That leaves the other reason for killer robots: so a small group of people can police the impoverished population without risking them turning to a charismatic strongman.
You missed the big reason: So a faceless group of people can sow turmoil and remain anonymous. Not being able to set up your industry in the african country you've got your eye on? Whoops, leader just got liquefied by a kill-bot. That 3rd world dictator stirring shit up again? His wife just had a terrible accident. Wife going to divorce you? Damn, she accidentally got her skull cracked by a drone that lost power and fell out of the sky! Tragic!
It's malware all over again. This time, however, it impacts hardware, software and wetware.
Machines with no conscience, ordered by leaders who possibly have no conscience.
More likely ordered by leaders advised by AI on how to most efficiently achieve their desired outcome. Maybe even with a choice of civilian casualty levels, and the difference in outcome for each one.
"Humm, do I pick 20% casualties and it ends in three weeks, or do I go for 50% and end it in one week. Well, two weeks from now I'm supposed to be going on that trip to Hawaii, so I guess I'll go for 50% and wrap this up faster."
I have fond memories of laying in a patch of cut grass at my grandparents' farm picking the tiny wild strawberries that grew there. They were intensely sweet like condensed strawberries, but only about the size of a pencil eraser. Too soft to do anything with but pick with child fingers and lick off the mushed flesh and sweet juice.
If that flavor could be put into a more solid berry of a reasonable size....that'd destroy the current strawberry market.
But if they are as productive in 32 hours as they are in 40 hours, as the story suggests, are they actually working less or just being in the office less?
I'd probably even give up a bit in order to work less. It's not laziness. It's the recognition that I want more out of life than being someone's employee.
But then you'd have less value to society. As long as we're capitalistic-focused, your value in society is in what you produce and what you consume. Do less of either, and you're a less valuable person to society.
Combine that with a puritanical mindset that god rewards the just and punishes the unjust, and you've got the wonderful world-view of working you described. It's going to be very hard to overcome that in a majority of the population, which would be necessary to make the societal shift to working less.
No, it does not. This is what we've been mostly doing over the last 30 years when our workers' wages have stagnated for the last 30 years. This way of doing things has seen the near-collapse of our manufacturing base, with widespread underemployment and unemployment and Trump is putting a stop to it.
Nicely done getting all worked up about the first half of a sentence while ignoring the critical second half! The near-collapse of our manufacturing base is because it's cheaper to make things in other countries. Correct. But you ignored the second half of that very sentence which said,
...and spend the resources we'd have normally spent making it on something we can do more efficiently.
That's the missing part. We haven't done that. What "we've" done is pocket the money we saved and failed to reinvest it back into another product or service. You know, those things created by people doing a thing we call a job.
Just because the US has failed on this doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
Isolationist trade policies make just about everything cost more while everyone else willing to trade globally gets cheaper goods and services, and a higher quality of life. The issue isn't in the global market. It's in the the social and political systems that deny the full benefit of the global market from a subset of the population.
If you would bother to learn what you're talking about instead of just repeating incorrect political talking points, you'd seem much more intelligent.
Tariffs are only a fraction of the issue. If you're not a moron, you also look at the amount spent subsidizing the product in each country, and you look at the total of both goods and services exchanged between the two countries, and weight those including the tariffs. That's actually fair accounting, and not cherry-picking a number to prove your point.
If one country can make one product cheaper, it doesn't make sense to try to have balanced trade with them. It's in our best interest to buy that product or service at a lower dollar amount, and spend the resources we'd have normally spent making it on something we can do more efficiently. Making everything cost more and run less efficiently just to get a trade deficit number which will make Trump feel like a winner is stupid. This is why pretty much every serious economist is against what Trump is doing.
Well, I'm a bit torn. On one hand, yeah, you're 100% correct. On the other hand, stupid, ignorant people die when food labels aren't idiot proof.
There was a news story just this week of a teenager with a deathly peanut allergy. Always ate Chips Ahoy in the red package because it was safe. Went to a friend's house and that same package had "with Reeses Pieces bites" slapped all over the sides, but she just saw the familiar color, and slammed down a couple of cookies. Couple minutes later her throat starts closing up, so she ran home for the epipen because she was having a reaction, they called 911, and she died at the hospital.
