Having editors in Wikipedia is redundant. Anyone can edit a wikipedia article; therefore, anyone can be an editor. I think the idea of Wikipedia is radical egalitarianism. We can't have a class of titled users that have special priviliges that others don't.
I have thought that a signing system would be the most appropriate. Any text you create must be signed by you. You have the choice to sign off on any text you agree with. If any of your text is modified, you are somehow notified, and then you can in turn sign off on any of the edits made.
After a while, we have a large build-up of ratings for articles, and for authors and editors. The average wikipedia reader would then get an idea of the rating of the article and the reputation of the people behind it.
I think this would go hand-in-hand with multiple concurrent articles. For instance, on the article for Hitler, you would have several versions. You would have the main article, which most people agree with and sign off on. You would also have the white-supremacist version, which most people would disagree with, including me, but nontheless would have a number of adherents who would sign off, and still have a right to express their views. You would have more versions still -- perhaps the David Icke version, which, while still anti-Hitler, it would place Hitler in a long line of space-reptile rulers, so a lot of people who don't like Hitler would still disagree with the article.
How would you feel about having multiple concurrent texts for article headings? It seems to me that some of the problems from wikipedia is there are several legitimate groups that want to put their own spin on certain issues. Presently it seems that this is handled by some text such as "this issue is controversial" and then each side gets some kind of summary. Then we get into problems with whose opinion comes first, who gets the short shrift in the summary, who is made to look like a crackpot, etc.
What I'm proposing is a system where the user sees an interface like the disambiguation page, which offers different articles for each title, including a purportedly nuetral one. So for example, the abortion article would have 3 or more texts: a nuetral one, a pro-life, and a pro-choice.
"and think in the long run the Iraqi people (and by extension the rest of the Middle East) will be much better off with a participatory democracy than living under the heel of a thug."
Saddam is in his 70s. How mouch longer do you think he's going to run? I am not a Saddam supporter in any way, but is there less misery and death now for the Iraqi people than there would be under Saddam?
So my point is that if we were trying to get Iraq into a democracy, the time would have been when Saddam's health was failing ( which would be relatively soon in any case) or when he died and there was the ensuing power stuggle. Either way would have probably meant a lot less pain and suffering for the Iraqis.
"Did it ever cross your mind that
1) We gave WMDs to him in the past?
2) Other countries did too?"
Did it ever occur to you that WMD's have a shelf life? That these things don't last forever? That gases made in the 80s are not usable today? That, in order to have a WMD arsenal, you have to have an infrastructure to constantly renew your stocks? That to do so requires a large and ongoing project? That the weapons inspectors found no evidence of the large and ongiong WMD project needed to maintain a stockpile capable of threatening the US?
I think one of the main thrusts of US policy in the Middle East is to *control* oil. This is different than making sure that we have cheap oil to run our cars.
Oil is almost free energy. It's cheaper than hell. If you can get your hands on oil, you can turn your country in to a modern industrial informational state. So long as you don't have oil, you will be the boonies.
So the US wants to control mideast oil not so that we have cheap oil, but that our competitors, such as Russia and China, do not get their hands on it. If they got steady access to these pipelines of pracically free energy, they would be monsters in 100 years. Remember China is some 5,000 years old and the average Chinese person have a *very* long view of history.
Anyways, sooner or later the oil will run out and we will all be driving solar cars or whatever. But for now, there is oil, and oil is like a magic black potion that turns your country into a superpower. The current reigning super-power, the US, who got its title after winning two world wars, doesn't want anyone else to get its hands on this magic potion and threaten is super-power title.
Yeah, that would be a police state, and we are heading in that direction. However, there is the question of degree. Is the US in the present day the same as life under Pol Pot, Hitler or Hussein? No, not at all. That's not saying we won't get there in 10 years, but I think that we stand a good chance of impeaching Bush in the near future and bringing and end to this "war-on-terror" fascism.
You sound very much to me like an armchair libertarian. I suggest you spend sometime in the middle of the amazon or south central LA -- someplace where there are no police, and tough young men will kill you for looking at them the wrong way. I've been there (to the Amazon, that is), and our so-called 'police state' is very much preferable to having your fate decided by a 17 year old loser with something to prove, nothing to lose, and too much testosterone in his veins. That's your libertarian paradise -- no Man, no police, no authority telling you what to do, and most men dying in their 30s in revenge killing cycles.
Check out any book on the Yanomamo by Napoleon Chagnon. One Yanomamo Indian told the anthropologist Napoleon that he *had* to have a baby boy "to revenge his death". Sorry, but I'd much rather live into my 80s worrying about the mortgage here in our 'police states'.
So shut up and vote democratic. Democrats aren't perfect, but they will do for now in our need to get Republicans out of power. When the Democrats become corrupted, we cross that bridge at that time and vote them out. Your extremist views will get us nowhere. Or at least, hold off on the burning and looting until they actually declare martial law.
