
A US citizen can get health care for a fraction of the price by crossing the border to Mexico. Why don't they do so?
A wealthy Asian family might send their sick child to a US hospital, at enormous expense, when they could instead rely on their much cheaper local health system. Why don't they just stay at home?
The point is that in the First World, people generally value their own health, and the health of their family, much higher than mere piles of money - to the point where they may gladly spend a few thousand dollars more to replace, say, an operation with a 10% chance of risk to one's health with an operation with a 1% chance of risk to one's health. Whether this is rational or not is debatable, but it is fact of our modern culture.
A related fact is that health care is what economists call a prestige good - the more expensive the health care product, the more desirable it is to the consumer. You dream about TV ads on how hospital X charges 35% less than hospital Y, but that ain't going to happen - perversely, this may drive consumers AWAY from X and toward Y. (When was the last time you saw Harvard claiming its tuition was 35% less than Yale? Or Mercedes trying to undercut BMW in price?).
Basically, people are rather emotionally attached to their own health (and even more so to the health of their children), and so market forces are not as effective in this sector of the economy as they would be for, say, computers or oranges. To a large extent, mainstream medical care consumers WANT health care to be litigous, defensive, over-regulated, and expensive - and will pay premium for that extra 1% of safety in medical practice. In my opinion this is somewhat irrational, but until the mass psychology changes, health care will always be more expensive than what market forces would ordinarily drive it to.
I mean it's not like BackOriface and a bevy of other trojans don't allow a freakin screen capture! So all one has to do is trojan+screencap and with a little photoshop majik viola: the secure window skin.
Wonder how long it will take trojan writers to create a tool to automate that on all your hosts?
Maybe I'm naive, but if someone has penetrated your computer to an extent that a trojan is uploading screen captures and/or keystroke logs at will... haven't you pretty much lost the game already, no matter what OS or security measures you have in place?
This measure may not defend against the worst case scenario - not much does - but it may make it harder to pull off certain types of identity theft, and that's better than nothing.
The rights of GM humans might be an issue soon enough, sure. But what I fear most is the fact that we might lose touch with ourselves and create an upper class society of GM humans, with the new lower class being unable to afford the GM in their family. In fact, what might happen if we carry this too far and create a human that can hardly be desribed as a human any longer? Call me a doomsday prophet but this is what I fear most about GM, the division of the human race into several factions. The upper class and lower class, the new humans and the old humans, the superior humans and the lesser humans... Much like what Hitler dreamed of...
I think this won't happen because of the changing nature of the technology.
Early methods at genetically engineering humans will probably be done in vitro, where it is easiest to modify a specific gene. But as the technology improves, infants, children, and eventually adults will also be able to modify their own genes. (In fact, prototypes of this type of gene therapy already exist today). So in fact genetic engineering in the future will act to reduce genetic inequality as well as increase it - children and adults who are unhappy with the genes they were given at birth may well have the option to change them in the future.
Well, OK, so you may say that only the ultra-rich will have access to this super technology to change their genes of themselves and of their children, and the rest of us will miss out. This is also unlikely, again due to the maturing of the technology. Take for instance cell phones (or computers, or air travel, etc.) - this is another technology which started out only being available to the rich elite, at exorbitant prices, but eventually increased competition and R&D eventually made the technology better and cheaper, to the point where they are highly affordable, at least in the first world. If there is a lot of money to be made in GM humans, competition, R&D, and the natural forces of capitalism will force the price down. (Unless, of course, the government over-regulates the industry; but in that case the government will typically supply subsidized alternatives).
Apart from being new (and hence scary), genetic engineering in humans for traits such as intelligence is not much different from the current situation with, say, an Ivy League degree - this is "academically engineered" intelligence instead of "genetically engineered" intelligence, if you will. A Harvard MBA (for instance) can be worth over $1 million dollars (arguably much more) over the lifetime of the recipient. Clearly, rich parents are better able to afford giving their kids a Harvard education. Does this give them an advantage? Yes. Is it an overwhelming advantage? No. Certainly there is a lot of pressure to get into these good schools, but it is certainly possible to live and prosper without it.
