Imagine a world without the kind of innovation that Elon Musk has enabled because he actually reinvested his Ebay windfall into technology startups....Big established companies and governments are often too risk averse to spend capital on those sorts of projects and it does take individuals willing to take big risks on big bets.
Bullshit.
Take a look at the historical marginal tax rates during the 20th century. Take a look at those rates between the 30s and 60s. That's a point in time when we were really risk averse, and nothing was accomplished, right? I mean besides a few things like a world war won, social security nets built, an interstate highway system built, nuclear power invented and implemented, electrification of the rural US, a space race won...
The fact that we've gone away from that and you've been convinced that it's impossible is a real success on the part of the 1%. They got you good.
Massive wealth accumulation doesn't happen in a vacuum. It is the extraction of wealth from the many into the pockets of the few. If you're not considering the well-being of the many, sure, you can point to a few of the 1% who are really doing great things and say that that wealth accumulation is a good thing. But that ignores everyone in the 1% just taking their yacht to their private island and partying, and it ignores the real harm done to millions and millions by continuing to live in poverty.
Governments can do amazing things, if they have the funding to do it, and the drive and vision. Part of that requires an educated and frankly comfortable populace, and you don't get that by keeping most of them poor. You do that by making sure that excessive wealth gets reinvested into the rest of the populace. And you do that with taxes of some sort.
The top 1% have 50% of the wealth. Why would you think they should pay less than 50% of the taxes? To ever get us back to even a remotely reasonable wealth distribution, the 1% have to own far less than 50% of the wealth. We don't have many ways to remove a disgusting excess of money from a tiny percent of the population other than taxes.
What is your solution to fix this community and culture-destroying wealth inequality that doesn't involve taxing the hell out of the 1%?
Ads are a blight on our cities. And even the countryside. Miles and miles of billboards along roads. It's disgusting.
Growing up in Vermont, where billboards are banned for this very reason, it's still jarring to me to be driving out in the country in some other state only to come across some shitty billboard blocking the scenery. Now they've got LCD screens that light up and are showing video, and that's so fucking distracting I'm seriously tempted to see if a rifle could solve the problem. The advertising in Blade Runner wasn't supposed to be aspirational.
(But I do totally agree - until we somehow can pass a law that says spending must be equal, this isn't a solvable problem. And with the Citizen's United ruling, that's not going to happen anytime soon.)
And the progressives, the left were too proud to do it, too hung up on principals and bogged down trying to use the truth as their sword when politics had already moved to the post-truth world.
A couple hundred years ago this was already noted:
Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
If you've made the determination that facts are no longer relevant to the position you hold, you have literally decided to disengage from reality. It's not really possible to use reality to deal with that. (How a sizable fraction of the country managed to all come down with the same mental health problem at the same time is baffling to me.)
However, the answer to people trying to create a post-factual political system isn't to fight fantasy with fantasy either. It's sticking to what's true and offering them the mental health services they need to be able to re-engage with reality.
and are priced above what most people pay for their primary car.
Well done moving those goalposts.
It's weird that you arbitrarily decide that an EV has to be a second car. I'm not sure why you think that - the people I know that own them definitely don't think that way.
Regardless, there is not as much correlation between wealth and what someone is willing to spend on their car as you seem to think there is. I see plenty of people making not much money driving cars worth more than their annual salary, and I'm making good money and still bombing around in a 14 year old car that's probably worth about $5k. Cars are as much status symbols to people as they are necessary to get around, and if you don't know anyone who treats them like that and buys accordingly, I don't know what to tell you.
Your car being plugged into your house while you're sleeping is dystopic? Just wait until you find out that the alternate is that you're required to frequently visit the dispensaries of vast oil industry megacorps, and pay them twice as much as it takes to drive an electric, all while destroying the environment.
And you are wrong about electric cars being priced above what most people pay for their primary car. Doubly so if you include TCO and not just sticker price. Electrics are coming in at the same price-point as Accords, Camrys, and F-150s. No, there aren't any budget ones yet, but there will be in time.
Dozens of brands of $10-$50 programmable thermostats in this case.
