"The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no."
So please tell me: Has starvation historically been most prevalent in socialist or market economies?
Since there are approximately 2 million heavy trucks in the US although not 18 wheelers all of them I would expect them to dominate the road wear (if we assumed unrealistically that they were all 18 wheelers the road wear would correspond to approximately 20 billion cars).
"This isn't a left-right thing either as some allege here."
Sure it is. If health costs are not socialized and taxes are low there is no reason for the public to regulate your life. Without it there are simply less arguments for restricting your freedom to live as you please. And I hope we can agree that socialized health care is a left-right thing. And the general tax level as well (obese pay less taxes - so a high tax pressure means that there is more incentive to make obese people pay _their share_).
I am living in the country in the World with the highest tax pressure (Denmark). And I can tell you for a fact that I hear this type of argument again and again. We must regulate peoples behaviour because the enjoy __insert your favourite public good__.
What about Japan and (West) Germany in WW2? They are clear examples of democracy being forced upon countries. And they are clear examples of how to do nation building (Japan more so than Germany since Germany already had a short democratic history).
"...but don't these violate the Hague Convention on "exploding bullets"?"
I do not believe that is the case. The relevant article in the Hague Convention states:
"The Contracting Parties agree to abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core, or is pierced with incisions.
The present Declaration is only binding for the Contracting Powers in the case of a war between two or more of them.
It shall cease to be binding from the time when, in a war between the Contracting Parties, one of the belligerents is joined by a non-Contracting Power."
So it describes projectiles that are meant to penetrate into the body. Which I assume is not the case for the XM-25. And it requires that all parties in a given war are signatories to the convention. Otherwise it does not apply. So against Taleban or Al-Qaeda the use of such a weapon is lawful (Afghanistan has not signed the relevant convention btw. so in Afghanistan it is void under alle circumstances).
A) it is assuming that we will always have a technological breakthrough at the right moment to allow the doubling of computing power every 18 months. Maybe this is the case, but it's still a big assumption.
That is mainly a question of timing. The main point being that we will have computational power in a relatively near (~50 years) future to make a computer which has computational capabilities exceeding that of the human brain.
B) He assumes if we put enough cyber neurons together in a neural net you will develop intelligence and conscience. This may be the case, and it will be interesting to see, but I don't think you can take it for granted.
I believe that you can. If you simulate the processes of the brain the simulation will act as a brain.
C) I think he also assumes that having such massive massive amounts of computing power will solve all our problems. Has he heard of exponential-time problems, or NP-Completeness
I don't believe he assumes that. But it would of course solve a lot of our problems. And create a lot of new problems.
"There will be a few growing pains, but once APIs get straightened out and programmers get used to it (which shouldn't take too long for the ones writing HPC code), this is going to be a huge win for scientific computing."
I am working on HPC (numerical modelling). At our institute we are seriously considering using GPU's for our next generation development. From my viewpoint the biggest problem is that the abstraction layers on top of the GPU's are not widely implemented and that they are somewhat more complicated than traditional parallellization frameworks. But hopefully this will change in a few years.
It's one thing I'm pissed off at a lot of environuts for, they have a short sighted view that is just black and white. We don't have any commercial reactors here in Australia, mainly because of the environut movements. If they wanted to do good they'd stop the crap and find out what's real and what's not.
On the other hand you have a lot of coal (85% of the electricity production plus exports). And coal by a conservative estimate kills 3 or 4 times the number of people who died due to Chernobyl each year!
Here is an estimate of the number of people whose health is affected by coal based energy production in the USA:
So in my view the environmentalists are in fact responsible for millions of deaths due to their insistence on yet non-viable clean energy sources and their refusal of nuclear energy.
And out of a BBC budget of more than 7 billion USD per year the savings could have been in the order of 0.0006% on the budget.
This discussion is way out of proportions. If we should be discussing government waste we could easily find an example involving more than one man years work.
My experience during an extended visit to a chinese company in China was that access to basic web pages that I needed for my work was filtered. Try for example accessing Google Groups from China.