I'm not saying it doesn't cost money to mine gold. What I'm saying that is that the purpose of a currency is to have a public accounting record. If you can pull money out of the ground, that upsets the market functioning of the currency -- the money you pull out of the ground isn't a record of the labor produced to procure it. While it does have that cost built into it, the gold has *extra* value -- after all, isn't the purpose of mining it to make a profit? If they are making a profit, then it is just like printing money just because it costs $8 to print a $20 bill.
You might as well say "The person printing money pays for the printer, pays for the ink, pays the for the scanner to scan the money, pays for the photoshopper to create the money, pays for the paper, pays someone to run the printing and cut the currency..." The point is that's cheating and they are not supposed to do it. It ruins the accounting features of currency.
Except, when you are using metals as currency, you are able to get 'entries' in the public ledger by means *other* than marketplace exchange. Who would mine gold if it wasn't profitable to do so? It's a good way to cheat the system if gold is the currency. If your a printing phoney money, it's against the law to do so. People can stop you. However, if gold is the currency, you are still allowed to mine it.
So basically, if you base currency on anything *other* than symbolic records, you create a legitimate way to upset the functioning of currency.
Your crash course is ridiculous. If people stopped paying taxes, stopped voting, etc. there would be an immediate power vaccuum that would be filled *at best* with corporate interests. We would all be indentured servants to the corporations and would work in factories or coal mines for 14 hour days 365 days a year.
At worst a dictator would come into power, and we would live in a modern police state. This would be the most likely scenario, since this is the way that almost all states have existed in the past 6,000 years, and most non-western countries are ruled by kings. Remember, dictator is a synonym for King, Chief, or general. Basically the guy who commands the strongest army wins.
So you would have us throw away our 200 year old republic. Good luck getting it back from Robber Barons or Despots.
Hey, how about we see what happens in this upcoming election before we start burning cities to the ground?
I honestly don't think a Clinton invasion of Iraq would have put the presidency in Al Gore's hands. For better or worse, Conservatives and the Republican part 'own' national security. When Democrats are seen as doing anything to promote security, the right wing takes it as the Left playing politics with the military. Remember, the strikes Cliton ordered on Sudan and Afghanistan were on the eve of his impeachment. Remember all the 'wag the dog' talk? How much worse would it have been if Clinton had invaded Iraq? I don't think he would have had much support o n the left for his invasion either.
Though it would have played out much betterif Clinton *had* invaded Iraq -- there might actually be a stable democracy there right now. Clinton did a great job in the former Yugoslavia, with no combat casualties.
Well, I understand that all money was backed by precious metals 100 years ago. I have a bachelors in anthropology and we talked extensively about the development of state, the beginnings of money and taxes, etc.
That being said, I don't really like the idea of gold or silver as the absolute currency. The way I see it, money *shouldn't* be backed by metal. Money, IMHO is basically a public account system for labor*. When you have currency, it's just like having an entry in your favor in the public ledger. You can exchange your money to anyone in the market for something of value because the market as a whole is indebted to you for the work you have done.
That's all it is -- we just have to keep track of who is owed what for the valuable things they have done. I don't care if it's good, silver, beans, tobacco leaves, paper, electronic signal, PGP keys, etc. Of course, any material or symbolic currency is susceptible to cheating, whether the government prints too much and drives up inflation, or people print their own fraudulent currency, or people steal currency from one another. So no matter what system we have, we still have to ensure that it's properly run.
Anywho, I think that, while there are problems with paper currency, and oversight of the paper currency authority, there are *more* problems with metal as currency. The main problem, IMHO, is that you can mine metals and basically get money for free. Money is really supposed to be exchanged in the market place for valuable work. However, owning a mine is then like having a money printing press. Furthermore, we can't make more metal (while we might be able to destroy it, it would be an expensive proposition, and a lot of people would like to take the result and reconstitute it). That means that we are not in control of the value of the currency. While there are problems with people manipulating the value, I think in the end, we still will want to be in control.
There is something about human beings that will make gold and silver valuable in any 'end of the world' scenario. Thus it's a very safe investment -- as long as you have the resources to defend, maintain, and transport these extremely heavy, extremely valuable, extremely confiscatable metals.
Let me ask you this -- where do you keep your gold and silver? If it's not on your property, my bet would be is that you would have a hard time getting your hands on it in the event that the dollar collapses. In a worse-case dollar-collapse scenario, I doubt you would be able to defend your gold and silver stash against whatever marauding gangs or paramilitary organizations are about. In any other case, how are you going to securely transport these precious metal? Do you have a personal security force?
* Even if you are selling goods, what the person is paying for is 1. getting and transporting the raw materials, 2. refining the raw materials into industry usable materials, 3. manufacturing materials into goods, 4. shipping and storing goods, and finally 5. selling goods in retail outlets. So even when you are selling a thing, what the buyer is really paying for is all the effort to make and get the thing to them.