I am baffled at people's apparent need for something more than that. Every use-case I hear is either someone too lazy or too stupid to maintain a useful temperature in their house, or who is unable tolerate anything other than getting the exact temperature exactly when they want it.
Seal your gaps, make sure your insulation is up to code, program a reasonable daily temperature profile, and then you're done. If you've bought a house built in the last 20-30 years, the first half of that work is already done.
I really do not know how you can justify needing to yell at the thermostat from under your covers that you're too cold. Are you fucking 4?
EV: you take your car. It's already charged 100% overnight.
In talking to a couple of my friends with BEVs, that's the one thing that will make them never go back to an ICE car. Range anxiety isn't a thing in their day-to-day life. When going on a longer trip, it becomes something to plan around, but that's not generally that often. And most still have an ICE car available.
Never going to a gas station doesn't seem life-changing, but they all feel it is. One less valueless waste of time, detour, and distraction in life can sometimes really be a positive change.
Except that teachers often are told that they can't assess like that, because students need a clear-cut answer. Because subjectively grading that might lead to bias, and it would be better to have a multiple choice test with well defined answers so that nobody can complain about unfair grading.
If we could let teachers be professionals and hold them to high standards, without parental or student interference, that would really help. Unfortunately, we don't pay most public school teachers enough to get great ones, and a lot of administrators (and teachers themselves) aren't interested in fighting asshole parents who often are looking for As for their kid and are seeking any way to manipulate the system to get them.
If your kid fails a multiple choice test, the best you can do is argue that the question was vague or the answer options were wrong. Both are fairly easy to counter-argue. If your kid fails a 1 hr essay on why the Maginot line was ineffective, you can attack that from all sorts of angles including bias on the part of the teacher, and them asking kids for something that doesn't have a well-defined answer. And parents (at least in the US) are insane enough that some will throw fits in the school or district office, and show up at school board meetings to shit on a teacher who didn't give their kid an A. And who will sue everyone even tangentially involved.
This leads schools to dissuade this sort of very good exam writing in favor of cut-and-dried shit that would easily stand up in court. Yet another fantastic knock-on effect of the US legal system!
You're going to be really sad then. Because that's not going to happen.
We can keep a half dozen people at most alive on the ISS with monthly supply runs, and we're less than a day away. It took us three years to just have the basic structures in place and hooked up.
Mars is 6-9 months away, and it takes a giant rocket to get there. That's no Soyuz or Falcon. That's BFR or Falcon Heavy, an Atlas or Ariane 5, a Delta IV Heavy. If we build structures as minimal as the ISS, which has already clocked in at $150 billion, we're committing to launching one of those very big, very expensive rockets every month. That means either the initial investment needs to be way, way higher to make it more self-sufficient, or we need to incur rather hefty ongoing support costs, with a launch a month of those monsters.
For what? (Not to mention, who's going to be willing to fund that?)
For a fraction of the cost we can keep sending rovers. InSight cost $0.8 billion. Curiosity was expensive at $2.5 billion. Even if you swear we can do a Mars outpost for the price of the ISS, which is laughable, we could send 60 Curiosities for that price. Given that we'll get years of service out of that rover, and given that we could build a bunch of them in bulk for a lot less money, that sort of investment makes sending people look silly.
What makes it even more unlikely is that we'll likely have to send those 60 robotic missions before people anyway, because we're going to need to prep the living site. We need to find and purify water, set up power infrastructure, create habitation, set up the HVAC and air handling. Any one of these things going wrong, which will at minimum take hundreds of billions of dollars, scraps the human mission before it even starts.
Claiming we could tap this water ice is a fantasy. Mars is poisonous. The dust is, and the water is. We're not going to ever be drilling 4km deep wells on Mars. The expense and engineering it would take to do that would pay for another 60 rovers.
To all you Wisconsin voters who believed Trump's blather and his insane, over-the-top promises, sorry, but you got exactly what you voted for: a giant bag of bullshit.