There's a balance somewhere between "clear enough that most idiots won't die" and "they would have died anyway on something else because they are so dumb". I'm not really sure how society goes about deciding on that line. While the world will always make a better idiot, "not looking quite closely enough" probably shouldn't have fatal consequences in most circumstances.
and entrenched interests who get their gravy train from the wide variety of inefficiencies
And when you dig into the health care system in the US to any appreciable extent you realize that it's not just a gravy train of inefficiencies, it's inefficiencies all the way down. Inefficiency is a core structural component of the US healthcare system.
with difficulties, of course, there are lines, and in some areas, primary care doctors are harder to find - natural outcomes of a much more economical system
Hahahahahaha. That's hilarious. I'm in the US and I have Cadillac insurance.
I live in a small city with a half dozen different competing hospitals. And a teaching hospital and large medical school. I just changed to better insurance, and here's how it went:
"I'd like to schedule a physical, and check on my immunizations."
"We're booked for physicals for the next six or seven months, but we can get you in for an Establish Care meeting in 3 months." The Establish Care meeting means they do a basic health checkup, ask all my info, and send me on my way. I can at least get in for emergency care at that point.
So I do that, and get referred to a specialist for an issue. Luckily I could make an appointment with the specialist only 3.5 months later.
Seven months into my new insurance, and I have at least gotten the specialist care I needed. It's pretty amazing what paying 5x as much for insurance gets you....
Every time someone bemoans that there aren't enough X or the X they have aren't good enough, there are two questions to ask: 1) Are you paying people enough to want to do that job?/are the working conditions so shit that nobody wants to do that?, and 2) What are you doing to lower the barrier of entry for people who want in?
Almost always the problem is that the organization complaining is trying to be cheap.
It's also the beginning of the fiscal year, and the middle of the calendar year. Nobody is stressing about making their numbers for the year at this point. At the end of the year, fiscal or calendar, you often see a lot more pressure on retailers to show sales good numbers, and reduce inventory carried into the next year.
Where are these internet ads?? (I use uBlock origin personally, no ties).
The first late-night, auto-playing, pants staining ad that I ran into sometime around 1999 was the first and last. It's been open warfare since then, and the malware spreading ads that have popped up in the last 5 years or so have just reinforced my position.
I don't really see ads. If someone does and has some issue with them, that's their problem. It's a choice on their part, knowingly or not, and any issue they have is theirs.
I just hope that the two main parties adopt this thinking it's going to benefit them and hurt the other to the extent that the third parties/candidates can actually make a real difference. For the 2016 election, I don't think we disagree that it would have been better for the country to have had this voting method. We had two of the most disliked candidates ever, and to not have to vote for either one of them would have made most of both parties happier.
If Maine can do it, that shows it's possible. We just need enough other motivated people in other states to push it forward.
EV sales aren't being driven by the market though.
Absolute bullshit. There's a reason Tesla is sitting on a 2 year wait-list for cars. That's 100% market, and 0% California laws.
As soon as I'm out of my current condo and in somewhere I can easily add a 220V charging port, I'm on that list too. I'd trade the current maintenance and $30 fills for minimal maintenance and $2 fills in a heartbeat. All that's stopping me is some red tape due to the place I live, and I'm changing that soon.
To claim that it's a law driving EV sales outs you as an irrational hater of EVs. That's fine if that's your position. Just stop with the bullshit and own up to it.
When Tesla's biggest problem isn't being able to produce enough cars fast enough, it's laughable that you'd point to the law as what's driving EV sales.
Um, pretty much all of it. Median household income in the richest countries of the world is often right around there. For a young person in a single income household, that's rich.
In the long run, you can....though that hasn't happened since the Civil War.
No, you can't change anything by voting third party, by your own admission.
Look at what Maine did. In the span of just a couple of years they started the process of breaking the two party hegemony with ranked-choice voting. That's a little quicker than the 150+ year example you cited as an example of how voting 3rd party in first past the post elections can work.