I am not against conspiracy theories per se, but there is the maxim "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained my incompetence". What about a theory that says that 'true believers' in the value of silver within the government caused them to prop up the price, despite all evidence to the contrary? Then, after years of useless proping with no turning of the tide, everyone decides to forget this folly, and boom! the market collapses?
Well, you could say that "space is just nature's way or keeping everything from being in the same place". That doesn't tell us anything about space.
It might be that from a different perspective, everything can be 'happening' at once, so to speak. Some number of years ago, pretty much everyone thought that the earth was flat, and the celestial bodies rotated around it on fixed spheres. Turns out, no one knew what the hell was going on. Maybe we have a gross misunderstanding about the basic nature of time. This might help us in our temporal existance in organic bodies, but it doesn't necessarily have to be an accurate model of reality.
You're not ready to accept it, and that's good. We can't believe any new crackpot theory that comes along. However, we can't assume we do currently have the right idea, either. We have to be willing to give new ideas a chance.
My guess is that however many years ago, the fungus just infected and killed the poor bug. Maybe during the course of the infection, the bug did all kinds of crazy things, like a rabid animal. Then, after one or more random mutations happened, one of the crazy behaviors happened to be climbing upward. This benefitted the reproductive capability of that fungus, and bingo! Natural selection.
I spent a summer in Ecuador in a field study class. We learned about one fungus that makes its living this way: Spores enter the body of an insect where they mature into the adult fungus. This adult fungus affects the mind of the bug so that it climbs to the tippy-top of whatever tree it's on. Then, when it's at the top it just sits there while the fungus consumes its innards. Finally, when the fungus is done growing, the body of the bug breaks open, and millions of spores go floating about on the wind.
"Unfortunately this complicates the system because now the cars need to be intelligent enough to deal with the random and unpredictable events of human drivers."
I don't think it needs to do that -- it should treat a misbehaving car just like an unexpected obstacle in the road: slow to a stop and alert the driver. At any point the driver can take over and can drive normally until the 'danger' is past, or stop the car, etc. If you have an assured safe distance between all cars, a pile-up won't happen. Robot cars should be able to handle the car in front of them slowing to a stop, esp. if the car ahead tells them that's what it's doing.
There remains the question of how many unexpected obstacles are going to find their way onto the robot highway. Well, I think we want guidewalls all around to prevent animals from crossing. That leaves trash blowing in and coming out of cars. I think it's an open question what kind of problem that would cause a system like this. Perhaps a driver or car can report a piece of trash as a robot-navigable object to other cars behind it. I don't know how many truly unpassable objects are going to find their way onto the roadway. That's a problem on any highway system, robot or not.
"The rules you've laid out work as long as nothing unexpected happens. Unfortunately you can't engineer a system like this and assume nothing unexpected will happen."
All of these unexpected scenarios are answered by the human driver that is in the car. I don't know why you keep overlooking that. If paint falls on the reflectors and covers a bunch, or if there is a moose on the freeway, or a meteor just created a huge hole in the ground, then the car slows to a stop and alerts the driver. If the driver can respond, they do a 'manual override' and just start driving the car normally. But, say they are asleep and can't be roused quickly enough, the car slowly stops.
But what about a driver that doesn't respond quick enough? Well, that's a problem already. We have trick drivers who regularly drive 14 hours straight and somehow the highway system hasn't turned into a carnage of machines and bodies.
Oh really? You mean that all of the corporate boards are dissolved every 2, 4, and 8 years, and new boards are instated?
You mean that the Democratic and Republican parties are not more than 8 years old?
All that happens here in the US is that the two political parties trade off every several years. Currently, laws are written in private closed door sessions, when they are not directly written by the corporate interests themselves. Case in point, the recent consumer bankrupcy bill. It was literally written by industry lawyers. And bills are passed in the middle of the night, with little to no floor discussion.
Open your eyes, man. We live in Corporate fuedalism.
The Powers That Be really really *really* don't want private individuals to have private conversations. It would be too easy for them to organize their ouster.
"Let me ask you this, what is the purpose of having a roadway that is exclusive to computer controlled cars?"
Well, if you had read the original idea, which apparently you still haven't done, you would see that the special robot-highway needs some extra things to help the computers navigate. This makes it too expensive to roll out on every highway, so you just do it on special robot-highways at first.
For instance, you need some kind of artificial guidance system, such as reflectors, radio signals, etc. Regular cars don't need these because they have human drivers. So these guidance markers add extra expense to a stretch of freeway that most cars don't need.
Also, the robot highway needs smooth, regular roads with consistent
guiderails. You can't just have breaks in the berms or other ambiguous structures that are hard for a simple AI to understand.
Bottom line, you need extra features on the highway that are too expensive to put everywhere, especially when not everybody has a robot car. Just spend the money on special robot highways while robot cars are slowly being introduced into the fleet. As more robot cars some into the fleet, build more robot-driveable freeway.
