You are stating these things as though they are self-evident,
If it is not self-evident that taking money away from people because you think they have too much of it is wrong, then there is no further possible discussion. Taxes are a necessary evil, which is only offset by the goal of the common good. That means you have to know what the use will be. A tax just to "ease the wealth disparity" is theft.
And, where did you or I or anyone define what kind of taxation we're talking about?
It's in TFS, and I quoted the reason being given. If you cannot be bothered to read even that little about it, please stop wasting your time trying to argue about it.
Why should your tax dollars educate people on the other side of the country? For the same reason that your tax dollars should fund defensive actions by the military on the other side of the country.
Wrong. The military is a federal agency. Basic education is a local system. Why should someone living in California who has "too much money" be taxed to pay for education in New York when the people in New York won't pay for it? The people in New York have representation in the local school system operation by electing the school board, and by voting on any local tax levies to fund that operation -- or not fund it in some cases. The person in California has no such representation there. Taxation without representation. Remember that phrase?
What tax policy best rewards and incentivizes work and innovation?
That's easy. Don't punish those who work and innovate by deciding they don't need the money they earn by doing so and then taking it away from them just because they have it. While there are many incentives in life, money is a very common and effective one for most people.
arbitrary moral judgments, false analogies, and emotional appeals.
"You have too much money." "We're letting people die." "It's the price you pay for being able to buy things." Like those, you mean?
simply increasing the income of the poor won't create those jobs
Of course it will.
You cut a phrase out of context and then nailed the straw man you erected really well. How does giving money to someone who has little create a job in a company that does not exist and does not produce the thing that the investment would have funded the creation of? It may or may not create jobs in existing services, but not very many of them. Investing in new technology, a risky thing to do, will definitely create jobs.
Who is going to buy those new products the benevolent investor class has deigned to 'create'?
Who is going to buy products that aren't created yet? You seem to think investing should be some benevolent process, and it is not. It never will be. If the people who risk their money, and often lose it, don't get paid back, they aren't going to invest. Someone who has money didn't get that money by throwing it into the wind and hoping he'd get something back, you know.
If the poor have money to spend, are you saying folks won't dream up new widgets to sell them?
You've taken the money from the investors who would fund the creation, so "dreaming up" new products results in dreams and not actual products.
There's a lot more to health care than the emergency room, and we'd save money if we handled it more intelligently.
Of course we would. But that involves managing services better, not just taking money away from people who you think have too much and giving it to people who don't have it.
Redistribution of wealth doesn't solve problems, it only masks the real causes.
No. You can't decide that taxation is theft when it is for something you agree with, and that it isn't theft when it is for something you don't.
Yes, I certainly can. The purpose of the tax is critical in determining if it is a valid tax, and if it is invalid then it is theft. You can't get away with the idea that "no tax is a bad tax", or the opposite "every tax is a good tax". That's how we get so many taxes -- people who have never met a tax they didn't like.
When the purpose is solely to take money from some people to give it to others, it is a bad tax, and it is theft. There is no justification for that kind of tax.
Taxation is the price you pay to own property,
We're not talking about a property tax.
buy goods,
We're not talking about a sales tax, and in any case, a "sales tax" is not the justification for being able to buy things. I get to buy all kinds of things without paying a sales tax. Nobody has EVER said that a sales tax is necessary to give anyone the right to buy something.
and earn an income in a specific society.
How about the price for being able to breathe? You forgot that excuse.
No, it doesn't. The attitude isn't "you don't need your money".
That is EXACTLY the excuse being presented for over-taxing the rich. "You don't need that much money" is a statement that they don't need all of their money, so THAT part of their money belongs to the state, to be given to other people.
The attitude is "let's use our elected representatives to create an economic policy that is optimal".
Social engineering is yet another false purpose for taxation. Paying for common services, yes. Giving it to people because you think they deserve to have more is not.
Our system is allowing people to die because they don't have money,
Hyperbole much?
while other people are using excess money to plate their bathrooms in gold,
That's yet another example of "you don't need your money". Taking it away from them because you think they have too much so you can give it to someone else is not a valid reason for taxation. Remember, this is about taxation to ease the disparity of wealth, not to provide healthcare or education. It's to take money away from some people who YOU think shouldn't have it to give it to people YOU think should have more.
In fact, I explicitly said that we should create our policy to enable meritocracy to the greatest extent possible.
No, you're quite ready to take money from the people who earn it because you don't think they deserve it. That's not enabling meritocracy, that's punishing it.
People don't have equal access to education. If you disagree, then let's pick the school your kids attend by random lottery.
School funding is a local issue. If your local community chooses not to fund schools well, well, take it up with them. Why should people who live on the other side of the country pay for educating YOUR children if YOU vote down any and all school tax levies that would pay for more things? In any case, funding it not the only reason some schools excel. In fact, some schools do very well on a lot less money than others, and it is often correlated to number of staff and overhead more than just dollars per student. But again, we're not talking about a tax to fund schools, it's to "ease wealth disparity".
Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy.