Handily ignoring that Obama won Wisconsin twice, and Trump won by less people than were purged off the rolls due to the new voter ID law. A law which the then attorney general happily admitted played a big role in the win! Please note that he is not the current AG after that bullshit, having been tossed out in the last election, along with all the Republicans in statewide office. Except the legislators in their highly gerrymandered districts, which actually picked up a Republican seat!
When you throw down partisan bullshit like that, it doesn't help anyone. There are a lot of problems with our electoral system. The voters themselves are definitely one of the problems, but there's a whole lot more that's just as important. You can't really blame the voters when they aren't allowed to vote, or their votes have been gerrymandered to not mean much.
It's not just that - you've got a lot better control over your nicotine dosage with a vape pen or e-cig. That makes it a lot easier to quit, since you can slowly wean yourself off the drug while keeping the same habits otherwise.
I can't. By the time everything on the page loads so I can interact with the content I've given up and have gone somewhere else. I swear youtube loads like websites used to on dial-up.
Reading the article, they had javelin throwers throw spears made to mimic the ones they found, because they reasoned that Neanderthals would be practiced spear throwers, and javelin throwers are the closest modern analogy to that. But that made me realize that yeah, to stay alive, Neanderthals probably practiced throwing spears, and taught the kids how to do it. Did they have spear racks near where they slept? Stand them up in the corner?
It fascinates me for some reason that a given Neanderthal probably had a favorite spear that he practiced with a lot, killed a lot of things with, and was sad about when it finally broke. Who might have carved notches in it to mark kills. I imagine him trying to make another one just like the one he broke, trying to recreate the balance, length, and girth.
There doesn't seem to be any reason that Neanderthals wouldn't nerd out about their tools the way we do now.
The article on how AI just whooped some of the best Starcraft players has definitely got me a little scared. That's a management and logistics application of pretty high order. That's the sort of thing that could help run a company.
The luddite fallacy rests on the notion that companies will forever prefer or need humans instead of machines to perform tasks, but that's not set in stone.
And it rests on the notion that humans in companies will be the ones making that decision. When the AI says, "The least efficient position in the company is X, it should be automated.", a lot of C* employees are going to take that recommendation. We are not really that far from that day.
Some of the jobs which are widespread today (social media coordinator for example) were unimaginable by most people just 30 years ago.
You just don't get it, do you?
It doesn't matter what the jobs of the future are, or whether or not we can imagine them. That's immaterial to the problem.
The problem is that between AI and automation, robots will do them better, faster, and cheaper. It doesn't matter what jobs we come up with when it doesn't make any fiscal sense to hire humans to do them.
That's what baffles me about these discussions. Every time we talk about automation, someone comes on and posts about how industries were lost in the past, but we always found new things for people to do. That completely ignores the giant problem of machines being faster and better at so many things that there increasingly will be nothing productive for us to really do.
AI just crushed some of the greatest Starcraft players in the world. That's an insanely high level of organization, management, and efficiency skills. Imagine what you can apply a similar AI to. Like building management, supply chain design, any number of logistics fields!
Sure, that's still in its infancy, but it's coming, and coming fast.
In the article on the Starcraft battles, one of the human players said that the AI was winning using novel strategies that nobody had ever seen before. He was excited because that meant there was more to learn about the game. That terrifies me, because of how many people over the years couldn't come up with a creative, novel approach that an AI could figure out in 14 days of learning.
Machine learning/AI and automation just won't leave enough stuff for us to do for jobs. FFS, we're already turning this on the arts, with moderate success! If humans aren't even able to compete on creativity, what do we really have to offer? Not efficiency, cost, reliability, speed, or consistency.
Short-term, we're likely fine. We're going to have to build all of these systems that are going to put us out of a job. We're going to have to debug them and maintain them. But just like multi-million-dollar room-sized computers are now $10 disposable items, AI and automation will go that route too, where they already haven't. That's when we're really screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a world without the kind of innovation that Elon Musk has enabled because he actually reinvested his Ebay windfall into technology startups....Big established companies and governments are often too risk averse to spend capital on those sorts of projects and it does take individuals willing to take big risks on big bets.
Bullshit.