"No, I'm not being stubborn. You were the one who proposed to segregate computer controlled cars from human controlled cars, I assume so the computer controlled cars wouldn't have to deal with the unpredictable behavior of humans."
You've misread what I've posted. I said no *regular* cars in the robot car lane. If you assumed that computer controlled cars wouldn't have to deal with human-driven cars, how did you *assume* that those robot cars would get from the garages into the robot-car highway? Do me a favor and just read what I wrote, and leave your assumptions behind.
"You even agreed earlier on to the necessity of limiting access into the system so that a human driver can't drive in, whether accidentally or maliciously. Now you are proposing turning control back over to a human who is still in the system."
That's right. It's a good idea and it makes sense. We can't trust the computer for everything. We have automatic pilots on airplanes that are so good, the planes could fly themselves. However, we still have *not one*, but *two* human pilots for backup.
What is your problem? I think it's that you brought in wacky assumptions, and made a posting based on them, and now that I've called you out, you can't bring yourself to say "You know, you're right, I have no idea where I got that from."
"As soon as you turn control over to a human being you break that system. "
No, you don't. You're just being stubborn. Having a human driver navigate around robot cars doesn't break the system in any way. Look, we have human driving aroung *other humans*. What a mess that should be! Yet somehow the system still works. Imagine that.
"Your whole design assumed there were no human drivers on the road."
What the hell are you talking about? My whole designed presumed *no regular cars*. What's the point of having robot cars with no people in them? Where are these robot cars driving themselves to? Every car needs to have a human driver in it. How would the car get onto the special robot car freeway otherwise? And furthermore, you need the human driver as a failsafe.
This is just a guess, but this is what I replied to the expert on the thread: if your language requires you to use cardinal directions, and only cardinal directions, when refering to objects in space, that doesn't mean you actually have to know your current or past orientation. For it to work, all that has to happen is that the listener and the speaker agree. It's like talking about "North Umbridge" when we are already both north of North Umbridge, so that it would be south of us. We both know where we are referring to, so it doesn't matter that we are incorrect in a sense.
So if I say "cut down the tree on the east", and I actually mean the tree on the north, I still communicate if the listener silently corrects my lousy directions. Or, even if I fail and the listener heads to the wrong tree, I say "Hey dummy! I said the tree on the *East*!" and the listener grumbles "what an idiot... why can't he learn his directions?"
Although the report of the shark-bait story teller repositioning himself in space and correcting his hand gestures is fascinating, I wonder if *all* of the speakers of that language would be able to do that. It might be like left and right in our culture. Most people can handle it, but some people can't. That's where we get snarky phrases like "Oh, you mean the *other* left?".
I have some more thoughts on this. It seems to me, based on my experience in Columbus, OH, that some people have an 'internal compass', and some people don't. I myself have a strong compass -- not that there's anything magnetic going on inside of me, but I always have a theory of my cardinal direction orientation. It's based off of environmental clues -- mostly position of the sun, and the general East-West-North-South grid layout of Columbus streets and buildings. So even at night I have an idea of cardinal directions, because of streets and buildings. But I know that this is based on clues, because certain times I was turned around, in, say a hospital or office building, and when I came out, the sun was in the wrong part of the sky, for example. When that happens, I get very naseous.;)
We seem to have a cultural thing here in Columbus, where when you are talking about a suburb or section of Columbus, you are expected to point to the location. I know that I've been corrected for pointing the wrong way: "We were in Whitehall..."
"You mean Whitehall?" (Listener points in another direction)
I think because of the grid of the city, the flatness of the land, and the ring of suburbs around Columbus, this makes it an easy way to refer to locations -- if you can do it. Of course, not everyone can do this birds-eye-view, boy scout compass transformations and directions. They constantly apologize when they give directions. Some people just don't point. Some people refer to a map they are imagining in front of them, with north at the top. I can tell this because I am standing at the East or West of the map, and I see the 90* rotation I have to make to understand their directions. Some people just go ahead and point, without actual reference to a north oriented map, or the actual directions. For instance, my mom;) And she says "Oh, c'mon" when I try to correct her pointing.
So maybe in this language you are expected to attend to cardinal directions no matter what. Maybe this guy who told the shark-bait story was good with cardinal directions, and would consistently orient himself properly, and make the proper hand gesture transformations, no matter where he was standing when he told the story. Maybe other people aren't so good at cardinal directions, and ethnographers just haven't caught them messing up the re-telling of a story. Maybe a story recounter has can't tell the cardinal directions in every day life, but when they tell a story, they have settled on a direction for that story, and are able to stick with it.
Maybe it's like left and right in our culture. We are expected to attend to it, but some people are bad at it, which is why we have snarky phrases like "Oh, you mean the *other* left?"
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Having editors in Wikipedia is redundant. Anyone can edit a wikipedia article; therefore, anyone can be an editor. I think the idea of Wikipedia is radical egalitarianism. We can't have a class of titled users that have special priviliges that others don't.
