Furthermore, justice AND revenge both do not mandate prison and/or being subject to physical or sexual abuse. There are many things that can be done in BOTH cases besides the obvious one. Prisons cost too much money and have too much lobbying pressure to maintain or grow the punishment/revenge system we have today.
Having pedophile tattooed on your forehead should be enough...
Terry Childs is going to have career problems for life, no need to waste money holding him in a cage as if he was a wild animal threatening the peace - or even put an invisible fence around his house is not worth it.
Anything that is satire is safe free speech. his is religious too. the car looks all black and the geek squads are not all black. Plus he is in another line of work, it does not create brand confusion. He could win in court.
Could this case be an example of DCMA's loophole for compatibility? Should they be allowed to stop competing services from talking to their software? You BUY the software and then have a monthly service fee you are tied to - but you can not switch-- sure they do not have to open it up, but how can they legally stop some 3rd party from competing for that service? They can make money from the software alone, which has been the case for most software for decades; allowing reverse engineered competition would mean their business model would account for the situation and they could continue.
MICROSOFT's filesharing HAD a business model around making you pay for microsoft file servers - they could have argued that other SMB software interferes with their business model back before antitrust or possibly even today and shut down all 3rd party services providing SMB services or make them pay a huge license fee. Windows server is still making MS money even though file, email, calendar, etc. alternatives who are fairly compatible exist. They didn't seem to want to take on this battle but Blizzard is and they are winning. What happens when others try to use Blizzard to create their own legally protected little monopolies?
Think of how many people like classic games and think about all the modern games and how impossible it will be to ever go back and play them when not only the emulation environment is massive but ALSO the online server based community is mandatory and possibly a (limited existanse) DRM keyserver... You get sued for pulling all that off for some small die hard community using abandoned software.
> Don't drive the employer to bankruptcy pushing for ever-higher wages.
Why not?? Employers have less "right" to employ people than workers have "rights" to jobs. If the business is not a benefit to society then it is missing its main purpose for existing: to provide JOBS. No, its not to make or service people - the purpose is to gainfully employ people - we have far far too few necessary jobs to employ the ever increasing population so we need FLUFF filler jobs to employ the majority of people and a system which promotes endless consumerism in which to fuel those worthless jobs - whose only worth is that they employ people. Perhaps someday like the Jetson's we'll have to create meaningless jobs that revolve completely around business politics to busy and employ most people while machines do the actual work.
ponder over what I just wrote for a bit before jumping into literal absolutisms and taking the easy way out by defending all you've ever known (unless you are pre-WW2 where the post war transition in the usa was most predominant example of this change/manipulation of culture.)
Sacrifice is made for many reasons and the most significant ones need not occur in battle. Being a soldier means you risk more than just death. You also risk political consequences such as being a political pawn not just a battlefield pawn and are frequently exploited. A soldier ordered to break the law must be punished either for breaking it or for disobeying orders. Its not a good situation to put oneself in; however, to some degree the volunteers are aware of this when they sign up.
In the USA's professed system, the press has just as much of a right to indirectly cause a soldiers death as a general or a bunch of politicians.
Does anybody remember a while ago when the military planned to kill WikiLeaks by undermining its reputation on multiple fronts?
How can we NOT question these attacks when their motives and methods are already publicly known??
The documents were vetted with the White House and the NY Times working together on it then you have 2 other better papers in Europe that were also working with the NY Times YET ALL WE HEAR ABOUT IS HOW WIKILEAKS IS TO BLAME!?
We'll likely have some big attack on their sources made very public and brutal since that was also part of their plans.
An honest leader would let people know what was going wrong; especially when they lack the power personally to fix it without some public outrage to move things along. Sounds pretty messed up to think competency has to do with cover ups.
Being leader means eating a lot of shit that had little to nothing to do with you. Try being a leader sometime; its easy to bitch when you are clueless. Everybody is a critic.
Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul could have been extremely popular but neither would have been allowed to progress far and despite their slim chances the party establishment and media made sure they didn't have a fair chance just to be on the safe side. It takes a large movement to break the barriers down it also must be FAST because some successful new plan will be implemented before too long.
Unlike JFK, you can't be allowed to rise to this level of power these days without being "safe" because it is far easier to knock down a beginner when they are weak than when they rise to power. I think Carter was a fluke who made it due to blow back from Nixon but they managed to assassinate him politically which was still expensive and risky. Better to avoid that situation. Obama may be in a similar situation for obvious reasons and given how openly some are borrowing from that playbook. He is referring to it as well - its not just a rerun but also refinement of the process. If the system remains in place long enough we'll have playbooks for enough situations the game can be easily rigged. Some of you may have noticed how similar the politicians talk/act so similarly and it is NOT coincidence.