Take a look at the historical marginal tax rates during the 20th century. Take a look at those rates between the 30s and 60s. That's a point in time when we were really risk averse, and nothing was accomplished, right? I mean besides a few things like a world war won, social security nets built, an interstate highway system built, nuclear power invented and implemented, electrification of the rural US, a space race won...
The fact that we've gone away from that and you've been convinced that it's impossible is a real success on the part of the 1%. They got you good.
Massive wealth accumulation doesn't happen in a vacuum. It is the extraction of wealth from the many into the pockets of the few. If you're not considering the well-being of the many, sure, you can point to a few of the 1% who are really doing great things and say that that wealth accumulation is a good thing. But that ignores everyone in the 1% just taking their yacht to their private island and partying, and it ignores the real harm done to millions and millions by continuing to live in poverty.
Governments can do amazing things, if they have the funding to do it, and the drive and vision. Part of that requires an educated and frankly comfortable populace, and you don't get that by keeping most of them poor. You do that by making sure that excessive wealth gets reinvested into the rest of the populace. And you do that with taxes of some sort.
The top 1% have 50% of the wealth. Why would you think they should pay less than 50% of the taxes? To ever get us back to even a remotely reasonable wealth distribution, the 1% have to own far less than 50% of the wealth. We don't have many ways to remove a disgusting excess of money from a tiny percent of the population other than taxes.
What is your solution to fix this community and culture-destroying wealth inequality that doesn't involve taxing the hell out of the 1%?
Ads are a blight on our cities. And even the countryside. Miles and miles of billboards along roads. It's disgusting.
Growing up in Vermont, where billboards are banned for this very reason, it's still jarring to me to be driving out in the country in some other state only to come across some shitty billboard blocking the scenery. Now they've got LCD screens that light up and are showing video, and that's so fucking distracting I'm seriously tempted to see if a rifle could solve the problem. The advertising in Blade Runner wasn't supposed to be aspirational.
Uh, sorry buddy, history says you totally can fight money with no money: https://www.opensecrets.org/el...
Look! 12% of the time it works every time!
(But I do totally agree - until we somehow can pass a law that says spending must be equal, this isn't a solvable problem. And with the Citizen's United ruling, that's not going to happen anytime soon.)
I completely disagree.
What it's time for is logged in users to stop feeding the trolls. And checking my watch, it's been that time for about 20 years around here.
And the progressives, the left were too proud to do it, too hung up on principals and bogged down trying to use the truth as their sword when politics had already moved to the post-truth world.
A couple hundred years ago this was already noted:
Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.
If you've made the determination that facts are no longer relevant to the position you hold, you have literally decided to disengage from reality. It's not really possible to use reality to deal with that. (How a sizable fraction of the country managed to all come down with the same mental health problem at the same time is baffling to me.)
However, the answer to people trying to create a post-factual political system isn't to fight fantasy with fantasy either. It's sticking to what's true and offering them the mental health services they need to be able to re-engage with reality.
lol, wish I had mod points for you. I'd buy 5% to fertilize my garden.
You said,
and are priced above what most people pay for their primary car.
Well done moving those goalposts.
It's weird that you arbitrarily decide that an EV has to be a second car. I'm not sure why you think that - the people I know that own them definitely don't think that way.
Regardless, there is not as much correlation between wealth and what someone is willing to spend on their car as you seem to think there is. I see plenty of people making not much money driving cars worth more than their annual salary, and I'm making good money and still bombing around in a 14 year old car that's probably worth about $5k. Cars are as much status symbols to people as they are necessary to get around, and if you don't know anyone who treats them like that and buys accordingly, I don't know what to tell you.
Your car being plugged into your house while you're sleeping is dystopic? Just wait until you find out that the alternate is that you're required to frequently visit the dispensaries of vast oil industry megacorps, and pay them twice as much as it takes to drive an electric, all while destroying the environment.
And you are wrong about electric cars being priced above what most people pay for their primary car. Doubly so if you include TCO and not just sticker price. Electrics are coming in at the same price-point as Accords, Camrys, and F-150s. No, there aren't any budget ones yet, but there will be in time.
If I need a throwaway or temporary account, can it hook me up?
What choice do you have though?