I have thought that a signing system would be the most appropriate. Any text you create must be signed by you. You have the choice to sign off on any text you agree with. If any of your text is modified, you are somehow notified, and then you can in turn sign off on any of the edits made.
After a while, we have a large build-up of ratings for articles, and for authors and editors. The average wikipedia reader would then get an idea of the rating of the article and the reputation of the people behind it.
I think this would go hand-in-hand with multiple concurrent articles. For instance, on the article for Hitler, you would have several versions. You would have the main article, which most people agree with and sign off on. You would also have the white-supremacist version, which most people would disagree with, including me, but nontheless would have a number of adherents who would sign off, and still have a right to express their views. You would have more versions still -- perhaps the David Icke version, which, while still anti-Hitler, it would place Hitler in a long line of space-reptile rulers, so a lot of people who don't like Hitler would still disagree with the article.
How would you feel about having multiple concurrent texts for article headings? It seems to me that some of the problems from wikipedia is there are several legitimate groups that want to put their own spin on certain issues. Presently it seems that this is handled by some text such as "this issue is controversial" and then each side gets some kind of summary. Then we get into problems with whose opinion comes first, who gets the short shrift in the summary, who is made to look like a crackpot, etc.
What I'm proposing is a system where the user sees an interface like the disambiguation page, which offers different articles for each title, including a purportedly nuetral one. So for example, the abortion article would have 3 or more texts: a nuetral one, a pro-life, and a pro-choice.
"and think in the long run the Iraqi people (and by extension the rest of the Middle East) will be much better off with a participatory democracy than living under the heel of a thug."
Saddam is in his 70s. How mouch longer do you think he's going to run? I am not a Saddam supporter in any way, but is there less misery and death now for the Iraqi people than there would be under Saddam?
So my point is that if we were trying to get Iraq into a democracy, the time would have been when Saddam's health was failing ( which would be relatively soon in any case) or when he died and there was the ensuing power stuggle. Either way would have probably meant a lot less pain and suffering for the Iraqis.
What we have done was a total fuckup.
"Did it ever cross your mind that
1) We gave WMDs to him in the past?
2) Other countries did too?"
Did it ever occur to you that WMD's have a shelf life? That these things don't last forever? That gases made in the 80s are not usable today? That, in order to have a WMD arsenal, you have to have an infrastructure to constantly renew your stocks? That to do so requires a large and ongoing project? That the weapons inspectors found no evidence of the large and ongiong WMD project needed to maintain a stockpile capable of threatening the US?
I think one of the main thrusts of US policy in the Middle East is to *control* oil. This is different than making sure that we have cheap oil to run our cars.
Oil is almost free energy. It's cheaper than hell. If you can get your hands on oil, you can turn your country in to a modern industrial informational state. So long as you don't have oil, you will be the boonies.
So the US wants to control mideast oil not so that we have cheap oil, but that our competitors, such as Russia and China, do not get their hands on it. If they got steady access to these pipelines of pracically free energy, they would be monsters in 100 years. Remember China is some 5,000 years old and the average Chinese person have a *very* long view of history.
Anyways, sooner or later the oil will run out and we will all be driving solar cars or whatever. But for now, there is oil, and oil is like a magic black potion that turns your country into a superpower. The current reigning super-power, the US, who got its title after winning two world wars, doesn't want anyone else to get its hands on this magic potion and threaten is super-power title.
Yeah, that would be a police state, and we are heading in that direction. However, there is the question of degree. Is the US in the present day the same as life under Pol Pot, Hitler or Hussein? No, not at all. That's not saying we won't get there in 10 years, but I think that we stand a good chance of impeaching Bush in the near future and bringing and end to this "war-on-terror" fascism.
You sound very much to me like an armchair libertarian. I suggest you spend sometime in the middle of the amazon or south central LA -- someplace where there are no police, and tough young men will kill you for looking at them the wrong way. I've been there (to the Amazon, that is), and our so-called 'police state' is very much preferable to having your fate decided by a 17 year old loser with something to prove, nothing to lose, and too much testosterone in his veins. That's your libertarian paradise -- no Man, no police, no authority telling you what to do, and most men dying in their 30s in revenge killing cycles.
Check out any book on the Yanomamo by Napoleon Chagnon. One Yanomamo Indian told the anthropologist Napoleon that he *had* to have a baby boy "to revenge his death". Sorry, but I'd much rather live into my 80s worrying about the mortgage here in our 'police states'.
So shut up and vote democratic. Democrats aren't perfect, but they will do for now in our need to get Republicans out of power. When the Democrats become corrupted, we cross that bridge at that time and vote them out. Your extremist views will get us nowhere. Or at least, hold off on the burning and looting until they actually declare martial law.