Obama is changing positions now that he is in; however, I should mention that during the campaign he was quite vague on many things (as is necessary given our broken political climate.) This gets you IN but also creates disappointment because expectations differ when you are so general; furthermore, all the marketing is about EMOTIONS not much else which allows even more interpretation and contradictions for voters to make. This is your fault, not theirs - a great leader can't win without playing your emotions.
I think Obama is picking some HUGE battles and getting anything he can for them while skipping the rest which is one reason I think he is not a sell out (yet) -- healthcare being a prime example. He is trying to take on the untouchable issues the public is not smart enough to handle because they don't elect "leaders" with the guts to touch them.
Also, a good measure is how powerful they are: the more powerful, the more they are merely going along with the corrupt establishment. If they are "weak" or "ineffective" they are probably going against the flow. You must work by the laws of nature of the environment in which you live.
International waters I can understand; but wouldn't it make sense to use a bay or dig yourself a bay off the coast? you get water flow from the ocean and don't have to worry about storms or much motion.
YOU may be odd and not fit into any profiles so this stuff only sometimes generally applies to you but much of the time seems totally wrong-- but that would be a result of you being in the fringe or not existing in their sampling because you are even more rare. I'm usually one of these people who don't fit into any of the normal groups.
"Soft science" doesn't deal with concretes or literals. Its fuzzy. They look for trends in groups and try to define groups from generalized descriptions. To the untrained eye it can look odd but there is an art to it that requires training and skill development to get the "eye" for interpreting the fuzzy data that makes up the field. It is a place where being right means getting a high percentage that would be considered failure elsewhere.
Sweat shops may keep people from starving but it is a horrible living. The argument that screwing 1st world nations to bring up 3rd world nations to balance out the world's labor is false and overly simplistic. It is a race to the bottom of human existence where the worst possible (cheapest) is the goal of the system to maximize profits for the top of it.
At some point the middle class of the world will be so greatly undermined and shrunk they will not be able to afford all the products that employ the rest of the world which will again create a race to the bottom where the "balance" is that most everybody is poor. In the USA personal debt has greatly undermined our middle class already - delaying the fall in lifestyle by suckering people into over extending themselves... thus creating decades of delay in public outrage.
Remember the hype in the 90s about how we were going to be a service driven economy? including "thinking services" - a knowledge economy etc. Like the internet somehow was only going to belong to the usa or something and nobody would do anything because there would be somebody providing a service for that. I don't remember when the idiot work ethic got into the culture-- in the usa you are lazy if you don't want to work more than 35 hours a week and 4-6 weeks vacation. how they sold that to the culture I'd like to know because it is unbelievably stupid.
Fact is, we can not sustain the endless growth economic model we've embraced which includes other thoughtless growth problems like overpopulation.
The problem space is so vast when you get into the necessary details humans take for granted: Its so vast that it makes secure passwords look simplistic - this is far beyond brute forcing AES encryption. Even a simplified problem space is usually quite large in terms of possible combinations the only advantage AI work has is that there are no singular solutions but a large fuzzy set of solutions that are reasonably acceptable.
Say a monkey typed 99% of Shakespeare but it was wrong only for 1% of it: next attempt being random, the monkey would likely have 0% Shakespeare! There would be no convergence towards the answer. Even bruteforcing encryption rules out past attempts to avoid repeating itself but a random search does not. Furthermore, say the problem space is random - so then a 99% Shakespeare is light years away from the 100% Shakespeare, then no matter what the process for convergence (ie evolution) it is not going to converge which effectively puts you into the same situation as a random search.
The monkey typing thing is a silly way to state the obvious and sound good while doing so. "Its POSSIBLE but impractically time consuming" doesn't sound as good. These AI problems are nothing like monkey's typing - they learn and progress towards competency which is totally different! Again, they do this quite quickly since anything near the monkey approach wouldn't get there in our lifetimes (winning the lotto is more likely.)
Just because it is mindbogglingly complex does not mean it is intelligent...or that it has something we'd normally think of as a "memory" either. Its possible our brains are just pattern matching machines - and since we can only understand the most simple of such things we'll never figure it out (but could build a brain which could figure it out eventually and perhaps our brains are just an extremely fuzzy non-linear pattern match for #42.)
As far as Hillary, the two are nearly aligned and unfortunately her staff is his staff so it would not differ much who was president. I tend to think he expects to deal with adults instead of children and that is naive.