Yes, and? Bills take place after the care is provided. I've yet to see a hospital come take back the kidney they stitched into someone because the bill wasn't paid. I have heard about hospitals writing off bills for people who cannot pay.
It's not like this is going to significantly weaken their product in any way.
If someone runs an online comment board and chooses to use the Google API to detect negative comments for removal, then hard-coding the answer of "perfectly fine" when a comment refers to gays or Jews is going to fail miserably.
It will also be a lie, but programming computers to lie to us is apparently ok as long as the lies are for "good reasons".
But I'm not gay, nor a jew, so I'm not sure how they feel about such things.
If I were a gay using a comment forum that told me that negative comments were not allowed and would be removed, I'd be a bit concerned, I think, to find that comments like "that's so gay" or worse were not being removed at all. Does that mean the board operator doesn't think insulting gays is a problem?
Hopefully, someday, we'll find an appropriate middle ground that's acceptable to all.
I would think that proper computer identification of objectionable statements as such would be a good ground to be on, and that any "middle ground" would be less desired.
When it is for the explicit purpose of redistribution of wealth, yes it is. "Ease the disparity of wealth" is how this article puts it, but that's what it is.
Also, when taxes are used for social engineering purposes, it is theft.
Only when taxes are used for the intended purpose for taxes to begin with (to fund the needs as outlined in the Constitution, for US taxes) are they not equivalent to theft by threat of force.
It's pretty simple to see that you rectify this imbalance by removing points where you don't really need them
Deciding who needs points and who doesn't is what results in theft by taxation. It is class envy that propels this "you don't need your money" attitude.
Let's get rid of this ridiculous concept that money is the most sacred thing in life,
The concept you are trying to get rid of is rewarding those who take risks and creating the concept that we reward existence.
As one poster accidentally pointed out, the "rich" are simply hoarding their money "in money making investments". Those investments are things like companies that hire people to do things, and the best money making investments come from companies that are doing new things; things which aren't currently in demand and aren't available, so simply increasing the income of the poor won't create those jobs.
We have the resources as a society for all people to have access to decent health care and education
We've had "universal education" for a very long time. I doubt you will find anyone still alive who wasn't a participant, unless it was voluntary. As for health care, hospitals routinely deal with the uninsured when they walk in the door.
By the way, when was the last time you donated to any of the charity health care organizations? Just asking.
only a rigid ideological attachment to an arbitrary government construct
Yeah, that constitutional republic thing is getting so long in the tooth, we need something better.
I was down for having a constructive conversation around machine learning and AI until you pulled the "you're one of those people" piece.
Because I followed your analogy that led to the conclusion that you were saying that the computer has to be programmed to return the wrong answer. I was pointing out that you were not alone. That's all.
I never suggested teaching a computer to accept my own values,
You created an analogy in which we would clearly be instructing the child in the social beliefs that we as parents hold, which implied that the same thing should be done when a computer doesn't learn from the language it hears what we think it should believe. That's a natural result of the analogy. If we need to, and would, teach a child how to parse comments about "gay", then it seems we need to, and would, teach a computer doing the same thing.
in fact I was suggesting it's not the road they're looking to go down.
Well, you didn't say that it should be taught the "right answer", so I do apologize for taking that message away from your comment. You did not, however, suggest that they shouldn't do this training as we would a child learning the language. You gave a reason why it came to that conclusion, but didn't didn't say we shouldn't do something to stop it, as we would were our children to come to that conclusion.
Fuck off.
Wow. I wonder how the Google API would rate this as a positive comment?
I completely understand. My point was that if a child heard the word "gay" used in a negative connotation growing up, they'd believe it was a negative word. Being gay would be bad in their mind. That's exactly what has happened here.
Then you did not "completely understand" at all. "Being gay" is not "bad" in the "mind" of the Google language processor. The language processor is correctly reporting that what SOMEONE ELSE said was a negative statement, and part of that evaluation was that it used "gay" in a certain way. That evaluation is not because the computer has decided that being gay is bad, just that it has examined a lot of language as spoken and written by humans and knows that HUMANS probably mean it that way.
The difference is like this: I can know that having blond hair isn't a bad thing, but I can also identify a blond joke as using that characteristic in a negative way. Or put another way, I don't care who is or isn't gay, but if you ask me if the sentence "gays must die" was positive or negative about "gay" I'd know the correct answer. I'd even be able to pick that same answer for something much more innocuous like "that's so gay".
They simply let it loose to learn on its own, rather than being instructive about how it learns and what is good or bad.
In other words, you are another one of the people who thinks that the computer should be taught to lie to you because you don't want to hear that someone might have said something in a negative way about someone else. You want to teach the computer YOUR values about the world, instead of letting it tell you what it has detected in language used by other people. Why bother asking the question if you are going to program it to tell you the answer you want to hear anyway?
they don't have a reference, and so they come to believe those views are the standard.
You do understand, I hope, the difference between someone saying that "being gay is bad" and someone else saying "that sentence uses the word 'gay' in a negative way"? The child growing up in a leaderless space will become the former. The Google language processor is the latter.