From your previous posts my guess is that you are from Australia. In Australia 29% of the population aged 25-64 have a tertiary education compared with 37% in USA:
So it does seem that your government do in fact think that education is less important than people in the US believes.
Just because government is not funding something does not mean that it is less valued in a country. Just that the electorate prefers a (generally more efficient) market based solution to the problem.
"You paid for it just like the rest of us. The only difference is that your payment came (and comes) in the form of taxes, rather than student loans (or whatever else)."
No that is not the only difference. Most western countries such as mine (Denmark) have a progressive income tax. This means that people taking educations that result in a large productivity are actually paying for the ones taking educations that result in lower wages (but maybe more personal satisfaction). In effect this means that these countries are not getting the optimal utility of the education since effectively less productive educations are subsidized. And the time it takes for students to finish their degrees is also in general higher for the same reasons (time spent drinking beer at the dorm is subsidized through free education and high taxes).
And government sponsored education systems are producing less people with tertiary education than in US:
"I'd also like to point out, just for the sake of inflammatory goodness on the interwebs, that America is entirely green and homogenous, thus scientifically proving that we are the best at gravity as well as everything else."
Please take a look at central Africa and tell me again that green and homogenous is a sign that you are best at gravity as well as everything else;-)
I was just wondering whether athletes take gravity into account when trying to break World records. The best place to do athletics would then be near the Equator since the gravity is lower there by 0.5% compared with the poles. And that might give a centimeter or so in high jump and more in pole vault or long jump compared with mid-latitudes (potential energy and thus achieved height is a linear function of gravity near the Earth surface, meaning that a 0.5% drop in gravity means a 0.5% increase in height). The height above sea level is not really significant in this regard (but is probably due to other factors, mainly air density and temperature). So maybe Columbia would be a good place to break World records?
Assuming World records must be accomplished at the surface of the Earth.
They definitely have a large demographic momentum (many young people) but the total fertility rates (TFR) are in free fall in some of the countries. Here are some current numbers from the CIA World Factbook:
As you can see the largest North African countries are now barely reproducing (although their populations will continue to grow for a generation or so due to the shape of their population pyramids). Their population booms are essentially over and they seem to be heading for TFR's below that of the USA.
So my guess is that the main source of instability in those regions will in fact be immigration from Central Africa into these countries.
"The influx of money should raise the standard of living those countries and it might encourage a different sort of economic growth than what we've seen in economies fueled by petrodollars."
It will probably raise the standard of living. But solar energy shares many characteristics with socalled point resources (oil, gold, diamonds and so on).
Most importantly the income from point sources are easily monopolized by the ruler since the income is not so much a result of labour* as it is of (militarily) controlling the area in which the source is located. This effectively gives the ruler a solid power base and scientific research has shown that in countries with large point resources democratization and human development is halted or at least slowed considerably compared with countries without point resources.
Solar power is probably not as bad as oil. But I doubt that it will lead to democratization of said countries. But it will definitely lead to a stronger central government.
"Guess what happened then, we turned into a stable democratic society. It stands to reason that any society below a certain wealth/developmental level will tend towards fundamentalism of various kinds and as wealth and developmental level increase in society freedoms starts to emerge."
That is not true. It has been shown that oil and other point resources do in fact hinder democratic development (in less developed countries):
Furthermore the relationship between wealth and freedom has casaulity pointing in both directions. Economic freedom and property rights are definitely driving wealth. So by providing a framework for that you can of course increase the (pluralistic, not the oil type) economical growth and thus the democratization rate. A good example: Hong Kong.
Slashdot Mirror
"The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no."
So please tell me: Has starvation historically been most prevalent in socialist or market economies?
"It's not to die for your country. The goal is to secure the objective. It's to make the other poor bastard die for his."
The proper George S. Patton quote is:
"No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country." ;-)
In fact the (highway) road damage of one 18-wheeler is equivalent to at least 9600 cars:
http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf
Since there are approximately 2 million heavy trucks in the US although not 18 wheelers all of them I would expect them to dominate the road wear (if we assumed unrealistically that they were all 18 wheelers the road wear would correspond to approximately 20 billion cars).
http://www.bts.gov/publications/transportation_statistics_annual_report/2005/html/chapter_02/highway_trucks_by_weight.html
Is that a laden or unladen swallow?