The reality is that the system is larger, slower to move, much more complex, and quite corrupt. Obama could be the best possible person and it would not likely change that much - at least not as much as the typical naive American thinks. I had no illusions about Obama; I am surprised the healthcare bill was as good as it was (I didn't expect any move forward; sideways at best.)
Bush's great power was an illusion, he was going WITH the system if not being a figurehead of it.
If I don't pay RENT I get the boot. If I don't pay "tax" on my home I get the boot and likely get screwed out a fair value of my stuff affixed to that land (the buildings) because a tax auction is not usually as fair as selling a house. There are plenty of rules, regulations, and ordinances for living on this land as well just as there is with rent. I'm even forced to pay for garbage service from a duopoly. How is this not like rent??
Oh and if you rent-- part of your rental payments is also property tax - around here it is itemized and last I heard, it came out to about 2/5 the total rent! So then you are paying rent to the government just for SHELTER in my city! (its not quite direct since the landlord collects it... makes interest from it...until handing it over to the gov.) Only way out is to be homeless, which is pretty much a crime here if they spot you looking homeless. I bet we have 100s we don't know about because of this cover up policy.
-
Homesteads under X dollar amount should never be taxed. Other property and expensive homesteads should be (so bill gates doesn't homestead a million acres.)
Like to build stuff? Well, how would you like it if you make yourself a great house and then lost it because your value went up too much?
Don't get me started with the county tax assessor who you must let inspect your house or they screw you on its value - you can deny the police entry using your rights but not the tax assessor; they will penalize you. If they want to tax on value they should do it when the house is SOLD instead they estimate it. Then we have the whole history of discrimination of abuse using the property tax system... it has helped many cities steal land cheaply from farmers for expansion.
Furthermore, many areas of the USA have inadequate services like SCHOOLS because its based on property taxes. So a child in a poor area is discriminated against not only from his parents house value but all the other houses around them. This makes some states dumber than others. I had a talk with an idiot from Georgia one day - he bragged how smart they were for only paying $300 per year on his million dollar house but how bad their schools were! He had to pay $30k per year to get his kid a decent education! Claimed public schools don't work. He also complained about the lazy people around him and how many couldn't read etc.... His state is near bottom on everything and he was lecturing me about how wrong my highly ranked state was?
Some public servants do something good and well intentioned that is BETTER for the public -- then some private interest finds out and declares war using whatever politicians they can sucker or buy out - the good guys LOOSE and sometimes get in trouble. This is if they don't fight, if they fight for the public then they are in trouble in 1 way or another. Making policy is not their place so even standing up for the truth on something can be seen as messing around with policy and will hurt them in the end. This is why so many learn to keep their mouths shut about anything that has such potential. They don't get whistle blower protection and they don't get job protection for doing the right thing; but if they know the right people and have a union, then they can sometimes be protected for all the wrong things...
They FEAR getting into private business's arena from my experience - because they know its not about political philosophies its because business buys influence and can wage long term battles - corrupting from the top down.
There was debate about changing road tax to be based upon WEIGHT instead of value of the car - instead we ended up with almost a flat tax:-(
Weight wears out roads which is what the tax is for. I've seen the actual numbers for roads - and its really horribly expensive as you add more weight and speed to the road design! We could solve our budget issues just by making all roads 35mph... Also allowing commercial trucking adds significantly to costs - they don't pay their fair share. My state also stopped weigh stations quite a while back so they are not getting any of that money now.
The only smart thing we are doing here is installing turnabouts and LED lights - it costs $600/year per intersection just in electricity for the stop lights! We do have car pool and bus lanes all over the city and those seem to do little since they are always empty - guess people here don't mind waiting in traffic (except some guy a while back caught with a dummy car pool.)
My 1st thought was civil rights law! Net Neutrality is not just about commerce its also about civil rights! Perhaps they could let comcast screw amazon.com or slashdot.org but be restricted on messing with free speech related websites. Who knows what this corrupt SC could come up with - you know that comcast has nothing to lose fighting it all the way and even cheating as much as possible (like paying people to fill up public forums.)
I believe it was France which came up with a better solution:
By the class of car: Tax cars by how much gas they use then take that money to lower the price of cars that use less gas.
It creates a market condition the car makers will adapt to over time, pays for itself. How you create this equation is a little tricky; but I'd not worry much about the transition since its the long term process that is the goal and the price "shocks" will quickly fade out.
One could also try a carbon tax; but that is impossible in some countries and the money from that tax will likely go elsewhere-- like back to the fossil fuel companies who get most the government energy subsidies already.
thanx. I thought we past 15 trillion already. I've heard various numbers.