The Google language processor should return the correct result, not the result we want it to return based on our personal views of something. "Did the speaker of the words being processed mean something positively or negatively" has an answer that is completely independent of our feelings about the subject.
and very often, perhaps much more often than not, when the word is used it's being used by a bigot,
You used the word three times, and included it in a quote once more.
Google's got a complex linguistic and cognitive problem there that may be beyond current solution power.
I think it is understanding the language very well. "The language" is a mean of all the users, not just the politically correct ones. As you point out, when the term "gay" appears in a sentence, it is "more often than not" in a negative connotation. The fact that a language processor that has been trained on "the language" would return a negative connotation value for a sentence constructed a certain way using certain words means it is getting the answer RIGHT, not WRONG.
You can't ignore the language that you don't like when you try to understand what was said. You ignore it when YOU listen, but if you ask a computer to tell you what is being written, it is wrong to have it figuratively stick its fingers in its ears and go "nanner nanner boo boo I'm not listening to you", and then return the answer that you want to hear instead of the right one.
The big mistake that Google made is not putting a politically correct filter on their API to make sure controversial words had a neutral value, even if that wasn't really the case.
It is a sad state of affairs when we have to program our computers to lie to us because we can't handle the truth. Removing the existing and actual negative connotations to the use of certain words in certain sentences so that language processing will tell us that the statements made specifically with negative connotations as a goal are "neutral"? Well, that's silly.
The mistake that Google is making is not simply saying "this is where the language takes us, get over it."
wherein highly limited "AI" algorithms simply regurgitates the training material it was fed without any deep or sophisticated understanding.
If even an unsophisticated look at human language shows us that certain ways of speaking are inherently negative, the solution is to program the computer to return a different answer?
That brings up a point I was going to raise: it's odd that this algorithm would be summative of values for individual words
TFS tells us that it evaluates sentences, not just words.
But this result should be no surprise. There are so many references to both that even the speaker doesn't realize are derogatory that it would be odd to expect a program not to come to that conclusion when processing automatically.
Your example is very very close to one of them. "You're so gay" is rarely a compliment, but I was originally thinking of the sentence "that's so gay". Nobody in modern language talks about people being gay unless they mean the modern usage. Everyone snickers when they hear old songs that use the word in the old meaning. And "that's so gay", while it could be parsed using the old meaning to be a positive, is never ever used that way.
But it's even more. Every time someone uses being gay as an example of why someone could be blackmailed, or as a recent example, "what if NFL players were ordered to have gay sex...", they are relying on a negative connotation to make their point.
Remember when politicians were caught trolling for "gay sex" in restrooms? Oh my, this is so bad. But wait... is gay sex bad? If not...
Google's language processor picked up on that. Whooda thunk? It will actually take human intervention to bias the process AWAY from understanding what people mean when they say certain things so that the computer won't appear to be holding the opinions and attitudes that the input was actually representing. That makes the results WRONGer than letting it tell us what our language is telling us.
It's for scanning passports for Real ID checkins on international flights.
The United app on my phone or tablet is not going to be used to scan anything, much less my passport. Don't be stupid. Neither TSA nor United need to use my phone to scan their documents, they have their own scanners. Why would they trust a device that I control to do such things in the first place?
Sheesh.
I actually asked about it a long time ago. It's intended for social media so I can show everyone how I am smiling during a United flight.
Nice. I almost never go out my backdoor, so any package they deliver there would sit in the cold rain, slowly decomposing.
OR they leave this neat little high tech slip of paper detailing the precise GPS location I can pick up box with slip & ID
After I complained about UPS prying open a locked screen door to hide two packages (the second was a replacement for the first, which I didn't know was there because UPS HID IT FROM ME), they left me a delivery notice for the next "package". That "package" was the size of a CD mailer (square envelope), and the pickup point was ten miles out of town, open during business hours.
It didn't have a GPS location on the slip. How many people would understand how to use that? It had a street address.
I think the next step for Amazon will be to want access to the fridge to put things away.
That is already part of the service if you are buying perishable items through them. It isn't "the next step".
Does your UPS store have a freezer/fridge to store your Amazon deliveries?
To those who post things like "no way", ok, we get it. Not every service that every company might provide is something you'd want to use. That doesn't mean there aren't people who will want this, and most of them don't care that you don't. In fact, I'm guessing that the only person who really cares that you don't want this service is... you.
I haven't flown in decades, but my first guess involves using the device's rear-facing camera to scan 2D barcodes printed on boarding passes and the like.
It's the United app. They know what boarding passes I have, and my tablet is not used to scan my boarding pass either for TSA or when I get on the plane. There are dedicated scanners at those check points.
And no, displaying a QR code on a phone or tablet to be scanned by one of those devices does not require "camera" permissions on the display device.
tell it to F off, as there should be no reason for it to have access to those.