Besides, society tends to adapt. With regard to college education, there are scholarships, student loans, and a proliferation of cheaper but reasonable quality colleges and universities, that allow the less wealthy to enjoy at least some of the benefits of higher education. The playing field still isn't level, but it is not totally lop-sided. I expect if genetic engineering becomes mainstream, similar devices will come into play here - you can take out a genetic engineering loan for your kid, perhaps, and only make payments once he or she gets a job that pays extra because of his or her genetic qualifications. (Sounds scary now, but really, it isn't much different from the way student loans work today).
and that is the true reason why they must be rejected. A society cannot claim to be a democracy unless it has free and secret elections.
Well, while secrecy of voting is an important issue, it seems to be an orthogonal one to whether voting is online or paper-based. One can have both open and secret votes in both systems.
For instance, it is technically possible, by using public key encryption techniques, to have an online election which is verifiable, secret, and resistant to fraud. There's lots of academic research on this subject; here's a random URL on this stuff. At present, I don't think these types of secure online voting schemes are actually implemented in real-world situations, but the technology is still rather new.
Next comes permanent underclass. How many here are having trouble finding work because of no degree? Well a degree will not help you if you are not known to be a so called super-engineered child. No opportunities for any white collar job. Only people with +160 IQ's can have them. After all the shareholders want top notch people and its there right. McDonalds wants you. Please apply.
After this situation comes true then rich parents will only have children who are engineered. If they do not then they condemmn there children to a life of poverty where they earn less then 10k a year. This in return will skyrocket demand and make BIO-engineering CEO's cream in there pants. They will sell parts of people's genes to the highest possible bidder. DMCA like laws will continue to protect these shitty companies so they can rake in hundreds of billions a year from scared parents willing to do anything to make sure their children are not left behind.
Yes and no. The scenario you describe is not much different from the current situation with, say, an Ivy League degree - this is "academically engineered" intelligence instead of "genetically engineered" intelligence, if you will. A Harvard MBA (for instance) can be worth over $1 million dollars (arguably much more) over the lifetime of the recipient. Clearly, rich parents are better able to afford giving their kids a Harvard education. Does this give them an advantage? Yes. Is it an overwhelming advantage? No. Certainly there is a lot of pressure to get into these good schools, but it is certainly possible to live and prosper without it.
Besides, society tends to adapt. With regard to college education, there are scholarships, student loans, and a proliferation of cheaper but reasonable quality colleges and universities, that allow the less wealthy to enjoy at least some of the benefits of higher education. The playing field still isn't level, but it is not totally lop-sided. I expect if genetic engineering becomes mainstream, similar devices will come into play here - you can take out a genetic engineering loan for your kid, perhaps,
and only make payments once he or she gets a job that
pays extra because of his or her genetic qualifications.
(Sounds scary now, but really, it isn't much
different from the way student loans work today).
In some ways, genetic engineering may be able to reduce inequality. For instance, suppose one could use gene therapy to change one's skin color as easily as one changes hair color today. Feel discriminated against because you are black/yellow/brown/green? No problem! Now you can look like the race of your choice. Discrimination based on skin color, a major problem today, may in the future only be as big a deal as discrimination based on hair color is today. We make blonde jokes all the time, but this doesn't cause anywhere near the controversy that, say, racial jokes would, in large part because blondes can choose to be non-blond simply with an application of dye. Perhaps one day race will be the same way.
(flash back a few thousand years)
Imagine a world where only the rich have access to weaponry.
(flash back a few hundred years)
Imagine a world where only the rich will be have access to advanced health care.
(flash back one hundred years)
Imagine a world where only the rich will have access to cars.
Imagine a world where only the rich have access to flight.
etc., etc., etc.
Initial offerings are always expensive. Economies of scale and competition always end up bringing the price down to levels affordable by everyone.
Very true. Indeed, one can argue that this is actually a very progressive system: the rich unintentionally subsidize the R&D cost of new technologies, bringing the costs down to
be able to provide cheap mass production for the rest of us. And all for the measly privilege of getting a lousy beta version of the technology a few years before the rest of us.
Cell phones are a good example. Fifteen years ago they were a rich businessman's plaything, cost a small fortune, were as heavy as a brick and only marginally more useful. However, the money these suck^H^H^H^H early adopters paid for those clunky gadgets are what allowed the R&D that make cell phones so useful and cheap today. Imagine if we had banned cell phones in 1989 because "they gave an unfair advantage to the rich". We'd still be using payphones now, which I suppose is equally fair to rich and poor alike, but still suckier than what we have today.
And there is the problem in a nutshell. It seems to be an article of faith in modern society that Economic Growth == Happiness. While I would agree that it helps to minimize physical suffering, a strong economy (or materialism, if you prefer the term) does not automatically translate into happiness.