I'm not saying it doesn't cost money to mine gold. What I'm saying that is that the purpose of a currency is to have a public accounting record. If you can pull money out of the ground, that upsets the market functioning of the currency -- the money you pull out of the ground isn't a record of the labor produced to procure it. While it does have that cost built into it, the gold has *extra* value -- after all, isn't the purpose of mining it to make a profit? If they are making a profit, then it is just like printing money just because it costs $8 to print a $20 bill.
You might as well say "The person printing money pays for the printer, pays for the ink, pays the for the scanner to scan the money, pays for the photoshopper to create the money, pays for the paper, pays someone to run the printing and cut the currency..." The point is that's cheating and they are not supposed to do it. It ruins the accounting features of currency.
Except, when you are using metals as currency, you are able to get 'entries' in the public ledger by means *other* than marketplace exchange. Who would mine gold if it wasn't profitable to do so? It's a good way to cheat the system if gold is the currency. If your a printing phoney money, it's against the law to do so. People can stop you. However, if gold is the currency, you are still allowed to mine it.
So basically, if you base currency on anything *other* than symbolic records, you create a legitimate way to upset the functioning of currency.
Your crash course is ridiculous. If people stopped paying taxes, stopped voting, etc. there would be an immediate power vaccuum that would be filled *at best* with corporate interests. We would all be indentured servants to the corporations and would work in factories or coal mines for 14 hour days 365 days a year.
At worst a dictator would come into power, and we would live in a modern police state. This would be the most likely scenario, since this is the way that almost all states have existed in the past 6,000 years, and most non-western countries are ruled by kings. Remember, dictator is a synonym for King, Chief, or general. Basically the guy who commands the strongest army wins.
So you would have us throw away our 200 year old republic. Good luck getting it back from Robber Barons or Despots.
Hey, how about we see what happens in this upcoming election before we start burning cities to the ground?
I honestly don't think a Clinton invasion of Iraq would have put the presidency in Al Gore's hands. For better or worse, Conservatives and the Republican part 'own' national security. When Democrats are seen as doing anything to promote security, the right wing takes it as the Left playing politics with the military. Remember, the strikes Cliton ordered on Sudan and Afghanistan were on the eve of his impeachment. Remember all the 'wag the dog' talk? How much worse would it have been if Clinton had invaded Iraq? I don't think he would have had much support o n the left for his invasion either.
Though it would have played out much betterif Clinton *had* invaded Iraq -- there might actually be a stable democracy there right now. Clinton did a great job in the former Yugoslavia, with no combat casualties.
Hell, I don't know.
Well, I understand that all money was backed by precious metals 100 years ago. I have a bachelors in anthropology and we talked extensively about the development of state, the beginnings of money and taxes, etc.
That being said, I don't really like the idea of gold or silver as the absolute currency. The way I see it, money *shouldn't* be backed by metal. Money, IMHO is basically a public account system for labor*. When you have currency, it's just like having an entry in your favor in the public ledger. You can exchange your money to anyone in the market for something of value because the market as a whole is indebted to you for the work you have done.
That's all it is -- we just have to keep track of who is owed what for the valuable things they have done. I don't care if it's good, silver, beans, tobacco leaves, paper, electronic signal, PGP keys, etc. Of course, any material or symbolic currency is susceptible to cheating, whether the government prints too much and drives up inflation, or people print their own fraudulent currency, or people steal currency from one another. So no matter what system we have, we still have to ensure that it's properly run.
Anywho, I think that, while there are problems with paper currency, and oversight of the paper currency authority, there are *more* problems with metal as currency. The main problem, IMHO, is that you can mine metals and basically get money for free. Money is really supposed to be exchanged in the market place for valuable work. However, owning a mine is then like having a money printing press. Furthermore, we can't make more metal (while we might be able to destroy it, it would be an expensive proposition, and a lot of people would like to take the result and reconstitute it). That means that we are not in control of the value of the currency. While there are problems with people manipulating the value, I think in the end, we still will want to be in control.
There is something about human beings that will make gold and silver valuable in any 'end of the world' scenario. Thus it's a very safe investment -- as long as you have the resources to defend, maintain, and transport these extremely heavy, extremely valuable, extremely confiscatable metals.
Let me ask you this -- where do you keep your gold and silver? If it's not on your property, my bet would be is that you would have a hard time getting your hands on it in the event that the dollar collapses. In a worse-case dollar-collapse scenario, I doubt you would be able to defend your gold and silver stash against whatever marauding gangs or paramilitary organizations are about. In any other case, how are you going to securely transport these precious metal? Do you have a personal security force?
* Even if you are selling goods, what the person is paying for is 1. getting and transporting the raw materials, 2. refining the raw materials into industry usable materials, 3. manufacturing materials into goods, 4. shipping and storing goods, and finally 5. selling goods in retail outlets. So even when you are selling a thing, what the buyer is really paying for is all the effort to make and get the thing to them.
I wish for the day when people learn the meaning of SARCASM.
Actually, I could care less about that day.