Our GDP is made up of too much non-real things. We used to have larger percentages of output that were actual tangible items. Small business used to have a larger stake in it too. I'm actually NOT a fan of GDP as a measurement outside of illustrating how bad our trade deficit is (dead last by a crazy margin.)
The Gold standard was simple and understandable and fairly fixed. We moved to a dynamic complex and not understandable system where a minority can wield the complexity against us. We traded gold for Oil Dollars; the world needs oil and you buy it in US dollars which increased the value of our currency. This was similar to owning much of the gold but unlike gold, it fluctuates and oil demand will not last forever and as we've seen - Euros are also buying OIL today. The "new gold standard" refers to this Oil Dollar influence on this post gold system. This is where the modern complex monetary system mixes with OIL and energy policies where the two topics used to not be coupled. We must not only secure OIL as a fuel but also because it backs our monetary policy. In addition, we have to prop up the currency's value in other ways; giving us more attack vectors to guard than just protecting a mountain of gold.
I do tend to rant off into tangents that require a great deal more verbosity than I afford them.
amen brother! But that is a whole other side issue. The religious belief in the free market private corporation is the source for most our problems since the civil war when the modern corporation was born. Generations of propaganda tells us the corps should run everything and spending money is a form voting. This results in conclusions like how the FED can better run our monetary system for us... How the stock market can handle our social security... etc.
The debt is LARGER. Deficit is all people talk about and often confuse with the debt. The total debt is higher but when we had a "surplus" instead of using that to pay down the debt, the public thought we were in the green again !?#@! You can't ignore your mortgage because you stopped going in the hole every month!
As far as this national debt blabbing its hype - because it was a non-starter before 2009. During WWII the deficit was much higher; although, we had a real GDP back then. Also, the total debt was lower back then... but then now we monopolize the new gold standard: the US dollar -- that is until it gets so weak that it loses status or more nations allow OIL to be purchased in euros. We may have gone off gold, but we realistically traded it for OIL we didn't have but was sold in dollars...
Its not a game if you just aimlessly push buttons as the kids do in those lego games. It shouldn't be so open ended that no challenge exists other than what you make up yourself. They continue regardless as if it was a broken DVD player where you have to keep pressing play to keep it moving forward.
The darn things are the most popular ones and I think they undermine any skill building exercise.
Tic Tac Toe - it always ends up in a draw so its no longer a game but an exercise in futility. No difficulty no value. But young children enjoy it because its difficult to them.
Since you have issues with minor redistribution, I do not think you would be capable of properly redistributing my "wealth." In the USA, the party that takes the strongest positions on redistribution and betterment of society are the WORST IN HISTORY at doing any of the redistribution themselves!
We live in this condition called civilization it is highly social and interdependent; "collectivism" is a large and necessary part of existence in a civil society. Too many individualists fail to realize that they are quite dependent upon others and to get what they preach they would need LESS population and a hell of a lot more anarchy. Problems are like energy in that they are never destroyed but instead change; anarchy fixes your redistribution hangups but replaces all the management problems with lack of management problems. Its all a matter of choosing the lesser problems not creating a utopia free of all problems.
Oh, teamwork in sports is often heavily collectivist (relative to the team or to the whole sport/all players/spectators.)
Colleges are rarely about collectivist indoctrination - the FOUR I've seen had very little of this outside of sports. Those who grade with curves undermine it for example and its often not involved with the classes or interactions going on. Learning with help from others works well and other students are in the same boat --so that does contribute to a collective environment to some extent. The main source of thinking beyond oneself is the students THEMSELVES who are at an age where they outgrow their clueless teenage selfishness and train to function in the larger society outside their childhood home - the large number of students in this phase is the biggest factor. Some do not outgrow the self-centered view and some don't get over that phase and become activists.
Wealth is a term that shouldn't be used on anybody who is not in the upper 1%.
Easy task have little value while difficult tasks have much value.
I have (almost) no sense of accomplishment beating a lego themed video game other than tolerating it for so many hours with the kids who don't know better. While a REAL video game can be frustrating and require development of some skills when you finish that there is a sense of a valuable accomplishment; as far as game playing goes... I may have beaten the thing 1 time or was close to it 1 time and I remember that when I fail miserably to repeat it decades later and lack the time and motivation to do it again when I now "have a life." Besides, I did it before... which is where less difficult games become the ones played the most like Super Mario Brothers or Tetris where one can create more difficulty if they wish, but it is not required and its not so lame that it has no value.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, justice AND revenge both do not mandate prison and/or being subject to physical or sexual abuse. There are many things that can be done in BOTH cases besides the obvious one. Prisons cost too much money and have too much lobbying pressure to maintain or grow the punishment/revenge system we have today.