I'd say that minimizing physical suffering is already a pretty respectable achievement. It's kind of hard to achieve joy and happiness when you've just contracted cholera from unsafe drinking water.
I think the correct equation is not Economic Growth == Happiness, but Economic Growth + Other Stuff == Happiness. Economic growth gives you (or your country, or your planet) the resources to achieve more goals than would be possible with no economic growth. Now, whether you can actually marshall those resources correctly to achieve your goals - that's another problem, but it's not the fault of Economic Growth if you are unable to do it.
Also, it sometimes happens that putting economic growth ahead of other concerns may paradoxically help address these concerns more efficiently than if they got first priority. Let's take a somewhat oversimplified example. Suppose that the world economy is currently worth $10 trillion a year. But global warming is a problem. Consider the following two strategies to deal with global warming:
Strategy A: Fight Global Warming now. This will cost $1 trillion dollars a year, and also slow down global economic growth, so that the economy will only double every 40 years.
Strategy B: Fight Global Warming later. Emphasize economic growth for the next 40 years, so the economy doubles every 20 years instead of every 40 years. Only after 40 years do we start fighting global warming, though due to inaction (and our desire to maintain economic growth at all costs) this will now cost $20 trillion dollars a year instead of $1 trillion dollars.
It would seem that Strategy B is a foolish short-sighted strategy which will cost us dearly in 40 years time. But Strategy A is even worse. Strategy A cuts our GDP now from $10 trillion to $9 trillion, and after 40 years it will only have doubled once, to $18 trillion. Meanwhile, with Strategy B, the world economy will after 40 years have doubled twice, to $40 trillion, and even after spending $20 trillion to control global warming, we are still ahead at $20 trillion versus $18 trillion. Both strategies will solve the long-term global warming problem, but Strategy B is cheaper, despite the apparent sticker shock of a $20 trillion price tag. The magic of exponential economic growth in Strategy B creates enough resources to pay for this additional burden.
Of course, I chose the numbers deliberately to illustrate my point, and with different numbers the situation might be different; however, the point is that economic growth can be a very, very good long-term investment, even if you care about non-economic things such as global warming.
I admire the simplicity of the capitalist ideal, but using it as a justification for making everything behave like property by enforcing scarcity where there is none, is an ugly perversion of capitalism, in fact, I would argue that it is the opposite of capitalism.
Ahh, but there is scarcity in IP. Not in the dissemination of intellectual property, but in the creation of the intellectual property. It does take real, and scarce, intellectual resources to come up with a new idea, a new piece of fiction, a new computer game, or whatever. How are these intellectual resources to be managed without some sort of intellectual property rights?
The hospital analogy is not terribly accurate, since medical care is a scarce resource (we don't have an infinite number of doctors, for instance). A better analogy would be closing the doors to a movie theater to everyone except people who purchased a ticket, thus "artificially" creating scarcity to those people hoping to sneak in for free.
Slashdot Mirror
"Wikipedia is not a democracy" is actually part of official Wikipedia policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_democracy
This is somewhat ironic, since both the internet and the algorithm were invented by the same person. :-)
Those Aussies are ruthless! They even wired kangaroos with explosives... come hopping in the camp and knock out ten guys! You know, the Americans already knew about this Aussie tactic.
You might try curvelet methods, which seem to show a great deal of promise: http://etd.caltech.edu/etd/available/etd-05262006- 133555/
Personally, I find it a bit sad that objectivity is no longer considered a reasonable demand to ask of the media, and that having a mix of left-biased and right-biased reporting is considered the least worst option. It's getting to the point that people are forgetting that information don't always have to be contaminated with some sort of agenda.
At least projects like Wikipedia and Wikinews are giving this objectivity thing a chance. Sure, it's not perfect, but I think it's a step in the right direction. (Not that this opinion is in any way objective. ;-).
Terry
Finally, a scientific explanation of the Slashdot Dupe effect!
Someone already has.
Terry
While it is true that employment in these industries has declined dramatically, it's not really true that the industries themselves are in trouble. American steel output, for instance, has been stable or generally increasing in the last thirty years. What's really happened is that technological improvements have made the production of steel much more efficient; for instance, a steel worker in 1987 could make 472 tons of steel a year, while in 1997 the same worker could make 947 tons of steel a year. Modern steel mini-mills are actually thriving; it is the old steel firms who have to deal with the leacy of massive pension costs from the days when they had to hire many times more workers than they need to today who are in trouble. The situation is much the same for autos and textiles; it is the transition from low productivity technology to high productivity technology, not so much competiton from imports, which is causing the bulk of the dislocation.