And then some apps will tell you to F off, they aren't going to run. I have a Galaxy Tab, and the "Galaxy Apps" demands access to "phone" and "contacts". It has no need to know my contacts, and it isn't a phone so it doesn't need 'phone'. If I don't give it those permissions, it just closes.
I have no idea what services "galaxy apps" would provide to me because of that. If Samsung is trying to differentiate its product by giving me wonderful free apps that do great things, then it should know it is accomplishing just the opposite.
Give an app permission to use your camera and it can use your camera. Who knew?
Yeah. This is a d'oh story. Same thing goes for Android.
The problem comes when sloppy or malicious programmers write code that wants too many permissions. I am using Mobisytems OfficeSuite and every time I try to look at a document I get the really scary warning that "this app will not work properly" unless Google Play is given permission to access my phone, camera, and occasionally a couple of other things. Sorry? You don't need to access my camera so I can read a document, and it ISN'T A PHONE. Oh, "body sensors" is another mandatory permission for opening an Excel spreadsheet.
Same thing for the United Airlines app. It demands "camera". Why? So you can get pictures of me being dragged off the airplane without me knowing about it?
How on earth you could connect longer beaks with genes for beak length, Mr Holmes!
Every bird had genes for beak length. Some have genes for short beaks, some have genes for long beaks.
What appears to be missing is any information that would exclude natural causes for longer beaks in the UK and shorter in The Netherlands. It is almost certain that there are many times as many birds in both places who eat from "the wild" and not from "bird feeders", so the evolutionary pressure to develop longer beaks may have nothing at all to do with feeders to begin with.
Decimation of the Korean economy would be what happens if we united South Korea with North Korea as one psychotic dictatorship.
I was talking about decimation of the SOUTH Korean economy, and it will happen if you combine by force the north and south with any form of government. Well, ok, decimation is actually "reduce by 1/10th", so cutting the south's economy in half would be much worse than decimation.
at some point North Korea has to accept that it has no moral right to exist
You should go on the road with that comedy routine. You're amazingly funny.
allowing Korea to unify again.
Why in God's name would the south want to absorb a non-functional society like the north, destroying their economy in the process? Do you imagine that the south has the money to rebuild the north? Again, take it on the road, you'll make a million from ROTFL audiences.
And you wonder why NK wants nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivering them.
No, I don't wonder, and I didn't say I did. I said that they didn't keep their previous promises after being bought off, so why would buying them off again result in anything different?
And how big a war will it take to make the South Koreans bend over and accept that decimation of their economy? Or do we just do it by fiat and damn the people involved?
You know, there's a lot of homeless people in many large cities (and small). We could solve this problem by forcing all homeowners to adopt and house one or two (or a family, if they are homeless, to keep from splitting them up). How many North Koreans will each South Korean be forced to let move in so the wealth can be shared? You're ready to force the South to essentially do that, so I'd like to know how many homeless you have living with you?
Yet TFA claims that General Goldfein is asking his staff to come up with ways to use nukes in combat. To me that sounds very much like the US Joint Chiefs are preparing contingency plans for pre-emptive strikes...
I guess the concept that "combat" would FOLLOW a first strike by NK is beyond comprehension. I guess the only proper response if the US is attacked is for us to surrender. Maybe pay reparations to the attacker for the cost of his attack? My God, there couldn't be COMBAT after we get attacked, that would be incontheivable.
Problem is, there is a long standing dictum "You can bomb it, shell it until the rubble bounces, but you don't control it until you stick a kid with a rifle on it."
You assume we would want to control NK after dropping a couple of tactical nukes on it.
Tactically, this is shaping up to be a bigger version of Vietnam and the US had to worry back then about the Soviet Union and The Peoples Republic of China
The difference is that NV didn't lob a nuke at US soil, and that's the event that would trigger our response now. Neither Russia nor China would want an active nuclear NK and they wouldn't be active supporters.
Even when you set aside the spectre of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against North Korea and the immediate fall out
You mean like one of those unlikely contingencies you talked about before?
But he's dumb enough, and vainglorious enough, to provoke such a war just to buff his image.
Oh, knock it off. This kinds of imaginative fiction is getting really tiring. Is there no limit to the kinds of nonsense you'll hypothesize based on your hate for this guy? What would you have said to someone who made this kind of stuff up about Obama?
This is in affect the US invading each of these countries.
You realize that in WWII US troops were in many countries other than Germany fighting the war. If China lets the situation get to the point that NK lobs a nuke to start a war, then they are going to be interested in stopping it, not proliferating.
We also prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the US is the ONLY country in the world that WILL use Nuclear Weapons.
Other than NK, whose nukes started the response. And all those other countries that everyone here is claiming will start lobbing nukes at us. Lots of countries would be proving they WILL use them, yes? That's why we cannot respond, right?
What DO you do if your neighbor starts lobbing missiles at you? Sit back and say "please stop that. Oh, that's not nice. We're very angry with you!"
Slashdot Mirror
You are stating these things as though they are self-evident,
If it is not self-evident that taking money away from people because you think they have too much of it is wrong, then there is no further possible discussion. Taxes are a necessary evil, which is only offset by the goal of the common good. That means you have to know what the use will be. A tax just to "ease the wealth disparity" is theft.