Having pedophile tattooed on your forehead should be enough...
Terry Childs is going to have career problems for life, no need to waste money holding him in a cage as if he was a wild animal threatening the peace - or even put an invisible fence around his house is not worth it.
Anything that is satire is safe free speech. his is religious too. the car looks all black and the geek squads are not all black. Plus he is in another line of work, it does not create brand confusion. He could win in court.
Could this case be an example of DCMA's loophole for compatibility?
Should they be allowed to stop competing services from talking to their software?
You BUY the software and then have a monthly service fee you are tied to - but you can not switch-- sure they do not have to open it up, but how can they legally stop some 3rd party from competing for that service?
They can make money from the software alone, which has been the case for most software for decades; allowing reverse engineered competition would mean their business model would account for the situation and they could continue.
MICROSOFT's filesharing HAD a business model around making you pay for microsoft file servers - they could have argued that other SMB software interferes with their business model back before antitrust or possibly even today and shut down all 3rd party services providing SMB services or make them pay a huge license fee. Windows server is still making MS money even though file, email, calendar, etc. alternatives who are fairly compatible exist. They didn't seem to want to take on this battle but Blizzard is and they are winning. What happens when others try to use Blizzard to create their own legally protected little monopolies?
Think of how many people like classic games and think about all the modern games and how impossible it will be to ever go back and play them when not only the emulation environment is massive but ALSO the online server based community is mandatory and possibly a (limited existanse) DRM keyserver... You get sued for pulling all that off for some small die hard community using abandoned software.
> Don't drive the employer to bankruptcy pushing for ever-higher wages.
Why not?? Employers have less "right" to employ people than workers have "rights" to jobs. If the business is not a benefit to society then it is missing its main purpose for existing: to provide JOBS. No, its not to make or service people - the purpose is to gainfully employ people - we have far far too few necessary jobs to employ the ever increasing population so we need FLUFF filler jobs to employ the majority of people and a system which promotes endless consumerism in which to fuel those worthless jobs - whose only worth is that they employ people. Perhaps someday like the Jetson's we'll have to create meaningless jobs that revolve completely around business politics to busy and employ most people while machines do the actual work.
ponder over what I just wrote for a bit before jumping into literal absolutisms and taking the easy way out by defending all you've ever known (unless you are pre-WW2 where the post war transition in the usa was most predominant example of this change/manipulation of culture.)
Sacrifice is made for many reasons and the most significant ones need not occur in battle. Being a soldier means you risk more than just death. You also risk political consequences such as being a political pawn not just a battlefield pawn and are frequently exploited. A soldier ordered to break the law must be punished either for breaking it or for disobeying orders. Its not a good situation to put oneself in; however, to some degree the volunteers are aware of this when they sign up.
In the USA's professed system, the press has just as much of a right to indirectly cause a soldiers death as a general or a bunch of politicians.
Does anybody remember a while ago when the military planned to kill WikiLeaks by undermining its reputation on multiple fronts?
How can we NOT question these attacks when their motives and methods are already publicly known??
The documents were vetted with the White House and the NY Times working together on it then you have 2 other better papers in Europe that were also working with the NY Times YET ALL WE HEAR ABOUT IS HOW WIKILEAKS IS TO BLAME!?
We'll likely have some big attack on their sources made very public and brutal since that was also part of their plans.
An honest leader would let people know what was going wrong; especially when they lack the power personally to fix it without some public outrage to move things along. Sounds pretty messed up to think competency has to do with cover ups.
Being leader means eating a lot of shit that had little to nothing to do with you. Try being a leader sometime; its easy to bitch when you are clueless. Everybody is a critic.
Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul could have been extremely popular but neither would have been allowed to progress far and despite their slim chances the party establishment and media made sure they didn't have a fair chance just to be on the safe side. It takes a large movement to break the barriers down it also must be FAST because some successful new plan will be implemented before too long.
Unlike JFK, you can't be allowed to rise to this level of power these days without being "safe" because it is far easier to knock down a beginner when they are weak than when they rise to power. I think Carter was a fluke who made it due to blow back from Nixon but they managed to assassinate him politically which was still expensive and risky. Better to avoid that situation. Obama may be in a similar situation for obvious reasons and given how openly some are borrowing from that playbook. He is referring to it as well - its not just a rerun but also refinement of the process. If the system remains in place long enough we'll have playbooks for enough situations the game can be easily rigged. Some of you may have noticed how similar the politicians talk/act so similarly and it is NOT coincidence.