You're right, some things get cheaper with truly open markets. So far those things seem to mostly be plastic trinkets at WalMart. The cost of education continues to outpace inflation, healthcare costs are spiralling out of control and the housing and real estate markets are heavily overvalued, at least in my part of the country. Bargain-basement cars may be marginally cheaper, and of course electronics always get less expensive, but those are the only two durable goods I can think of that have become significantly less expensive.
Strangely enough, health care, education, and real estate are the components of our economy which are NOT generally outsourced overseas. Connect the dots yourself...
Terry
This has already been done. Wolfram's cellular automata model cannot be simultaneously consistent with relativity and quantum mechanics, because the model cannot violate Bell's inequality (whereas quantum mechanics does).
Terry
So Hilbert was asking about the "shape" of algebraic curves (I think).
Yeah, that's pretty much the first part of Hilbert's 16th problem. For example, just by using quadratic equations, one can obtain a single infinite curve (like a parabola y = x^2), a single closed curve (like a circle x^2 + y^2 = 1), two disjoint infinite curves (like a hyperbola x^2 - y^2 = 1), or two intersecting infinite curves (like the pair of lines x^2 = y^2). That's about all you can do with quadratics. With cubics, you can get more complicated things (like a closed loop together with another infinite curve - look up "elliptic curve" for some examples), and so on and so forth. The first part of Hilbert's 16th is to classify all the possible numbers of loops and infinite curves that an algebraic equation of a fixed degree can generate, as well as their relative position (if an equation generates two loops, are they disjoint, or intersecting, or is one contained inside the other? etc.)
The second half of Hilbert's 16th is similar, but deals with curves that are not solved by algebraic equations, but rather by differential equations. For instance, the differential equation dy/dx = y gives exponential curves such as y = e^x. Sometimes these curves converge to a periodic loop known as a "limit cycle"; Hilbert's problem is then to count how many limit cycles there are and how they are positioned.
Oxenhielm's paper can be found here. It seems that she hasn't solved Hilbert's 16th problem for all differential equations, which would be absolutely amazing, but only for a specific class of such equations, although this does still seem to be a substantial achievement.
Terry
Then they started building factories, and told us that we could get rich by making things, even though lots of people got hurt or killed, the air and water got fouled, and the pay wasn't really that good after all. Then we got together and fought for better conditions, and the people that had only been consuming what we made got strong enough to build factories of their own, and the factories picked up and left.
Then they told us, "Don't worry about the factories leaving! The future is in services and intellectual property creation!" So they trained two generations of us to use computers and write memos and move paper around (at our great expense) so we could work in their service industries.
But the service industries didn't have any factories or other major infrastructural investments, so when the consumers of our software code and financial products got well-educated enough to do those things themselves, the service industries had an even easier time of it and ran for the hills.
Now they're not telling us where we're supposed to work, and not telling us how we're supposed to put our expensive educations to use, only that it'll get better some day. But what's left? No farms, no factories, empty office buildings, and even the production of the very food we eat and the houses we live in is restricted to illegal immigrants because no one is willing to pay living wages. There are some jobs that can't be moved easily - construction, machining, auto repair, but how are we supposed to support an entire economy with this?
Well, firstly, there are a lot more immobile jobs than you might think. Health care (except maybe for lab tests) isn't going off shore any time soon, nor will education (even if distance learning really does take off, countries like a US will have a natural competitive advantage here). Curiously enough, these two sectors of the economy are booming right now. Huge parts of the public sector are more or less domestic by definition. Heck, even something as simple as getting a haircut can't be easily outsourced to cheaper countries.
Secondly, the key factor that allows this cycle to improve our economic situation is productivity. For instance, take the farmers. From 1900 to 2000, agricultural employment in the US dropped from 40% of the workforce to 2%. Yet we still export 12 billion$ more food than we import every year; indeed these 2% are producing far more food than the 40% did in 1900. (Arguably subsidies are a factor, but that's another issue). We don't have agricultural jobs any more because we don't need them; our productivity has improved by an order of magnitude. The same then happened to manufacturing, and currently to certain types of services; technological advances in productivity, rather than offshore outsourcing, are the real driver of the shift in jobs from more automatable jobs to the more labor-intensive ones. Even without trade with China and India, this trend would continue; the only main difference would be that a lot of the stuff we are accustomed to getting cheaply from overseas would now be somewhat more expensive.