And, where did you or I or anyone define what kind of taxation we're talking about?
It's in TFS, and I quoted the reason being given. If you cannot be bothered to read even that little about it, please stop wasting your time trying to argue about it.
Why should your tax dollars educate people on the other side of the country? For the same reason that your tax dollars should fund defensive actions by the military on the other side of the country.
Wrong. The military is a federal agency. Basic education is a local system. Why should someone living in California who has "too much money" be taxed to pay for education in New York when the people in New York won't pay for it? The people in New York have representation in the local school system operation by electing the school board, and by voting on any local tax levies to fund that operation -- or not fund it in some cases. The person in California has no such representation there. Taxation without representation. Remember that phrase?
What tax policy best rewards and incentivizes work and innovation?
That's easy. Don't punish those who work and innovate by deciding they don't need the money they earn by doing so and then taking it away from them just because they have it. While there are many incentives in life, money is a very common and effective one for most people.
arbitrary moral judgments, false analogies, and emotional appeals.
"You have too much money." "We're letting people die." "It's the price you pay for being able to buy things." Like those, you mean?
simply increasing the income of the poor won't create those jobs
Of course it will.
You cut a phrase out of context and then nailed the straw man you erected really well. How does giving money to someone who has little create a job in a company that does not exist and does not produce the thing that the investment would have funded the creation of? It may or may not create jobs in existing services, but not very many of them. Investing in new technology, a risky thing to do, will definitely create jobs.
Who is going to buy those new products the benevolent investor class has deigned to 'create'?
Who is going to buy products that aren't created yet? You seem to think investing should be some benevolent process, and it is not. It never will be. If the people who risk their money, and often lose it, don't get paid back, they aren't going to invest. Someone who has money didn't get that money by throwing it into the wind and hoping he'd get something back, you know.
If the poor have money to spend, are you saying folks won't dream up new widgets to sell them?
You've taken the money from the investors who would fund the creation, so "dreaming up" new products results in dreams and not actual products.
There's a lot more to health care than the emergency room, and we'd save money if we handled it more intelligently.
Of course we would. But that involves managing services better, not just taking money away from people who you think have too much and giving it to people who don't have it.
Redistribution of wealth doesn't solve problems, it only masks the real causes.
No. You can't decide that taxation is theft when it is for something you agree with, and that it isn't theft when it is for something you don't.
Yes, I certainly can. The purpose of the tax is critical in determining if it is a valid tax, and if it is invalid then it is theft. You can't get away with the idea that "no tax is a bad tax", or the opposite "every tax is a good tax". That's how we get so many taxes -- people who have never met a tax they didn't like.
When the purpose is solely to take money from some people to give it to others, it is a bad tax, and it is theft. There is no justification for that kind of tax.
Taxation is the price you pay to own property,
We're not talking about a property tax.
buy goods,
We're not talking about a sales tax, and in any case, a "sales tax" is not the justification for being able to buy things. I get to buy all kinds of things without paying a sales tax. Nobody has EVER said that a sales tax is necessary to give anyone the right to buy something.
and earn an income in a specific society.
How about the price for being able to breathe? You forgot that excuse.
No, it doesn't. The attitude isn't "you don't need your money".
That is EXACTLY the excuse being presented for over-taxing the rich. "You don't need that much money" is a statement that they don't need all of their money, so THAT part of their money belongs to the state, to be given to other people.
The attitude is "let's use our elected representatives to create an economic policy that is optimal".
Social engineering is yet another false purpose for taxation. Paying for common services, yes. Giving it to people because you think they deserve to have more is not.
Our system is allowing people to die because they don't have money,
Hyperbole much?
while other people are using excess money to plate their bathrooms in gold,
That's yet another example of "you don't need your money". Taking it away from them because you think they have too much so you can give it to someone else is not a valid reason for taxation. Remember, this is about taxation to ease the disparity of wealth, not to provide healthcare or education. It's to take money away from some people who YOU think shouldn't have it to give it to people YOU think should have more.
In fact, I explicitly said that we should create our policy to enable meritocracy to the greatest extent possible.
No, you're quite ready to take money from the people who earn it because you don't think they deserve it. That's not enabling meritocracy, that's punishing it.
People don't have equal access to education. If you disagree, then let's pick the school your kids attend by random lottery.
School funding is a local issue. If your local community chooses not to fund schools well, well, take it up with them. Why should people who live on the other side of the country pay for educating YOUR children if YOU vote down any and all school tax levies that would pay for more things? In any case, funding it not the only reason some schools excel. In fact, some schools do very well on a lot less money than others, and it is often correlated to number of staff and overhead more than just dollars per student. But again, we're not talking about a tax to fund schools, it's to "ease wealth disparity".
Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy.
Yes, and? Bills take place after the care is provided. I've yet to see a hospital come take back the kidney they stitched into someone because the bill wasn't paid. I have heard about hospitals writing off bills for people who cannot pay.