I don't see how that's a preferable option, unless you're a die-hard republican or democrat interested in self-preservation.
Good idea! Lets pick minority candidates who can't win, making it a toss-up between whether we get the greater or lesser evil. That's much better than picking the lesser evil, right?
In a first-past-the-post system, the majority party candidates are the only choices. If you don't like that, you're SOL. The only option is to change the system. You can't fix anything by choosing a third party candidate.
You are absolutely incorrect. I can understand why it doesn't seem like it could impact national elections, but it absolutely does.
Gerrymandering has allowed mostly republicans to hold onto state legislative majorities while receiving far less than half the vote. In 2012 in Wisconsin, Democrats won 52% of the aggregate vote but only 39% of the seats in the Assembly.
That majority in state legislature has allowed republicans to install laws designed to prevent voting, which disproportionately impacts democratic voters. If likely democratic voters aren't allowed to vote at all, national elections are absolutely impacted by gerrymandering.
As a great example, look at Wisconsin. While I know Mother Jones isn't necessarily a great source, feel free to click through and listen to the interview where Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel says:
How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?
It should be noted that you can count the voter fraud convictions in WI over the last decade on one hand. "if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest" is absolutely saying, "if we didn't have Voter ID to keep democrats, especially blacks, from voting".
23k-45k voters are estimated to have not been able to vote due to the voter ID law. Trump won the state by 22k votes.
If the state wasn't gerrymandered, that law wouldn't have passed, and those people would have voted. The supreme court has decided to pass on this lawsuit, because apparently the democrats didn't have standing? Apparently it will take someone losing a gerrymandered district to sue, and then proving that it was the gerrymandering that caused it. I.E., gerrymandering by political parties is fine according to the supreme court. That's fucked up, and pretty undemocratic.
But we got a supreme court that thinks this way in part due to gerrymandering. How's that for full circle?
Slashdot Mirror
Google "roomba dog shit". I guarantee people fear that far more than an autonomous car.
That leaves the other reason for killer robots: so a small group of people can police the impoverished population without risking them turning to a charismatic strongman.
You missed the big reason: So a faceless group of people can sow turmoil and remain anonymous. Not being able to set up your industry in the african country you've got your eye on? Whoops, leader just got liquefied by a kill-bot. That 3rd world dictator stirring shit up again? His wife just had a terrible accident. Wife going to divorce you? Damn, she accidentally got her skull cracked by a drone that lost power and fell out of the sky! Tragic!
It's malware all over again. This time, however, it impacts hardware, software and wetware.
Machines with no conscience, ordered by leaders who possibly have no conscience.
More likely ordered by leaders advised by AI on how to most efficiently achieve their desired outcome. Maybe even with a choice of civilian casualty levels, and the difference in outcome for each one.
"Humm, do I pick 20% casualties and it ends in three weeks, or do I go for 50% and end it in one week. Well, two weeks from now I'm supposed to be going on that trip to Hawaii, so I guess I'll go for 50% and wrap this up faster."
"Siri, please order the 50% casualty strategy."
I have fond memories of laying in a patch of cut grass at my grandparents' farm picking the tiny wild strawberries that grew there. They were intensely sweet like condensed strawberries, but only about the size of a pencil eraser. Too soft to do anything with but pick with child fingers and lick off the mushed flesh and sweet juice.
If that flavor could be put into a more solid berry of a reasonable size....that'd destroy the current strawberry market.
But if they are as productive in 32 hours as they are in 40 hours, as the story suggests, are they actually working less or just being in the office less?
I'd probably even give up a bit in order to work less. It's not laziness. It's the recognition that I want more out of life than being someone's employee.
But then you'd have less value to society. As long as we're capitalistic-focused, your value in society is in what you produce and what you consume. Do less of either, and you're a less valuable person to society.
Combine that with a puritanical mindset that god rewards the just and punishes the unjust, and you've got the wonderful world-view of working you described. It's going to be very hard to overcome that in a majority of the population, which would be necessary to make the societal shift to working less.