Obama is changing positions now that he is in; however, I should mention that during the campaign he was quite vague on many things (as is necessary given our broken political climate.) This gets you IN but also creates disappointment because expectations differ when you are so general; furthermore, all the marketing is about EMOTIONS not much else which allows even more interpretation and contradictions for voters to make. This is your fault, not theirs - a great leader can't win without playing your emotions.
I think Obama is picking some HUGE battles and getting anything he can for them while skipping the rest which is one reason I think he is not a sell out (yet) -- healthcare being a prime example. He is trying to take on the untouchable issues the public is not smart enough to handle because they don't elect "leaders" with the guts to touch them.
Also, a good measure is how powerful they are: the more powerful, the more they are merely going along with the corrupt establishment. If they are "weak" or "ineffective" they are probably going against the flow. You must work by the laws of nature of the environment in which you live.
International waters I can understand; but wouldn't it make sense to use a bay or dig yourself a bay off the coast? you get water flow from the ocean and don't have to worry about storms or much motion.
YOU may be odd and not fit into any profiles so this stuff only sometimes generally applies to you but much of the time seems totally wrong-- but that would be a result of you being in the fringe or not existing in their sampling because you are even more rare. I'm usually one of these people who don't fit into any of the normal groups.
"Soft science" doesn't deal with concretes or literals. Its fuzzy. They look for trends in groups and try to define groups from generalized descriptions. To the untrained eye it can look odd but there is an art to it that requires training and skill development to get the "eye" for interpreting the fuzzy data that makes up the field. It is a place where being right means getting a high percentage that would be considered failure elsewhere.
Sweat shops may keep people from starving but it is a horrible living. The argument that screwing 1st world nations to bring up 3rd world nations to balance out the world's labor is false and overly simplistic. It is a race to the bottom of human existence where the worst possible (cheapest) is the goal of the system to maximize profits for the top of it.
At some point the middle class of the world will be so greatly undermined and shrunk they will not be able to afford all the products that employ the rest of the world which will again create a race to the bottom where the "balance" is that most everybody is poor. In the USA personal debt has greatly undermined our middle class already - delaying the fall in lifestyle by suckering people into over extending themselves... thus creating decades of delay in public outrage.
Remember the hype in the 90s about how we were going to be a service driven economy? including "thinking services" - a knowledge economy etc. Like the internet somehow was only going to belong to the usa or something and nobody would do anything because there would be somebody providing a service for that. I don't remember when the idiot work ethic got into the culture-- in the usa you are lazy if you don't want to work more than 35 hours a week and 4-6 weeks vacation. how they sold that to the culture I'd like to know because it is unbelievably stupid.
Fact is, we can not sustain the endless growth economic model we've embraced which includes other thoughtless growth problems like overpopulation.
The problem space is so vast when you get into the necessary details humans take for granted:
Its so vast that it makes secure passwords look simplistic - this is far beyond brute forcing AES encryption. Even a simplified problem space is usually quite large in terms of possible combinations the only advantage AI work has is that there are no singular solutions but a large fuzzy set of solutions that are reasonably acceptable.
Say a monkey typed 99% of Shakespeare but it was wrong only for 1% of it: next attempt being random, the monkey would likely have 0% Shakespeare! There would be no convergence towards the answer. Even bruteforcing encryption rules out past attempts to avoid repeating itself but a random search does not. Furthermore, say the problem space is random - so then a 99% Shakespeare is light years away from the 100% Shakespeare, then no matter what the process for convergence (ie evolution) it is not going to converge which effectively puts you into the same situation as a random search.
The monkey typing thing is a silly way to state the obvious and sound good while doing so. "Its POSSIBLE but impractically time consuming" doesn't sound as good. These AI problems are nothing like monkey's typing - they learn and progress towards competency which is totally different! Again, they do this quite quickly since anything near the monkey approach wouldn't get there in our lifetimes (winning the lotto is more likely.)
Just because it is mindbogglingly complex does not mean it is intelligent...or that it has something we'd normally think of as a "memory" either. Its possible our brains are just pattern matching machines - and since we can only understand the most simple of such things we'll never figure it out (but could build a brain which could figure it out eventually and perhaps our brains are just an extremely fuzzy non-linear pattern match for #42.)
As far as Hillary, the two are nearly aligned and unfortunately her staff is his staff so it would not differ much who was president. I tend to think he expects to deal with adults instead of children and that is naive.