Terry
Well, two things will happen:
Moreover, and even worse: People claim all the time that the economy has survived everything before it, and will adapt. But some trends, promoted by such shifts, have just continued to go in an unhealthy direction. One of them is the concentration of wealth: the increasing percentage of resources owned by a tiny fraction of society. Another is the shift in wealth from individuals to corporations - never before has the economy dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
Hmm, have you ever heard of the Dutch East India Company? I imagine as a relative proportion of the world economy at the time, that corporation was far larger than AOL-TW (which, by the way, is not that large of a company, compared with e.g. Wal-Mart). Besides, corporations are ultimately owned by individuals, and incidentally also provide a large chunk of the tax revenues that keep government running. (Same goes for the rich. The top 20% may have 50% of the world's wealth, but is also paying 70-80% of the world's income tax, and (more indirectly) also a similarly large proportion of other taxes too).
The key thing is not so much income inequality, but income mobility - how easily can an individual by dint of sheer achievement move up the income ladder? The example of the Harry Potter author in the article is a good example of this. Unfortunately we don't have much good data on income mobility, but it doesn't seem significantly worse than in the past, and may even be slightly better. Today's rich typically aren't coming from old-money families any more, but from the middle and even working classes.
I suspect that we're heading toward a two-class society, comprised of the working skilled and the unemployed masses. Already, these two groups exist and rarely interact, but the differences are growing more visible stark by the day.
I doubt it. Skill is a continuum, not a boolean variable. Technology tends to shift this continuum in one direction or another, but doesn't have any particular tendency to tear it apart.
Terry
I propose we quickly abandon this system in favor of quarternery logic. The possibilities for abuse of a trinary logic system (and its trits) are simply too many.
Nah, if we did that then we'd have to call it qits.
Terry
2. Park large EMP device outside of Google headquarters.
3. Detonate large EMP device.
4. Profit!
or something along those lines...I can't think of any other way they'll get ahead of google...
(also notice, that the usual missing step 3 is included in this exercise for your viewing pleasure)
If this movie is any guide, I believe the missing step 3 is "cross your legs and squint painfully".
Terry
001: page is porn. Porn is all the same, show porn page from disk.
010: page is pop-up ad. Block it.
011: page is a 404.
100: page has javascript. Show random javascript error.
101: page is Slashdot.
110: page is Slashdot.
111: page belongs to the
I think your code for 110 is incorrect, it should be: 110: page is Slahdotted.
Terry
Yes. Although one should be warned, prolonged exposure to four-dimensional cubes can have detrimental side-effects.
Terry
Yes; but this is a provable consequence of the laws of quantum mechanics. It's known as the no cloning theorem.
Terry
1. Litigation.
2. CYA medicine
3. Failed accountability.
4. Complex and inefficient billing.
5. Secrecy.
6. Vested interests.
These are legitimate reasons, but they are not all due to malice or incompetence on the part of governments and health care companies. In part, they are what the consumer (especially the First World consumer) wants.
A US citizen can get health care for a fraction of the price by crossing the border to Mexico. Why don't they do so?
A wealthy Asian family might send their sick child to a US hospital, at enormous expense, when they could instead rely on their much cheaper local health system. Why don't they just stay at home?
The point is that in the First World, people generally value their own health, and the health of their family, much higher than mere piles of money - to the point where they may gladly spend a few thousand dollars more to replace, say, an operation with a 10% chance of risk to one's health with an operation with a 1% chance of risk to one's health. Whether this is rational or not is debatable, but it is fact of our modern culture.
A related fact is that health care is what economists call a prestige good - the more expensive the health care product, the more desirable it is to the consumer. You dream about TV ads on how hospital X charges 35% less than hospital Y, but that ain't going to happen - perversely, this may drive consumers AWAY from X and toward Y. (When was the last time you saw Harvard claiming its tuition was 35% less than Yale? Or Mercedes trying to undercut BMW in price?).
Basically, people are rather emotionally attached to their own health (and even more so to the health of their children), and so market forces are not as effective in this sector of the economy as they would be for, say, computers or oranges. To a large extent, mainstream medical care consumers WANT health care to be litigous, defensive, over-regulated, and expensive - and will pay premium for that extra 1% of safety in medical practice. In my opinion this is somewhat irrational, but until the mass psychology changes, health care will always be more expensive than what market forces would ordinarily drive it to.