It's not much, but I donate $50 a month to Living
It's not like this is going to significantly weaken their product in any way.
If someone runs an online comment board and chooses to use the Google API to detect negative comments for removal, then hard-coding the answer of "perfectly fine" when a comment refers to gays or Jews is going to fail miserably.
It will also be a lie, but programming computers to lie to us is apparently ok as long as the lies are for "good reasons".
But I'm not gay, nor a jew, so I'm not sure how they feel about such things.
If I were a gay using a comment forum that told me that negative comments were not allowed and would be removed, I'd be a bit concerned, I think, to find that comments like "that's so gay" or worse were not being removed at all. Does that mean the board operator doesn't think insulting gays is a problem?
Hopefully, someday, we'll find an appropriate middle ground that's acceptable to all.
I would think that proper computer identification of objectionable statements as such would be a good ground to be on, and that any "middle ground" would be less desired.
Taxation is not theft.
When it is for the explicit purpose of redistribution of wealth, yes it is. "Ease the disparity of wealth" is how this article puts it, but that's what it is.
Also, when taxes are used for social engineering purposes, it is theft.
Only when taxes are used for the intended purpose for taxes to begin with (to fund the needs as outlined in the Constitution, for US taxes) are they not equivalent to theft by threat of force.
It's pretty simple to see that you rectify this imbalance by removing points where you don't really need them
Deciding who needs points and who doesn't is what results in theft by taxation. It is class envy that propels this "you don't need your money" attitude.
Let's get rid of this ridiculous concept that money is the most sacred thing in life,
The concept you are trying to get rid of is rewarding those who take risks and creating the concept that we reward existence.
As one poster accidentally pointed out, the "rich" are simply hoarding their money "in money making investments". Those investments are things like companies that hire people to do things, and the best money making investments come from companies that are doing new things; things which aren't currently in demand and aren't available, so simply increasing the income of the poor won't create those jobs.
We have the resources as a society for all people to have access to decent health care and education
We've had "universal education" for a very long time. I doubt you will find anyone still alive who wasn't a participant, unless it was voluntary. As for health care, hospitals routinely deal with the uninsured when they walk in the door.
By the way, when was the last time you donated to any of the charity health care organizations? Just asking.
only a rigid ideological attachment to an arbitrary government construct
Yeah, that constitutional republic thing is getting so long in the tooth, we need something better.
I was down for having a constructive conversation around machine learning and AI until you pulled the "you're one of those people" piece.
Because I followed your analogy that led to the conclusion that you were saying that the computer has to be programmed to return the wrong answer. I was pointing out that you were not alone. That's all.
I never suggested teaching a computer to accept my own values,
You created an analogy in which we would clearly be instructing the child in the social beliefs that we as parents hold, which implied that the same thing should be done when a computer doesn't learn from the language it hears what we think it should believe. That's a natural result of the analogy. If we need to, and would, teach a child how to parse comments about "gay", then it seems we need to, and would, teach a computer doing the same thing.
in fact I was suggesting it's not the road they're looking to go down.
Well, you didn't say that it should be taught the "right answer", so I do apologize for taking that message away from your comment. You did not, however, suggest that they shouldn't do this training as we would a child learning the language. You gave a reason why it came to that conclusion, but didn't didn't say we shouldn't do something to stop it, as we would were our children to come to that conclusion.
Fuck off.
Wow. I wonder how the Google API would rate this as a positive comment?
I completely understand. My point was that if a child heard the word "gay" used in a negative connotation growing up, they'd believe it was a negative word. Being gay would be bad in their mind. That's exactly what has happened here.
Then you did not "completely understand" at all. "Being gay" is not "bad" in the "mind" of the Google language processor. The language processor is correctly reporting that what SOMEONE ELSE said was a negative statement, and part of that evaluation was that it used "gay" in a certain way. That evaluation is not because the computer has decided that being gay is bad, just that it has examined a lot of language as spoken and written by humans and knows that HUMANS probably mean it that way.
The difference is like this: I can know that having blond hair isn't a bad thing, but I can also identify a blond joke as using that characteristic in a negative way. Or put another way, I don't care who is or isn't gay, but if you ask me if the sentence "gays must die" was positive or negative about "gay" I'd know the correct answer. I'd even be able to pick that same answer for something much more innocuous like "that's so gay".
They simply let it loose to learn on its own, rather than being instructive about how it learns and what is good or bad.
In other words, you are another one of the people who thinks that the computer should be taught to lie to you because you don't want to hear that someone might have said something in a negative way about someone else. You want to teach the computer YOUR values about the world, instead of letting it tell you what it has detected in language used by other people. Why bother asking the question if you are going to program it to tell you the answer you want to hear anyway?
they don't have a reference, and so they come to believe those views are the standard.
You do understand, I hope, the difference between someone saying that "being gay is bad" and someone else saying "that sentence uses the word 'gay' in a negative way"? The child growing up in a leaderless space will become the former. The Google language processor is the latter.
