So what you are saying is that if someone disables the breaks on your car as a "prank", and you get killed because of that, they should not have to go to jail because it was just a prank, right?
Pardon me, but while that is something for concern, government has a mass murderous track record with respect to freedom of speech.
Here you are implying that this is something that is exclusive for governments, and that is absolutely not true. There are many examples thought out history of companies with worse track records than governments, for instance British East India Company.
With governments there is at least some transparency and accountability for its ruling (although seldom enough), which is missing for private companies. When companies becomes as influential and powerful as governments without the corresponding checks and balances that is an extremely serious problem. Secret ruling is seldom good idea.
But even with completely open and transparent algorithms, that means nothing.
The algorithms themselves are actually the least important aspect. As I have said before, even if the algorithms are 100% open and transparent, that means nothing if the data feed into them is secret. If the bank uses an algorithm to determine if it wants to lend money to you, how is the data about you collected? Who decided to classify you as a say medium risk person? What criteria did he/she/they use for that? How thorough were he/she/they in gathering decision material? What did he/she/they miss/ignore/misunderstood?
Unless there is full and complete transparency and accountability for data collection, the transparency for just the algorithms is without value.
What is the problem?
We would like to sell more and expensive audio accessories to people, even though they actually do not need this.
Also we would like to do this as exclusively as possible, without bothersome competition
What is the cause?
People already own a lot of existing audio hardware that works just fine. And there is a lot of competition with a low barrier to entry.
What is the solution?
Remove the option to use the 3.5mm jack (and justify by blaming physical size) and thus force people to just discard all their existing, fully functional audio hardware and buy new (from us).
Which is completely irrelevant to this discussion which was about what defines a government in the normal case. War is an extreme exception to the normal, peaceful operation of a government.
The only way I guess your view could be so skewed that you think war is normal is if you live in a country which has been
participating in wars almost every single year since 1950, has a massively oversized military (around 4% of the world's population but has around
35% of the world's military spending (used to be around 40%)),
and aggressively market itself as "the good guys" (more below) .
Many countries involved in WW2 teach a "war is bad, look at all the bad
things that happened" philosophy to children born after WW2 (although
Japan is shamefully largly avoiding admitting its own mistakes and take
more a "war is bad, (only) look at what happened to us during the war"
approach).
In USA this is considered problematic since its oversized military
is based on voluntary participation, and with an honest "war is bad"
teaching that would severely negatively impact enrolment.
So instead they take a "well, we do not have to be that honest about war is bad" approach
and instead
endorsemilitaryworshipping,
completely ignoring president Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning that
... we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We
must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or
democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert
and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge
industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods
and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
This is obviously a false argument. Because if it were true, it would mean that the majority of countries in the world does not have a government since they do not allow for their citizens to be killed. It is perfectly fine to have a government without it having the ability to kill its residents.
Want to know who the government is, in a location? It's whoever can legitimately send armed men against you to enforce their will.
The government has a violence monopoly (police) and freedom removal monopoly (imprisonment). Neither of those implies killing its residents as a requirement.
You... literally just defined government. " the right to be able to {officially} kill other people at the squeeze of a trigger"
It is sad how limited view you have of government. Legal execution of people is in no way a requirement of governing said people. In the majority of countries in the world it is illegal for anyone to execute any of its citizen (sans self defence).
Except, he does not. When he speeks the sentences are so split up and often mixes in lots of unrelated things, and has a (lack of) flow that makes it is really hard to follow. In fact this is the one thing that is easy to make parody of Donald Trump, to mimic his form of speaking. To parody the actual content of what he is say is on the other hand very hard because of the crazy things he say. For instance "My nuclear button is bigger than his" would be a natural thing to try to parody him on except he acutally manager to say that himself for real...
For an excample of how he does not speaks plainly, consider
this:
“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
While this is probably a cherry-picked example of worst cases there is, it is not exceptional and far of his average.
This is the free market as it should be. Much better than in markets where government meddles, actually fucking things up.
Why are you against a properly working free marked? Because a working free marked requires low barriers to entry/exit, lack of cartel activity, etc, all of which needs govenment intervention. By all means, it is absolutely possible for governments to mess up with things they do (say like unwisely keeping a dying coal industry on life support instead of investing in renewable energy), but that is not an argument for them to do nothing.