Terry
Wonder how long it will take trojan writers to create a tool to automate that on all your hosts?
Maybe I'm naive, but if someone has penetrated your computer to an extent that a trojan is uploading screen captures and/or keystroke logs at will... haven't you pretty much lost the game already, no matter what OS or security measures you have in place?
This measure may not defend against the worst case scenario - not much does - but it may make it harder to pull off certain types of identity theft, and that's better than nothing.
Terry
I think this won't happen because of the changing nature of the technology.
Early methods at genetically engineering humans will probably be done in vitro, where it is easiest to modify a specific gene. But as the technology improves, infants, children, and eventually adults will also be able to modify their own genes. (In fact, prototypes of this type of gene therapy already exist today). So in fact genetic engineering in the future will act to reduce genetic inequality as well as increase it - children and adults who are unhappy with the genes they were given at birth may well have the option to change them in the future.
Well, OK, so you may say that only the ultra-rich will have access to this super technology to change their genes of themselves and of their children, and the rest of us will miss out. This is also unlikely, again due to the maturing of the technology. Take for instance cell phones (or computers, or air travel, etc.) - this is another technology which started out only being available to the rich elite, at exorbitant prices, but eventually increased competition and R&D eventually made the technology better and cheaper, to the point where they are highly affordable, at least in the first world. If there is a lot of money to be made in GM humans, competition, R&D, and the natural forces of capitalism will force the price down. (Unless, of course, the government over-regulates the industry; but in that case the government will typically supply subsidized alternatives).
Apart from being new (and hence scary), genetic engineering in humans for traits such as intelligence is not much different from the current situation with, say, an Ivy League degree - this is "academically engineered" intelligence instead of "genetically engineered" intelligence, if you will. A Harvard MBA (for instance) can be worth over $1 million dollars (arguably much more) over the lifetime of the recipient. Clearly, rich parents are better able to afford giving their kids a Harvard education. Does this give them an advantage? Yes. Is it an overwhelming advantage? No. Certainly there is a lot of pressure to get into these good schools, but it is certainly possible to live and prosper without it.
Besides, society tends to adapt. With regard to college education, there are scholarships, student loans, and a proliferation of cheaper but reasonable quality colleges and universities, that allow the less wealthy to enjoy at least some of the benefits of higher education. The playing field still isn't level, but it is not totally lop-sided. I expect if genetic engineering becomes mainstream, similar devices will come into play here - you can take out a genetic engineering loan for your kid, perhaps, and only make payments once he or she gets a job that pays extra because of his or her genetic qualifications. (Sounds scary now, but really, it isn't much different from the way student loans work today).
Terry
Well, while secrecy of voting is an important issue, it seems to be an orthogonal one to whether voting is online or paper-based. One can have both open and secret votes in both systems.
For instance, it is technically possible, by using public key encryption techniques, to have an online election which is verifiable, secret, and resistant to fraud. There's lots of academic research on this subject; here's a random URL on this stuff. At present, I don't think these types of secure online voting schemes are actually implemented in real-world situations, but the technology is still rather new.
Terry
After this situation comes true then rich parents will only have children who are engineered. If they do not then they condemmn there children to a life of poverty where they earn less then 10k a year. This in return will skyrocket demand and make BIO-engineering CEO's cream in there pants. They will sell parts of people's genes to the highest possible bidder. DMCA like laws will continue to protect these shitty companies so they can rake in hundreds of billions a year from scared parents willing to do anything to make sure their children are not left behind.
Yes and no. The scenario you describe is not much different from the current situation with, say, an Ivy League degree - this is "academically engineered" intelligence instead of "genetically engineered" intelligence, if you will. A Harvard MBA (for instance) can be worth over $1 million dollars (arguably much more) over the lifetime of the recipient. Clearly, rich parents are better able to afford giving their kids a Harvard education. Does this give them an advantage? Yes. Is it an overwhelming advantage? No. Certainly there is a lot of pressure to get into these good schools, but it is certainly possible to live and prosper without it.