Dozens of brands of $10-$50 programmable thermostats in this case.
I am baffled at people's apparent need for something more than that. Every use-case I hear is either someone too lazy or too stupid to maintain a useful temperature in their house, or who is unable tolerate anything other than getting the exact temperature exactly when they want it.
Seal your gaps, make sure your insulation is up to code, program a reasonable daily temperature profile, and then you're done. If you've bought a house built in the last 20-30 years, the first half of that work is already done.
I really do not know how you can justify needing to yell at the thermostat from under your covers that you're too cold. Are you fucking 4?
EV: you take your car. It's already charged 100% overnight.
In talking to a couple of my friends with BEVs, that's the one thing that will make them never go back to an ICE car. Range anxiety isn't a thing in their day-to-day life. When going on a longer trip, it becomes something to plan around, but that's not generally that often. And most still have an ICE car available.
Never going to a gas station doesn't seem life-changing, but they all feel it is. One less valueless waste of time, detour, and distraction in life can sometimes really be a positive change.
Well, since we all do them on postcards now, it's a moot point, right?
Except that teachers often are told that they can't assess like that, because students need a clear-cut answer. Because subjectively grading that might lead to bias, and it would be better to have a multiple choice test with well defined answers so that nobody can complain about unfair grading.
If we could let teachers be professionals and hold them to high standards, without parental or student interference, that would really help. Unfortunately, we don't pay most public school teachers enough to get great ones, and a lot of administrators (and teachers themselves) aren't interested in fighting asshole parents who often are looking for As for their kid and are seeking any way to manipulate the system to get them.
If your kid fails a multiple choice test, the best you can do is argue that the question was vague or the answer options were wrong. Both are fairly easy to counter-argue. If your kid fails a 1 hr essay on why the Maginot line was ineffective, you can attack that from all sorts of angles including bias on the part of the teacher, and them asking kids for something that doesn't have a well-defined answer. And parents (at least in the US) are insane enough that some will throw fits in the school or district office, and show up at school board meetings to shit on a teacher who didn't give their kid an A. And who will sue everyone even tangentially involved.
This leads schools to dissuade this sort of very good exam writing in favor of cut-and-dried shit that would easily stand up in court. Yet another fantastic knock-on effect of the US legal system!
You're going to be really sad then. Because that's not going to happen.
We can keep a half dozen people at most alive on the ISS with monthly supply runs, and we're less than a day away. It took us three years to just have the basic structures in place and hooked up.
Mars is 6-9 months away, and it takes a giant rocket to get there. That's no Soyuz or Falcon. That's BFR or Falcon Heavy, an Atlas or Ariane 5, a Delta IV Heavy. If we build structures as minimal as the ISS, which has already clocked in at $150 billion, we're committing to launching one of those very big, very expensive rockets every month. That means either the initial investment needs to be way, way higher to make it more self-sufficient, or we need to incur rather hefty ongoing support costs, with a launch a month of those monsters.
For what? (Not to mention, who's going to be willing to fund that?)
For a fraction of the cost we can keep sending rovers. InSight cost $0.8 billion. Curiosity was expensive at $2.5 billion. Even if you swear we can do a Mars outpost for the price of the ISS, which is laughable, we could send 60 Curiosities for that price. Given that we'll get years of service out of that rover, and given that we could build a bunch of them in bulk for a lot less money, that sort of investment makes sending people look silly.
What makes it even more unlikely is that we'll likely have to send those 60 robotic missions before people anyway, because we're going to need to prep the living site. We need to find and purify water, set up power infrastructure, create habitation, set up the HVAC and air handling. Any one of these things going wrong, which will at minimum take hundreds of billions of dollars, scraps the human mission before it even starts.
Claiming we could tap this water ice is a fantasy. Mars is poisonous. The dust is, and the water is. We're not going to ever be drilling 4km deep wells on Mars. The expense and engineering it would take to do that would pay for another 60 rovers.
So, what part of the south are you from, Dallas May?
To all you Wisconsin voters who believed Trump's blather and his insane, over-the-top promises, sorry, but you got exactly what you voted for: a giant bag of bullshit.