"This isn't a left-right thing either as some allege here."
Sure it is. If health costs are not socialized and taxes are low there is no reason for the public to regulate your life. Without it there are simply less arguments for restricting your freedom to live as you please. And I hope we can agree that socialized health care is a left-right thing. And the general tax level as well (obese pay less taxes - so a high tax pressure means that there is more incentive to make obese people pay _their share_).
I am living in the country in the World with the highest tax pressure (Denmark). And I can tell you for a fact that I hear this type of argument again and again. We must regulate peoples behaviour because the enjoy __insert your favourite public good__.
First they came for the smokers,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a smoker.
Then they came for the obese,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't obese.
Then they came for the hedonists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a hedonist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
And I guess future combat aircraft won't even have pilots onboard.
Agent Smith: Never send a human to do a machine's job.
What about Japan and (West) Germany in WW2? They are clear examples of democracy being forced upon countries. And they are clear examples of how to do nation building (Japan more so than Germany since Germany already had a short democratic history).
The United States has never acceded the St Petersburg Declaration (see your own link)
"...but don't these violate the Hague Convention on "exploding bullets"?"
I do not believe that is the case. The relevant article in the Hague Convention states:
"The Contracting Parties agree to abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core, or is pierced with incisions.
The present Declaration is only binding for the Contracting Powers in the case of a war between two or more of them.
It shall cease to be binding from the time when, in a war between the Contracting Parties, one of the belligerents is joined by a non-Contracting Power."
So it describes projectiles that are meant to penetrate into the body. Which I assume is not the case for the XM-25. And it requires that all parties in a given war are signatories to the convention. Otherwise it does not apply. So against Taleban or Al-Qaeda the use of such a weapon is lawful (Afghanistan has not signed the relevant convention btw. so in Afghanistan it is void under alle circumstances).
A) it is assuming that we will always have a technological breakthrough at the right moment to allow the doubling of computing power every 18 months. Maybe this is the case, but it's still a big assumption.
That is mainly a question of timing. The main point being that we will have computational power in a relatively near (~50 years) future to make a computer which has computational capabilities exceeding that of the human brain.
B) He assumes if we put enough cyber neurons together in a neural net you will develop intelligence and conscience. This may be the case, and it will be interesting to see, but I don't think you can take it for granted.
I believe that you can. If you simulate the processes of the brain the simulation will act as a brain.
C) I think he also assumes that having such massive massive amounts of computing power will solve all our problems. Has he heard of exponential-time problems, or NP-Completeness
I don't believe he assumes that. But it would of course solve a lot of our problems. And create a lot of new problems.
Debian is clearly the company kindest to my packages although they break them once in a while.
Regulation and red tape is seriously hampering the space program. We need to cut back on that. Unfortunately that won't happen until pigs fly.
First wave (oh no, they killed it)
"There will be a few growing pains, but once APIs get straightened out and programmers get used to it (which shouldn't take too long for the ones writing HPC code), this is going to be a huge win for scientific computing."
I am working on HPC (numerical modelling). At our institute we are seriously considering using GPU's for our next generation development. From my viewpoint the biggest problem is that the abstraction layers on top of the GPU's are not widely implemented and that they are somewhat more complicated than traditional parallellization frameworks. But hopefully this will change in a few years.
It's one thing I'm pissed off at a lot of environuts for, they have a short sighted view that is just black and white. We don't have any commercial reactors here in Australia, mainly because of the environut movements. If they wanted to do good they'd stop the crap and find out what's real and what's not.
On the other hand you have a lot of coal (85% of the electricity production plus exports). And coal by a conservative estimate kills 3 or 4 times the number of people who died due to Chernobyl each year!
Here is an estimate of the number of people whose health is affected by coal based energy production in the USA:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/
So in my view the environmentalists are in fact responsible for millions of deaths due to their insistence on yet non-viable clean energy sources and their refusal of nuclear energy.
And out of a BBC budget of more than 7 billion USD per year the savings could have been in the order of 0.0006% on the budget.