Besides, society tends to adapt. With regard to college education, there are scholarships, student loans, and a proliferation of cheaper but reasonable quality colleges and universities, that allow the less wealthy to enjoy at least some of the benefits of higher education. The playing field still isn't level, but it is not totally lop-sided. I expect if genetic engineering becomes mainstream, similar devices will come into play here - you can take out a genetic engineering loan for your kid, perhaps, and only make payments once he or she gets a job that pays extra because of his or her genetic qualifications. (Sounds scary now, but really, it isn't much different from the way student loans work today).
In some ways, genetic engineering may be able to reduce inequality. For instance, suppose one could use gene therapy to change one's skin color as easily as one changes hair color today. Feel discriminated against because you are black/yellow/brown/green? No problem! Now you can look like the race of your choice. Discrimination based on skin color, a major problem today, may in the future only be as big a deal as discrimination based on hair color is today. We make blonde jokes all the time, but this doesn't cause anywhere near the controversy that, say, racial jokes would, in large part because blondes can choose to be non-blond simply with an application of dye. Perhaps one day race will be the same way.
Terry
etc., etc., etc.
Initial offerings are always expensive. Economies of scale and competition always end up bringing the price down to levels affordable by everyone.
Very true. Indeed, one can argue that this is actually a very progressive system: the rich unintentionally subsidize the R&D cost of new technologies, bringing the costs down to be able to provide cheap mass production for the rest of us. And all for the measly privilege of getting a lousy beta version of the technology a few years before the rest of us.
Cell phones are a good example. Fifteen years ago they were a rich businessman's plaything, cost a small fortune, were as heavy as a brick and only marginally more useful. However, the money these suck^H^H^H^H early adopters paid for those clunky gadgets are what allowed the R&D that make cell phones so useful and cheap today. Imagine if we had banned cell phones in 1989 because "they gave an unfair advantage to the rich". We'd still be using payphones now, which I suppose is equally fair to rich and poor alike, but still suckier than what we have today.
Terry
I'd say that minimizing physical suffering is already a pretty respectable achievement. It's kind of hard to achieve joy and happiness when you've just contracted cholera from unsafe drinking water.
I think the correct equation is not Economic Growth == Happiness, but Economic Growth + Other Stuff == Happiness. Economic growth gives you (or your country, or your planet) the resources to achieve more goals than would be possible with no economic growth. Now, whether you can actually marshall those resources correctly to achieve your goals - that's another problem, but it's not the fault of Economic Growth if you are unable to do it.
Also, it sometimes happens that putting economic growth ahead of other concerns may paradoxically help address these concerns more efficiently than if they got first priority. Let's take a somewhat oversimplified example. Suppose that the world economy is currently worth $10 trillion a year. But global warming is a problem. Consider the following two strategies to deal with global warming:
- Strategy A: Fight Global Warming now. This will cost $1 trillion dollars a year, and also slow down global economic growth, so that the economy will only double every 40 years.
- Strategy B: Fight Global Warming later. Emphasize economic growth for the next 40 years, so the economy doubles every 20 years instead of every 40 years. Only after 40 years do we start fighting global warming, though due to inaction (and our desire to maintain economic growth at all costs) this will now cost $20 trillion dollars a year instead of $1 trillion dollars.
It would seem that Strategy B is a foolish short-sighted strategy which will cost us dearly in 40 years time. But Strategy A is even worse. Strategy A cuts our GDP now from $10 trillion to $9 trillion, and after 40 years it will only have doubled once, to $18 trillion. Meanwhile, with Strategy B, the world economy will after 40 years have doubled twice, to $40 trillion, and even after spending $20 trillion to control global warming, we are still ahead at $20 trillion versus $18 trillion. Both strategies will solve the long-term global warming problem, but Strategy B is cheaper, despite the apparent sticker shock of a $20 trillion price tag. The magic of exponential economic growth in Strategy B creates enough resources to pay for this additional burden.Of course, I chose the numbers deliberately to illustrate my point, and with different numbers the situation might be different; however, the point is that economic growth can be a very, very good long-term investment, even if you care about non-economic things such as global warming.
Terry
Ahh, but there is scarcity in IP. Not in the dissemination of intellectual property, but in the creation of the intellectual property. It does take real, and scarce, intellectual resources to come up with a new idea, a new piece of fiction, a new computer game, or whatever. How are these intellectual resources to be managed without some sort of intellectual property rights?
The hospital analogy is not terribly accurate, since medical care is a scarce resource (we don't have an infinite number of doctors, for instance). A better analogy would be closing the doors to a movie theater to everyone except people who purchased a ticket, thus "artificially" creating scarcity to those people hoping to sneak in for free.