The Google language processor should return the correct result, not the result we want it to return based on our personal views of something. "Did the speaker of the words being processed mean something positively or negatively" has an answer that is completely independent of our feelings about the subject.
and very often, perhaps much more often than not, when the word is used it's being used by a bigot,
You used the word three times, and included it in a quote once more.
Google's got a complex linguistic and cognitive problem there that may be beyond current solution power.
I think it is understanding the language very well. "The language" is a mean of all the users, not just the politically correct ones. As you point out, when the term "gay" appears in a sentence, it is "more often than not" in a negative connotation. The fact that a language processor that has been trained on "the language" would return a negative connotation value for a sentence constructed a certain way using certain words means it is getting the answer RIGHT, not WRONG.
You can't ignore the language that you don't like when you try to understand what was said. You ignore it when YOU listen, but if you ask a computer to tell you what is being written, it is wrong to have it figuratively stick its fingers in its ears and go "nanner nanner boo boo I'm not listening to you", and then return the answer that you want to hear instead of the right one.
The big mistake that Google made is not putting a politically correct filter on their API to make sure controversial words had a neutral value, even if that wasn't really the case.
It is a sad state of affairs when we have to program our computers to lie to us because we can't handle the truth. Removing the existing and actual negative connotations to the use of certain words in certain sentences so that language processing will tell us that the statements made specifically with negative connotations as a goal are "neutral"? Well, that's silly.
The mistake that Google is making is not simply saying "this is where the language takes us, get over it."
wherein highly limited "AI" algorithms simply regurgitates the training material it was fed without any deep or sophisticated understanding.
If even an unsophisticated look at human language shows us that certain ways of speaking are inherently negative, the solution is to program the computer to return a different answer?
That brings up a point I was going to raise: it's odd that this algorithm would be summative of values for individual words
TFS tells us that it evaluates sentences, not just words.
But this result should be no surprise. There are so many references to both that even the speaker doesn't realize are derogatory that it would be odd to expect a program not to come to that conclusion when processing automatically.
Your example is very very close to one of them. "You're so gay" is rarely a compliment, but I was originally thinking of the sentence "that's so gay". Nobody in modern language talks about people being gay unless they mean the modern usage. Everyone snickers when they hear old songs that use the word in the old meaning. And "that's so gay", while it could be parsed using the old meaning to be a positive, is never ever used that way.
But it's even more. Every time someone uses being gay as an example of why someone could be blackmailed, or as a recent example, "what if NFL players were ordered to have gay sex...", they are relying on a negative connotation to make their point.
Remember when politicians were caught trolling for "gay sex" in restrooms? Oh my, this is so bad. But wait ... is gay sex bad? If not ...
Google's language processor picked up on that. Whooda thunk? It will actually take human intervention to bias the process AWAY from understanding what people mean when they say certain things so that the computer won't appear to be holding the opinions and attitudes that the input was actually representing. That makes the results WRONGer than letting it tell us what our language is telling us.
It's for scanning passports for Real ID checkins on international flights.
The United app on my phone or tablet is not going to be used to scan anything, much less my passport. Don't be stupid. Neither TSA nor United need to use my phone to scan their documents, they have their own scanners. Why would they trust a device that I control to do such things in the first place?
Sheesh.
I actually asked about it a long time ago. It's intended for social media so I can show everyone how I am smiling during a United flight.
Get off my lawn.
They leave it in my backyard at my backdoor.
Nice. I almost never go out my backdoor, so any package they deliver there would sit in the cold rain, slowly decomposing.
OR they leave this neat little high tech slip of paper detailing the precise GPS location I can pick up box with slip & ID
After I complained about UPS prying open a locked screen door to hide two packages (the second was a replacement for the first, which I didn't know was there because UPS HID IT FROM ME), they left me a delivery notice for the next "package". That "package" was the size of a CD mailer (square envelope), and the pickup point was ten miles out of town, open during business hours.
It didn't have a GPS location on the slip. How many people would understand how to use that? It had a street address.
I think the next step for Amazon will be to want access to the fridge to put things away.
That is already part of the service if you are buying perishable items through them. It isn't "the next step".
Does your UPS store have a freezer/fridge to store your Amazon deliveries?
To those who post things like "no way", ok, we get it. Not every service that every company might provide is something you'd want to use. That doesn't mean there aren't people who will want this, and most of them don't care that you don't. In fact, I'm guessing that the only person who really cares that you don't want this service is ... you.
I haven't flown in decades, but my first guess involves using the device's rear-facing camera to scan 2D barcodes printed on boarding passes and the like.
It's the United app. They know what boarding passes I have, and my tablet is not used to scan my boarding pass either for TSA or when I get on the plane. There are dedicated scanners at those check points.
And no, displaying a QR code on a phone or tablet to be scanned by one of those devices does not require "camera" permissions on the display device.
No valid purpose.
tell it to F off, as there should be no reason for it to have access to those.
And then some apps will tell you to F off, they aren't going to run. I have a Galaxy Tab, and the "Galaxy Apps" demands access to "phone" and "contacts". It has no need to know my contacts, and it isn't a phone so it doesn't need 'phone'. If I don't give it those permissions, it just closes.