The reality is that the system is larger, slower to move, much more complex, and quite corrupt. Obama could be the best possible person and it would not likely change that much - at least not as much as the typical naive American thinks. I had no illusions about Obama; I am surprised the healthcare bill was as good as it was (I didn't expect any move forward; sideways at best.)
Bush's great power was an illusion, he was going WITH the system if not being a figurehead of it.
If I don't pay RENT I get the boot. If I don't pay "tax" on my home I get the boot and likely get screwed out a fair value of my stuff affixed to that land (the buildings) because a tax auction is not usually as fair as selling a house. There are plenty of rules, regulations, and ordinances for living on this land as well just as there is with rent. I'm even forced to pay for garbage service from a duopoly. How is this not like rent??
Oh and if you rent-- part of your rental payments is also property tax - around here it is itemized and last I heard, it came out to about 2/5 the total rent! So then you are paying rent to the government just for SHELTER in my city! (its not quite direct since the landlord collects it... makes interest from it...until handing it over to the gov.) Only way out is to be homeless, which is pretty much a crime here if they spot you looking homeless. I bet we have 100s we don't know about because of this cover up policy.
-
Homesteads under X dollar amount should never be taxed. Other property and expensive homesteads should be (so bill gates doesn't homestead a million acres.)
Like to build stuff? Well, how would you like it if you make yourself a great house and then lost it because your value went up too much?
Don't get me started with the county tax assessor who you must let inspect your house or they screw you on its value - you can deny the police entry using your rights but not the tax assessor; they will penalize you. If they want to tax on value they should do it when the house is SOLD instead they estimate it. Then we have the whole history of discrimination of abuse using the property tax system... it has helped many cities steal land cheaply from farmers for expansion.
Furthermore, many areas of the USA have inadequate services like SCHOOLS because its based on property taxes. So a child in a poor area is discriminated against not only from his parents house value but all the other houses around them. This makes some states dumber than others. I had a talk with an idiot from Georgia one day - he bragged how smart they were for only paying $300 per year on his million dollar house but how bad their schools were! He had to pay $30k per year to get his kid a decent education! Claimed public schools don't work. He also complained about the lazy people around him and how many couldn't read etc.... His state is near bottom on everything and he was lecturing me about how wrong my highly ranked state was?
Some public servants do something good and well intentioned that is BETTER for the public -- then some private interest finds out and declares war using whatever politicians they can sucker or buy out - the good guys LOOSE and sometimes get in trouble. This is if they don't fight, if they fight for the public then they are in trouble in 1 way or another. Making policy is not their place so even standing up for the truth on something can be seen as messing around with policy and will hurt them in the end. This is why so many learn to keep their mouths shut about anything that has such potential. They don't get whistle blower protection and they don't get job protection for doing the right thing; but if they know the right people and have a union, then they can sometimes be protected for all the wrong things...
They FEAR getting into private business's arena from my experience - because they know its not about political philosophies its because business buys influence and can wage long term battles - corrupting from the top down.
Having money doesn't make you smart either. You can earn a billion form playing games no one is going to consider you a genius.
Just millions will consider you a hero.
There was debate about changing road tax to be based upon WEIGHT instead of value of the car - instead we ended up with almost a flat tax :-(
Weight wears out roads which is what the tax is for. I've seen the actual numbers for roads - and its really horribly expensive as you add more weight and speed to the road design! We could solve our budget issues just by making all roads 35mph... Also allowing commercial trucking adds significantly to costs - they don't pay their fair share. My state also stopped weigh stations quite a while back so they are not getting any of that money now.
The only smart thing we are doing here is installing turnabouts and LED lights - it costs $600/year per intersection just in electricity for the stop lights! We do have car pool and bus lanes all over the city and those seem to do little since they are always empty - guess people here don't mind waiting in traffic (except some guy a while back caught with a dummy car pool.)
My 1st thought was civil rights law! Net Neutrality is not just about commerce its also about civil rights! Perhaps they could let comcast screw amazon.com or slashdot.org but be restricted on messing with free speech related websites. Who knows what this corrupt SC could come up with - you know that comcast has nothing to lose fighting it all the way and even cheating as much as possible (like paying people to fill up public forums.)
I believe it was France which came up with a better solution:
By the class of car:
Tax cars by how much gas they use then take that money to lower the price of cars that use less gas.
It creates a market condition the car makers will adapt to over time, pays for itself. How you create this equation is a little tricky; but I'd not worry much about the transition since its the long term process that is the goal and the price "shocks" will quickly fade out.
One could also try a carbon tax; but that is impossible in some countries and the money from that tax will likely go elsewhere-- like back to the fossil fuel companies who get most the government energy subsidies already.
thanx. I thought we past 15 trillion already. I've heard various numbers.