This discussion is way out of proportions. If we should be discussing government waste we could easily find an example involving more than one man years work.
My experience during an extended visit to a chinese company in China was that access to basic web pages that I needed for my work was filtered. Try for example accessing Google Groups from China.
From your previous posts my guess is that you are from Australia. In Australia 29% of the population aged 25-64 have a tertiary education compared with 37% in USA:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_att_ter-education-educational-attainment-tertiary
So it does seem that your government do in fact think that education is less important than people in the US believes.
Just because government is not funding something does not mean that it is less valued in a country. Just that the electorate prefers a (generally more efficient) market based solution to the problem.
"You paid for it just like the rest of us. The only difference is that your payment came (and comes) in the form of taxes, rather than student loans (or whatever else)."
No that is not the only difference. Most western countries such as mine (Denmark) have a progressive income tax. This means that people taking educations that result in a large productivity are actually paying for the ones taking educations that result in lower wages (but maybe more personal satisfaction). In effect this means that these countries are not getting the optimal utility of the education since effectively less productive educations are subsidized. And the time it takes for students to finish their degrees is also in general higher for the same reasons (time spent drinking beer at the dorm is subsidized through free education and high taxes).
And government sponsored education systems are producing less people with tertiary education than in US:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_att_ter-education-educational-attainment-tertiary
"I'd also like to point out, just for the sake of inflammatory goodness on the interwebs, that America is entirely green and homogenous, thus scientifically proving that we are the best at gravity as well as everything else."
Please take a look at central Africa and tell me again that green and homogenous is a sign that you are best at gravity as well as everything else;-)
I was just wondering whether athletes take gravity into account when trying to break World records. The best place to do athletics would then be near the Equator since the gravity is lower there by 0.5% compared with the poles. And that might give a centimeter or so in high jump and more in pole vault or long jump compared with mid-latitudes (potential energy and thus achieved height is a linear function of gravity near the Earth surface, meaning that a 0.5% drop in gravity means a 0.5% increase in height). The height above sea level is not really significant in this regard (but is probably due to other factors, mainly air density and temperature). So maybe Columbia would be a good place to break World records?
Assuming World records must be accomplished at the surface of the Earth.
They definitely have a large demographic momentum (many young people) but the total fertility rates (TFR) are in free fall in some of the countries. Here are some current numbers from the CIA World Factbook:
Western Sahara: 4.37 (only ~500.000 inhabitants)
Libya: 3.01
Morocco: 2.23
Algeria: 1.76
Tunisia: 1.71
As you can see the largest North African countries are now barely reproducing (although their populations will continue to grow for a generation or so due to the shape of their population pyramids). Their population booms are essentially over and they seem to be heading for TFR's below that of the USA.
So my guess is that the main source of instability in those regions will in fact be immigration from Central Africa into these countries.
"The influx of money should raise the standard of living those countries and it might encourage a different sort of economic growth than what we've seen in economies fueled by petrodollars."
It will probably raise the standard of living. But solar energy shares many characteristics with socalled point resources (oil, gold, diamonds and so on).
Most importantly the income from point sources are easily monopolized by the ruler since the income is not so much a result of labour* as it is of (militarily) controlling the area in which the source is located. This effectively gives the ruler a solid power base and scientific research has shown that in countries with large point resources democratization and human development is halted or at least slowed considerably compared with countries without point resources.
Solar power is probably not as bad as oil. But I doubt that it will lead to democratization of said countries. But it will definitely lead to a stronger central government.
"Guess what happened then, we turned into a stable democratic society. It stands to reason that any society below a certain wealth/developmental level will tend towards fundamentalism of various kinds and as wealth and developmental level increase in society freedoms starts to emerge."
That is not true. It has been shown that oil and other point resources do in fact hinder democratic development (in less developed countries):
http://www.jstor.org/pss/25054153
(see abstract at bottom of page)
Furthermore the relationship between wealth and freedom has casaulity pointing in both directions. Economic freedom and property rights are definitely driving wealth. So by providing a framework for that you can of course increase the (pluralistic, not the oil type) economical growth and thus the democratization rate. A good example: Hong Kong.