I have no idea what services "galaxy apps" would provide to me because of that. If Samsung is trying to differentiate its product by giving me wonderful free apps that do great things, then it should know it is accomplishing just the opposite.
Give an app permission to use your camera and it can use your camera. Who knew?
Yeah. This is a d'oh story. Same thing goes for Android.
The problem comes when sloppy or malicious programmers write code that wants too many permissions. I am using Mobisytems OfficeSuite and every time I try to look at a document I get the really scary warning that "this app will not work properly" unless Google Play is given permission to access my phone, camera, and occasionally a couple of other things. Sorry? You don't need to access my camera so I can read a document, and it ISN'T A PHONE. Oh, "body sensors" is another mandatory permission for opening an Excel spreadsheet.
Same thing for the United Airlines app. It demands "camera". Why? So you can get pictures of me being dragged off the airplane without me knowing about it?
How on earth you could connect longer beaks with genes for beak length, Mr Holmes!
Every bird had genes for beak length. Some have genes for short beaks, some have genes for long beaks.
What appears to be missing is any information that would exclude natural causes for longer beaks in the UK and shorter in The Netherlands. It is almost certain that there are many times as many birds in both places who eat from "the wild" and not from "bird feeders", so the evolutionary pressure to develop longer beaks may have nothing at all to do with feeders to begin with.
Have you actually tried? Even with "Safe Search" turned off, you get oodles of pages of birds before anything else.
This statement is true no matter which way it goes, once you remember that "bird" is also slang for "chick".
Decimation of the Korean economy would be what happens if we united South Korea with North Korea as one psychotic dictatorship.
I was talking about decimation of the SOUTH Korean economy, and it will happen if you combine by force the north and south with any form of government. Well, ok, decimation is actually "reduce by 1/10th", so cutting the south's economy in half would be much worse than decimation.
at some point North Korea has to accept that it has no moral right to exist
You should go on the road with that comedy routine. You're amazingly funny.
allowing Korea to unify again.
Why in God's name would the south want to absorb a non-functional society like the north, destroying their economy in the process? Do you imagine that the south has the money to rebuild the north? Again, take it on the road, you'll make a million from ROTFL audiences.
And you wonder why NK wants nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivering them.
No, I don't wonder, and I didn't say I did. I said that they didn't keep their previous promises after being bought off, so why would buying them off again result in anything different?
A Korea unified in prosperity,
And how big a war will it take to make the South Koreans bend over and accept that decimation of their economy? Or do we just do it by fiat and damn the people involved?
You know, there's a lot of homeless people in many large cities (and small). We could solve this problem by forcing all homeowners to adopt and house one or two (or a family, if they are homeless, to keep from splitting them up). How many North Koreans will each South Korean be forced to let move in so the wealth can be shared? You're ready to force the South to essentially do that, so I'd like to know how many homeless you have living with you?
Yet TFA claims that General Goldfein is asking his staff to come up with ways to use nukes in combat. To me that sounds very much like the US Joint Chiefs are preparing contingency plans for pre-emptive strikes ...
I guess the concept that "combat" would FOLLOW a first strike by NK is beyond comprehension. I guess the only proper response if the US is attacked is for us to surrender. Maybe pay reparations to the attacker for the cost of his attack? My God, there couldn't be COMBAT after we get attacked, that would be incontheivable.
Problem is, there is a long standing dictum "You can bomb it, shell it until the rubble bounces, but you don't control it until you stick a kid with a rifle on it."
You assume we would want to control NK after dropping a couple of tactical nukes on it.
Tactically, this is shaping up to be a bigger version of Vietnam and the US had to worry back then about the Soviet Union and The Peoples Republic of China
The difference is that NV didn't lob a nuke at US soil, and that's the event that would trigger our response now. Neither Russia nor China would want an active nuclear NK and they wouldn't be active supporters.
Even when you set aside the spectre of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against North Korea and the immediate fall out
You mean like one of those unlikely contingencies you talked about before?
But he's dumb enough, and vainglorious enough, to provoke such a war just to buff his image.
Oh, knock it off. This kinds of imaginative fiction is getting really tiring. Is there no limit to the kinds of nonsense you'll hypothesize based on your hate for this guy? What would you have said to someone who made this kind of stuff up about Obama?
This is in affect the US invading each of these countries.
You realize that in WWII US troops were in many countries other than Germany fighting the war. If China lets the situation get to the point that NK lobs a nuke to start a war, then they are going to be interested in stopping it, not proliferating.
We also prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the US is the ONLY country in the world that WILL use Nuclear Weapons.
Other than NK, whose nukes started the response. And all those other countries that everyone here is claiming will start lobbing nukes at us. Lots of countries would be proving they WILL use them, yes? That's why we cannot respond, right?
What DO you do if your neighbor starts lobbing missiles at you? Sit back and say "please stop that. Oh, that's not nice. We're very angry with you!"