And even with that, some government intervention by restricting what a properly working free marked could produce is good for society. For instance, do you think that companies should be able to 100% decide the safety of their products without any say from the government at all, or should the govenment be able to set some minimum requirements with regards to products? Will such safety requirements be perfect? Of course not. Will it make some products more expensive? Yes. But the world is undeniably a better place with such requirements in place.
...that good old "no true Scotsman" argument is trotted-out
which kind of socialism are you specifically talking about?
You do realize you just made his point...right?
You are making the mistake of assuming that his claim of a "no true Scotsman" argument was valid.
He made the claim "socialism always fails" and then I provided evidence that for some forms of socialism the situation is the exact opposite:
The United Nations World Happiness Report 2013 shows that the happiest nations are concentrated in northern Europe, where the Nordic model of social democracy is employed, with Denmark topping the list. This is at times attributed to the success of the Nordic model in the region. The Nordic countries ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.
A "no true Scotsman" argument operates on absolute classifications of something, and then uses the trueness to exclude contradicting instances. I dare you to point out where I have done so.
Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Person B: "But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge."
Person A: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
The argument closest to a "no true Scotsman" made in this discussion is the following:
BlueStrat: "No kinds of socialism do not fail always".
I: "But some countries in Europe have a kind of socialism that is regarded as highly successful".
I agree with whole-heartedly with everything that you write, it was badly phrased from my side. Even a common word like "plan" mean different things to different people, so if you just ask a friend/colleague/neighbour "can you make a plan for X" you might be in for a surprise of what he/she produces without actually defining/agreeing on exactly what a plan is.
What I meant was refraining from trying come up with a definition and try to impose it as an axiom/common definition that everyone is assumed to agree on.
Did you actually read the post I linked to?
When you say "when socialism fails as it always does", which kind of socialism are you specifically talking about? Because depending on what kind of socialism you mean, that statement is false.
b0s0z0ku and BlueStrat, please refrain from trying to define exactly what corporatism/fascism/socialism is and then argue from that.
It is an exercise that provides no value.
(c) Have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense;
So no charge necessary. No conviction necessary. Zero defence possibility. Just as long as some unaccountable employee in the Secretary of Homeland Security, or perhaps a TSA employee, some contractor or whoever has deemed that some alien has committed a chargeable criminal offense that's good enough.
True. As it is today for online banking for instance, every bank have their own legal contact you need to agree to in order to enable online banking. And they have this perverse incentive in that the less you understand about the contract the better for them.
Compare with how it would be if the banks were required to actively work to make contracts understandable for its customers. If all banks start out with their own contract there will be a incentive to standardise at least parts of the contract to be common between all/most banks because then for all non-first-time bank customers there will be zero or very little effort needed to read the contract when signing up as a customer because he/she already have read (most of) it before.
And how have we ended up in this situation? By not setting any requirements on contracts where there is a obvious power imbalance where one part is able to legally overrun the other part. If a company was required to consider how well the other part understands a contract we would not end up as bad as we are today.
There is also the issue in contract law of capacity, as in the ability to understand and consent.
That is unfortunately more a theoretical factor than a practical factor given how far companies are able to and allowed to skew the imbalance far beyond a David vs Goliat relation to something more like a single soldier against a national army imbalance. In most (all?) countries law/justice is not part of the mandatory education for kids (which when you think about it is crazy; all citizens of a country are supposed to follow all laws but are given no education about (the most important) laws or the justice system). So when companies have at its disposition expert lawyers with both dedicated education and experience which are paid full time to do the work vs the amateur on the other side having to follow up a case on his/her spare time, it is a guaranteed overrun.
There will always be a power advantage for companies that are able to factor in paying lawyers into their operational cost, and I do not think it will ever be possible to remove. But it is most certainly possible to reduce the imbalance from today's unfairness.