Our GDP is made up of too much non-real things. We used to have larger percentages of output that were actual tangible items. Small business used to have a larger stake in it too. I'm actually NOT a fan of GDP as a measurement outside of illustrating how bad our trade deficit is (dead last by a crazy margin.)
The Gold standard was simple and understandable and fairly fixed. We moved to a dynamic complex and not understandable system where a minority can wield the complexity against us. We traded gold for Oil Dollars; the world needs oil and you buy it in US dollars which increased the value of our currency. This was similar to owning much of the gold but unlike gold, it fluctuates and oil demand will not last forever and as we've seen - Euros are also buying OIL today. The "new gold standard" refers to this Oil Dollar influence on this post gold system. This is where the modern complex monetary system mixes with OIL and energy policies where the two topics used to not be coupled. We must not only secure OIL as a fuel but also because it backs our monetary policy. In addition, we have to prop up the currency's value in other ways; giving us more attack vectors to guard than just protecting a mountain of gold.
I do tend to rant off into tangents that require a great deal more verbosity than I afford them.
amen brother!
But that is a whole other side issue. The religious belief in the free market private corporation is the source for most our problems since the civil war when the modern corporation was born. Generations of propaganda tells us the corps should run everything and spending money is a form voting. This results in conclusions like how the FED can better run our monetary system for us... How the stock market can handle our social security... etc.
The debt is LARGER.
Deficit is all people talk about and often confuse with the debt. The total debt is higher but when we had a "surplus" instead of using that to pay down the debt, the public thought we were in the green again !?#@!
You can't ignore your mortgage because you stopped going in the hole every month!
As far as this national debt blabbing its hype - because it was a non-starter before 2009. During WWII the deficit was much higher; although, we had a real GDP back then. Also, the total debt was lower back then... but then now we monopolize the new gold standard: the US dollar -- that is until it gets so weak that it loses status or more nations allow OIL to be purchased in euros. We may have gone off gold, but we realistically traded it for OIL we didn't have but was sold in dollars...
Its not a game if you just aimlessly push buttons as the kids do in those lego games. It shouldn't be so open ended that no challenge exists other than what you make up yourself. They continue regardless as if it was a broken DVD player where you have to keep pressing play to keep it moving forward.
The darn things are the most popular ones and I think they undermine any skill building exercise.
Tic Tac Toe - it always ends up in a draw so its no longer a game but an exercise in futility. No difficulty no value. But young children enjoy it because its difficult to them.
Since you have issues with minor redistribution, I do not think you would be capable of properly redistributing my "wealth." In the USA, the party that takes the strongest positions on redistribution and betterment of society are the WORST IN HISTORY at doing any of the redistribution themselves!
We live in this condition called civilization it is highly social and interdependent; "collectivism" is a large and necessary part of existence in a civil society. Too many individualists fail to realize that they are quite dependent upon others and to get what they preach they would need LESS population and a hell of a lot more anarchy. Problems are like energy in that they are never destroyed but instead change; anarchy fixes your redistribution hangups but replaces all the management problems with lack of management problems. Its all a matter of choosing the lesser problems not creating a utopia free of all problems.
Oh, teamwork in sports is often heavily collectivist (relative to the team or to the whole sport/all players/spectators.)
Colleges are rarely about collectivist indoctrination - the FOUR I've seen had very little of this outside of sports. Those who grade with curves undermine it for example and its often not involved with the classes or interactions going on. Learning with help from others works well and other students are in the same boat --so that does contribute to a collective environment to some extent. The main source of thinking beyond oneself is the students THEMSELVES who are at an age where they outgrow their clueless teenage selfishness and train to function in the larger society outside their childhood home - the large number of students in this phase is the biggest factor. Some do not outgrow the self-centered view and some don't get over that phase and become activists.
Wealth is a term that shouldn't be used on anybody who is not in the upper 1%.
Easy task have little value while difficult tasks have much value.
I have (almost) no sense of accomplishment beating a lego themed video game other than tolerating it for so many hours with the kids who don't know better. While a REAL video game can be frustrating and require development of some skills when you finish that there is a sense of a valuable accomplishment; as far as game playing goes... I may have beaten the thing 1 time or was close to it 1 time and I remember that when I fail miserably to repeat it decades later and lack the time and motivation to do it again when I now "have a life." Besides, I did it before... which is where less difficult games become the ones played the most like Super Mario Brothers or Tetris where one can create more difficulty if they wish, but it is not required and its not so lame that it has no value.