I am not against conspiracy theories per se, but there is the maxim "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained my incompetence". What about a theory that says that 'true believers' in the value of silver within the government caused them to prop up the price, despite all evidence to the contrary? Then, after years of useless proping with no turning of the tide, everyone decides to forget this folly, and boom! the market collapses?
That doesn't therefore mean globe. The Earth could be a buckled disk, like a contact lens.
Well, you could say that "space is just nature's way or keeping everything from being in the same place". That doesn't tell us anything about space.
It might be that from a different perspective, everything can be 'happening' at once, so to speak. Some number of years ago, pretty much everyone thought that the earth was flat, and the celestial bodies rotated around it on fixed spheres. Turns out, no one knew what the hell was going on. Maybe we have a gross misunderstanding about the basic nature of time. This might help us in our temporal existance in organic bodies, but it doesn't necessarily have to be an accurate model of reality.
You're not ready to accept it, and that's good. We can't believe any new crackpot theory that comes along. However, we can't assume we do currently have the right idea, either. We have to be willing to give new ideas a chance.
Evolution, my dear Watson!
My guess is that however many years ago, the fungus just infected and killed the poor bug. Maybe during the course of the infection, the bug did all kinds of crazy things, like a rabid animal. Then, after one or more random mutations happened, one of the crazy behaviors happened to be climbing upward. This benefitted the reproductive capability of that fungus, and bingo! Natural selection.
I spent a summer in Ecuador in a field study class. We learned about one fungus that makes its living this way: Spores enter the body of an insect where they mature into the adult fungus. This adult fungus affects the mind of the bug so that it climbs to the tippy-top of whatever tree it's on. Then, when it's at the top it just sits there while the fungus consumes its innards. Finally, when the fungus is done growing, the body of the bug breaks open, and millions of spores go floating about on the wind.
"Unfortunately this complicates the system because now the cars need to be intelligent enough to deal with the random and unpredictable events of human drivers."
I don't think it needs to do that -- it should treat a misbehaving car just like an unexpected obstacle in the road: slow to a stop and alert the driver. At any point the driver can take over and can drive normally until the 'danger' is past, or stop the car, etc. If you have an assured safe distance between all cars, a pile-up won't happen. Robot cars should be able to handle the car in front of them slowing to a stop, esp. if the car ahead tells them that's what it's doing.
There remains the question of how many unexpected obstacles are going to find their way onto the robot highway. Well, I think we want guidewalls all around to prevent animals from crossing. That leaves trash blowing in and coming out of cars. I think it's an open question what kind of problem that would cause a system like this. Perhaps a driver or car can report a piece of trash as a robot-navigable object to other cars behind it. I don't know how many truly unpassable objects are going to find their way onto the roadway. That's a problem on any highway system, robot or not.
"The rules you've laid out work as long as nothing unexpected happens. Unfortunately you can't engineer a system like this and assume nothing unexpected will happen."
All of these unexpected scenarios are answered by the human driver that is in the car. I don't know why you keep overlooking that. If paint falls on the reflectors and covers a bunch, or if there is a moose on the freeway, or a meteor just created a huge hole in the ground, then the car slows to a stop and alerts the driver. If the driver can respond, they do a 'manual override' and just start driving the car normally. But, say they are asleep and can't be roused quickly enough, the car slowly stops.
But what about a driver that doesn't respond quick enough? Well, that's a problem already. We have trick drivers who regularly drive 14 hours straight and somehow the highway system hasn't turned into a carnage of machines and bodies.
Oh really? You mean that all of the corporate boards are dissolved every 2, 4, and 8 years, and new boards are instated?
You mean that the Democratic and Republican parties are not more than 8 years old?
All that happens here in the US is that the two political parties trade off every several years. Currently, laws are written in private closed door sessions, when they are not directly written by the corporate interests themselves. Case in point, the recent consumer bankrupcy bill. It was literally written by industry lawyers. And bills are passed in the middle of the night, with little to no floor discussion.
Open your eyes, man. We live in Corporate fuedalism.
The Powers That Be really really *really* don't want private individuals to have private conversations. It would be too easy for them to organize their ouster.
"Let me ask you this, what is the purpose of having a roadway that is exclusive to computer controlled cars?"
Well, if you had read the original idea, which apparently you still haven't done, you would see that the special robot-highway needs some extra things to help the computers navigate. This makes it too expensive to roll out on every highway, so you just do it on special robot-highways at first.
For instance, you need some kind of artificial guidance system, such as reflectors, radio signals, etc. Regular cars don't need these because they have human drivers. So these guidance markers add extra expense to a stretch of freeway that most cars don't need.
Also, the robot highway needs smooth, regular roads with consistent guiderails. You can't just have breaks in the berms or other ambiguous structures that are hard for a simple AI to understand.