If a company present the same legal contract to more than 1000 persons, it is obviously a David vs Goliat relation imbalance. To counter this there should be put some requirements to that contract. If a company present the same legal contract to more than 10000 persons, even stricter requirements. 100000 persons much stricter requirements and more than a million persons - very strict requirements. Exactly the steps and requirements are up for debate, but some fair ones would be
company is required to provide an accurate summary of the differences if a contact is updated.
company is required to document that it has given drafts of the contract to a representative sample of its intended recipients and worked on improving it to the point that all/most/some of the persons fully/adequately understands the contract.
company discloses to the recipient how much (accumulated) effort it has invested in creating the specific contract.
if a contract is changed, the company is required to document all the negative consequences for the affected person.
with appropriate penalties when this is not done properly.
Yes, 73% is extremely high, but water is a plentiful resource here in Norway so wasting it is less of a problem here compared to other countries.
Water is only partially metered. Most commonly the consumption is estimated based on the size of the house, but you can opt in to pay for the actual consumption. I cannot promise that absolutely no places have mandatory metering, but that would be very uncommon. At least for housholds, I think maybe companies have to pay for actually usage more commonly.
I am not at all doubting that there is mismanagement, but I just want to comment on the 40% lost to leak because that sounds like a quite normal number for leakage. Here in Norway many places are worse than that, and upon searching for some reference while writing this answer I see than worst in class is actually as bad as 73%.
The correct way to collect telemetry data would be the following:
1st question: "Hi, we would like to gather some information blah blah... with your permission"
Answer option 1: "OK (you can change your mind later)"
Answer option 2: "Let me control what and when (including none)"
Then as a follow-up to the 2nd answer option: A sufficient detailed list of what is collected
(possibly in a tree view/hierarchy) where you can opt in and out ala carte, e.g.
Collect hardware information under installation
CPU
GPU
Disk size(s) and partition information
Number of joysticks
Etc...
Statistics on how often the command "apt-get install" is run
Every time
Aggregate per day
Aggregate per week
Aggregate per month
Etc...
with two important additional overall options:
Save a copy of everything that is shared (choose location)
Let me review the data before it is being shared every time
A group prediction is just that, a prediction for the (the average of) whole group. Trying to extrapolate individual predictions from group membership is not accurate, no matter how accurate the group accuracy is.
Slashdot Mirror
You did not answer his question:
what problem did Apple solve by removing the 3.5mm jack?
Please do. What would you fill in for the two first entries?
What is the problem? ... What is the cause? ... What is the solution? Removing the 3.5mm jack.So what you are saying is that if someone disables the breaks on your car as a "prank", and you get killed because of that, they should not have to go to jail because it was just a prank, right?
Pardon me, but while that is something for concern, government has a mass murderous track record with respect to freedom of speech.
Here you are implying that this is something that is exclusive for governments, and that is absolutely not true. There are many examples thought out history of companies with worse track records than governments, for instance British East India Company.
With governments there is at least some transparency and accountability for its ruling (although seldom enough), which is missing for private companies. When companies becomes as influential and powerful as governments without the corresponding checks and balances that is an extremely serious problem. Secret ruling is seldom good idea.
But even with completely open and transparent algorithms, that means nothing.
The algorithms themselves are actually the least important aspect. As I have said before, even if the algorithms are 100% open and transparent, that means nothing if the data feed into them is secret. If the bank uses an algorithm to determine if it wants to lend money to you, how is the data about you collected? Who decided to classify you as a say medium risk person? What criteria did he/she/they use for that? How thorough were he/she/they in gathering decision material? What did he/she/they miss/ignore/misunderstood?
Unless there is full and complete transparency and accountability for data collection, the transparency for just the algorithms is without value.
This has been Apple's goal from the very start:
What is the problem? We would like to sell more and expensive audio accessories to people, even though they actually do not need this. Also we would like to do this as exclusively as possible, without bothersome competition What is the cause? People already own a lot of existing audio hardware that works just fine. And there is a lot of competition with a low barrier to entry. What is the solution? Remove the option to use the 3.5mm jack (and justify by blaming physical size) and thus force people to just discard all their existing, fully functional audio hardware and buy new (from us).War is legal execution.
Which is completely irrelevant to this discussion which was about what defines a government in the normal case. War is an extreme exception to the normal, peaceful operation of a government.