Handily ignoring that Obama won Wisconsin twice, and Trump won by less people than were purged off the rolls due to the new voter ID law. A law which the then attorney general happily admitted played a big role in the win! Please note that he is not the current AG after that bullshit, having been tossed out in the last election, along with all the Republicans in statewide office. Except the legislators in their highly gerrymandered districts, which actually picked up a Republican seat!
When you throw down partisan bullshit like that, it doesn't help anyone. There are a lot of problems with our electoral system. The voters themselves are definitely one of the problems, but there's a whole lot more that's just as important. You can't really blame the voters when they aren't allowed to vote, or their votes have been gerrymandered to not mean much.
It's not just that - you've got a lot better control over your nicotine dosage with a vape pen or e-cig. That makes it a lot easier to quit, since you can slowly wean yourself off the drug while keeping the same habits otherwise.
I can't. By the time everything on the page loads so I can interact with the content I've given up and have gone somewhere else. I swear youtube loads like websites used to on dial-up.
Reading the article, they had javelin throwers throw spears made to mimic the ones they found, because they reasoned that Neanderthals would be practiced spear throwers, and javelin throwers are the closest modern analogy to that. But that made me realize that yeah, to stay alive, Neanderthals probably practiced throwing spears, and taught the kids how to do it. Did they have spear racks near where they slept? Stand them up in the corner?
It fascinates me for some reason that a given Neanderthal probably had a favorite spear that he practiced with a lot, killed a lot of things with, and was sad about when it finally broke. Who might have carved notches in it to mark kills. I imagine him trying to make another one just like the one he broke, trying to recreate the balance, length, and girth.
There doesn't seem to be any reason that Neanderthals wouldn't nerd out about their tools the way we do now.
Never. Because the shift to electric cars is going to make all of those things go away.
The article on how AI just whooped some of the best Starcraft players has definitely got me a little scared. That's a management and logistics application of pretty high order. That's the sort of thing that could help run a company.
The luddite fallacy rests on the notion that companies will forever prefer or need humans instead of machines to perform tasks, but that's not set in stone.
And it rests on the notion that humans in companies will be the ones making that decision. When the AI says, "The least efficient position in the company is X, it should be automated.", a lot of C* employees are going to take that recommendation. We are not really that far from that day.
We literally need to do less work, at least of the unsustainable kind, if we are going to avoid driving ourselves to extinction.
But where's the profit in that?
Some of the jobs which are widespread today (social media coordinator for example) were unimaginable by most people just 30 years ago.
You just don't get it, do you?
It doesn't matter what the jobs of the future are, or whether or not we can imagine them. That's immaterial to the problem.
The problem is that between AI and automation, robots will do them better, faster, and cheaper. It doesn't matter what jobs we come up with when it doesn't make any fiscal sense to hire humans to do them.
That's what baffles me about these discussions. Every time we talk about automation, someone comes on and posts about how industries were lost in the past, but we always found new things for people to do. That completely ignores the giant problem of machines being faster and better at so many things that there increasingly will be nothing productive for us to really do.
AI just crushed some of the greatest Starcraft players in the world. That's an insanely high level of organization, management, and efficiency skills. Imagine what you can apply a similar AI to. Like building management, supply chain design, any number of logistics fields!
Sure, that's still in its infancy, but it's coming, and coming fast.
In the article on the Starcraft battles, one of the human players said that the AI was winning using novel strategies that nobody had ever seen before. He was excited because that meant there was more to learn about the game. That terrifies me, because of how many people over the years couldn't come up with a creative, novel approach that an AI could figure out in 14 days of learning.
Machine learning/AI and automation just won't leave enough stuff for us to do for jobs. FFS, we're already turning this on the arts, with moderate success! If humans aren't even able to compete on creativity, what do we really have to offer? Not efficiency, cost, reliability, speed, or consistency.
Short-term, we're likely fine. We're going to have to build all of these systems that are going to put us out of a job. We're going to have to debug them and maintain them. But just like multi-million-dollar room-sized computers are now $10 disposable items, AI and automation will go that route too, where they already haven't. That's when we're really screwed.