Bottom line, you need extra features on the highway that are too expensive to put everywhere, especially when not everybody has a robot car. Just spend the money on special robot highways while robot cars are slowly being introduced into the fleet. As more robot cars some into the fleet, build more robot-driveable freeway.
"No, I'm not being stubborn. You were the one who proposed to segregate computer controlled cars from human controlled cars, I assume so the computer controlled cars wouldn't have to deal with the unpredictable behavior of humans."
You've misread what I've posted. I said no *regular* cars in the robot car lane. If you assumed that computer controlled cars wouldn't have to deal with human-driven cars, how did you *assume* that those robot cars would get from the garages into the robot-car highway? Do me a favor and just read what I wrote, and leave your assumptions behind.
"You even agreed earlier on to the necessity of limiting access into the system so that a human driver can't drive in, whether accidentally or maliciously. Now you are proposing turning control back over to a human who is still in the system."
That's right. It's a good idea and it makes sense. We can't trust the computer for everything. We have automatic pilots on airplanes that are so good, the planes could fly themselves. However, we still have *not one*, but *two* human pilots for backup.
What is your problem? I think it's that you brought in wacky assumptions, and made a posting based on them, and now that I've called you out, you can't bring yourself to say "You know, you're right, I have no idea where I got that from."
"As soon as you turn control over to a human being you break that system. "
No, you don't. You're just being stubborn. Having a human driver navigate around robot cars doesn't break the system in any way. Look, we have human driving aroung *other humans*. What a mess that should be! Yet somehow the system still works. Imagine that.
"Your whole design assumed there were no human drivers on the road."
What the hell are you talking about? My whole designed presumed *no regular cars*. What's the point of having robot cars with no people in them? Where are these robot cars driving themselves to? Every car needs to have a human driver in it. How would the car get onto the special robot car freeway otherwise? And furthermore, you need the human driver as a failsafe.
This is just a guess, but this is what I replied to the expert on the thread: if your language requires you to use cardinal directions, and only cardinal directions, when refering to objects in space, that doesn't mean you actually have to know your current or past orientation. For it to work, all that has to happen is that the listener and the speaker agree. It's like talking about "North Umbridge" when we are already both north of North Umbridge, so that it would be south of us. We both know where we are referring to, so it doesn't matter that we are incorrect in a sense.
So if I say "cut down the tree on the east", and I actually mean the tree on the north, I still communicate if the listener silently corrects my lousy directions. Or, even if I fail and the listener heads to the wrong tree, I say "Hey dummy! I said the tree on the *East*!" and the listener grumbles "what an idiot... why can't he learn his directions?"
Although the report of the shark-bait story teller repositioning himself in space and correcting his hand gestures is fascinating, I wonder if *all* of the speakers of that language would be able to do that. It might be like left and right in our culture. Most people can handle it, but some people can't. That's where we get snarky phrases like "Oh, you mean the *other* left?".
I have some more thoughts on this. It seems to me, based on my experience in Columbus, OH, that some people have an 'internal compass', and some people don't. I myself have a strong compass -- not that there's anything magnetic going on inside of me, but I always have a theory of my cardinal direction orientation. It's based off of environmental clues -- mostly position of the sun, and the general East-West-North-South grid layout of Columbus streets and buildings. So even at night I have an idea of cardinal directions, because of streets and buildings. But I know that this is based on clues, because certain times I was turned around, in, say a hospital or office building, and when I came out, the sun was in the wrong part of the sky, for example. When that happens, I get very naseous. ;)
;) And she says "Oh, c'mon" when I try to correct her pointing.
We seem to have a cultural thing here in Columbus, where when you are talking about a suburb or section of Columbus, you are expected to point to the location. I know that I've been corrected for pointing the wrong way: "We were in Whitehall..."
"You mean Whitehall?" (Listener points in another direction)
I think because of the grid of the city, the flatness of the land, and the ring of suburbs around Columbus, this makes it an easy way to refer to locations -- if you can do it. Of course, not everyone can do this birds-eye-view, boy scout compass transformations and directions. They constantly apologize when they give directions. Some people just don't point. Some people refer to a map they are imagining in front of them, with north at the top. I can tell this because I am standing at the East or West of the map, and I see the 90* rotation I have to make to understand their directions. Some people just go ahead and point, without actual reference to a north oriented map, or the actual directions. For instance, my mom
So maybe in this language you are expected to attend to cardinal directions no matter what. Maybe this guy who told the shark-bait story was good with cardinal directions, and would consistently orient himself properly, and make the proper hand gesture transformations, no matter where he was standing when he told the story. Maybe other people aren't so good at cardinal directions, and ethnographers just haven't caught them messing up the re-telling of a story. Maybe a story recounter has can't tell the cardinal directions in every day life, but when they tell a story, they have settled on a direction for that story, and are able to stick with it.
Maybe it's like left and right in our culture. We are expected to attend to it, but some people are bad at it, which is why we have snarky phrases like "Oh, you mean the *other* left?"
Does any of this make sense?