The only way I guess your view could be so skewed that you think war is normal is if you live in a country which has been participating in wars almost every single year since 1950, has a massively oversized military (around 4% of the world's population but has around 35% of the world's military spending (used to be around 40%)), and aggressively market itself as "the good guys" (more below) .
Many countries involved in WW2 teach a "war is bad, look at all the bad things that happened" philosophy to children born after WW2 (although Japan is shamefully largly avoiding admitting its own mistakes and take more a "war is bad, (only) look at what happened to us during the war" approach). In USA this is considered problematic since its oversized military is based on voluntary participation, and with an honest "war is bad" teaching that would severely negatively impact enrolment. So instead they take a "well, we do not have to be that honest about war is bad" approach and instead endorse military worshipping, completely ignoring president Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning that
... we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
It's the defining characteristic of government.
This is obviously a false argument. Because if it were true, it would mean that the majority of countries in the world does not have a government since they do not allow for their citizens to be killed. It is perfectly fine to have a government without it having the ability to kill its residents.
Want to know who the government is, in a location? It's whoever can legitimately send armed men against you to enforce their will.
The government has a violence monopoly (police) and freedom removal monopoly (imprisonment). Neither of those implies killing its residents as a requirement.
You ... literally just defined government. " the right to be able to {officially} kill other people at the squeeze of a trigger"
It is sad how limited view you have of government. Legal execution of people is in no way a requirement of governing said people. In the majority of countries in the world it is illegal for anyone to execute any of its citizen (sans self defence).
Trump ..., he will speak plainly
Except, he does not. When he speeks the sentences are so split up and often mixes in lots of unrelated things, and has a (lack of) flow that makes it is really hard to follow. In fact this is the one thing that is easy to make parody of Donald Trump, to mimic his form of speaking. To parody the actual content of what he is say is on the other hand very hard because of the crazy things he say. For instance "My nuclear button is bigger than his" would be a natural thing to try to parody him on except he acutally manager to say that himself for real...
For an excample of how he does not speaks plainly, consider this:
“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
While this is probably a cherry-picked example of worst cases there is, it is not exceptional and far of his average.
Listen, the argument
Government can do bad things.
Therefore government should do nothing.
is not a valid argument.
This is the free market as it should be. Much better than in markets where government meddles, actually fucking things up.
Why are you against a properly working free marked? Because a working free marked requires low barriers to entry/exit, lack of cartel activity, etc, all of which needs govenment intervention. By all means, it is absolutely possible for governments to mess up with things they do (say like unwisely keeping a dying coal industry on life support instead of investing in renewable energy), but that is not an argument for them to do nothing.
And even with that, some government intervention by restricting what a properly working free marked could produce is good for society. For instance, do you think that companies should be able to 100% decide the safety of their products without any say from the government at all, or should the govenment be able to set some minimum requirements with regards to products? Will such safety requirements be perfect? Of course not. Will it make some products more expensive? Yes. But the world is undeniably a better place with such requirements in place.
Elon is not an expert on that area. Ignore that B.S.
So what you are saying is that Elon is not an expert but you are so we should listen to your advice instead? Really?
You do realize you just made his point...right?
You are making the mistake of assuming that his claim of a "no true Scotsman" argument was valid. He made the claim "socialism always fails" and then I provided evidence that for some forms of socialism the situation is the exact opposite:
The United Nations World Happiness Report 2013 shows that the happiest nations are concentrated in northern Europe, where the Nordic model of social democracy is employed, with Denmark topping the list. This is at times attributed to the success of the Nordic model in the region. The Nordic countries ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.
A "no true Scotsman" argument operates on absolute classifications of something, and then uses the trueness to exclude contradicting instances. I dare you to point out where I have done so.
The argument closest to a "no true Scotsman" made in this discussion is the following:
I agree with whole-heartedly with everything that you write, it was badly phrased from my side. Even a common word like "plan" mean different things to different people, so if you just ask a friend/colleague/neighbour "can you make a plan for X" you might be in for a surprise of what he/she produces without actually defining/agreeing on exactly what a plan is.
What I meant was refraining from trying come up with a definition and try to impose it as an axiom/common definition that everyone is assumed to agree on.
Did you actually read the post I linked to? When you say "when socialism fails as it always does", which kind of socialism are you specifically talking about? Because depending on what kind of socialism you mean, that statement is false.
b0s0z0ku and BlueStrat, please refrain from trying to define exactly what corporatism/fascism/socialism is and then argue from that. It is an exercise that provides no value.
Thanks to another moron which for political reasons are fine with throwing fair trail principals overboard you have had proposal to deny entry for
(c) Have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense;
So no charge necessary. No conviction necessary. Zero defence possibility. Just as long as some unaccountable employee in the Secretary of Homeland Security, or perhaps a TSA employee, some contractor or whoever has deemed that some alien has committed a chargeable criminal offense that's good enough.
True. As it is today for online banking for instance, every bank have their own legal contact you need to agree to in order to enable online banking. And they have this perverse incentive in that the less you understand about the contract the better for them.
Compare with how it would be if the banks were required to actively work to make contracts understandable for its customers. If all banks start out with their own contract there will be a incentive to standardise at least parts of the contract to be common between all/most banks because then for all non-first-time bank customers there will be zero or very little effort needed to read the contract when signing up as a customer because he/she already have read (most of) it before.
And how have we ended up in this situation? By not setting any requirements on contracts where there is a obvious power imbalance where one part is able to legally overrun the other part. If a company was required to consider how well the other part understands a contract we would not end up as bad as we are today.
There is also the issue in contract law of capacity, as in the ability to understand and consent.
That is unfortunately more a theoretical factor than a practical factor given how far companies are able to and allowed to skew the imbalance far beyond a David vs Goliat relation to something more like a single soldier against a national army imbalance. In most (all?) countries law/justice is not part of the mandatory education for kids (which when you think about it is crazy; all citizens of a country are supposed to follow all laws but are given no education about (the most important) laws or the justice system). So when companies have at its disposition expert lawyers with both dedicated education and experience which are paid full time to do the work vs the amateur on the other side having to follow up a case on his/her spare time, it is a guaranteed overrun.
Side note: This is worsened by morons like Jack H. Weil which for political reasons are fine with throwing fair trail principals overboard. On the issue of immigrant children not being assigned a layer but having to represent themselves - quote: I've taught immigration law to literally to three-year-olds and four-year-olds. ... They get it. ... it can be done".
There will always be a power advantage for companies that are able to factor in paying lawyers into their operational cost, and I do not think it will ever be possible to remove. But it is most certainly possible to reduce the imbalance from today's unfairness.
If a company present the same legal contract to more than 1000 persons, it is obviously a David vs Goliat relation imbalance. To counter this there should be put some requirements to that contract. If a company present the same legal contract to more than 10000 persons, even stricter requirements. 100000 persons much stricter requirements and more than a million persons - very strict requirements. Exactly the steps and requirements are up for debate, but some fair ones would be
with appropriate penalties when this is not done properly.
Yes, 73% is extremely high, but water is a plentiful resource here in Norway so wasting it is less of a problem here compared to other countries. Water is only partially metered. Most commonly the consumption is estimated based on the size of the house, but you can opt in to pay for the actual consumption. I cannot promise that absolutely no places have mandatory metering, but that would be very uncommon. At least for housholds, I think maybe companies have to pay for actually usage more commonly.
I am not at all doubting that there is mismanagement, but I just want to comment on the 40% lost to leak because that sounds like a quite normal number for leakage. Here in Norway many places are worse than that, and upon searching for some reference while writing this answer I see than worst in class is actually as bad as 73%.
The correct way to collect telemetry data would be the following:
1st question: "Hi, we would like to gather some information blah blah ... with your permission"
Then as a follow-up to the 2nd answer option: A sufficient detailed list of what is collected (possibly in a tree view/hierarchy) where you can opt in and out ala carte, e.g.
with two important additional overall options:
A pacemaker can be disassembled like this: EEVblog #1027 - Implantable NeuroStimulator Teardown.
A group prediction is just that, a prediction for the (the average of) whole group. Trying to extrapolate individual predictions from group membership is not accurate , no matter how accurate the group accuracy is.