No, it does not. This is what we've been mostly doing over the last 30 years when our workers' wages have stagnated for the last 30 years. This way of doing things has seen the near-collapse of our manufacturing base, with widespread underemployment and unemployment and Trump is putting a stop to it.
Nicely done getting all worked up about the first half of a sentence while ignoring the critical second half! The near-collapse of our manufacturing base is because it's cheaper to make things in other countries. Correct. But you ignored the second half of that very sentence which said,
...and spend the resources we'd have normally spent making it on something we can do more efficiently.
That's the missing part. We haven't done that. What "we've" done is pocket the money we saved and failed to reinvest it back into another product or service. You know, those things created by people doing a thing we call a job.
Just because the US has failed on this doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
Isolationist trade policies make just about everything cost more while everyone else willing to trade globally gets cheaper goods and services, and a higher quality of life. The issue isn't in the global market. It's in the the social and political systems that deny the full benefit of the global market from a subset of the population.
If you would bother to learn what you're talking about instead of just repeating incorrect political talking points, you'd seem much more intelligent.
Tariffs are only a fraction of the issue. If you're not a moron, you also look at the amount spent subsidizing the product in each country, and you look at the total of both goods and services exchanged between the two countries, and weight those including the tariffs. That's actually fair accounting, and not cherry-picking a number to prove your point.
If one country can make one product cheaper, it doesn't make sense to try to have balanced trade with them. It's in our best interest to buy that product or service at a lower dollar amount, and spend the resources we'd have normally spent making it on something we can do more efficiently. Making everything cost more and run less efficiently just to get a trade deficit number which will make Trump feel like a winner is stupid. This is why pretty much every serious economist is against what Trump is doing.
Well, you can cook with both of them, put them on your cereal, and drink them. How are they not interchangeable?
Well, I'm a bit torn. On one hand, yeah, you're 100% correct. On the other hand, stupid, ignorant people die when food labels aren't idiot proof.
There was a news story just this week of a teenager with a deathly peanut allergy. Always ate Chips Ahoy in the red package because it was safe. Went to a friend's house and that same package had "with Reeses Pieces bites" slapped all over the sides, but she just saw the familiar color, and slammed down a couple of cookies. Couple minutes later her throat starts closing up, so she ran home for the epipen because she was having a reaction, they called 911, and she died at the hospital.
There's a balance somewhere between "clear enough that most idiots won't die" and "they would have died anyway on something else because they are so dumb". I'm not really sure how society goes about deciding on that line. While the world will always make a better idiot, "not looking quite closely enough" probably shouldn't have fatal consequences in most circumstances.
and entrenched interests who get their gravy train from the wide variety of inefficiencies
And when you dig into the health care system in the US to any appreciable extent you realize that it's not just a gravy train of inefficiencies, it's inefficiencies all the way down. Inefficiency is a core structural component of the US healthcare system.
with difficulties, of course, there are lines, and in some areas, primary care doctors are harder to find - natural outcomes of a much more economical system
Hahahahahaha. That's hilarious. I'm in the US and I have Cadillac insurance.
I live in a small city with a half dozen different competing hospitals. And a teaching hospital and large medical school. I just changed to better insurance, and here's how it went:
"I'd like to schedule a physical, and check on my immunizations."
"We're booked for physicals for the next six or seven months, but we can get you in for an Establish Care meeting in 3 months." The Establish Care meeting means they do a basic health checkup, ask all my info, and send me on my way. I can at least get in for emergency care at that point.
So I do that, and get referred to a specialist for an issue. Luckily I could make an appointment with the specialist only 3.5 months later.
Seven months into my new insurance, and I have at least gotten the specialist care I needed. It's pretty amazing what paying 5x as much for insurance gets you....
This is the answer.
Every time someone bemoans that there aren't enough X or the X they have aren't good enough, there are two questions to ask: 1) Are you paying people enough to want to do that job?/are the working conditions so shit that nobody wants to do that?, and 2) What are you doing to lower the barrier of entry for people who want in?
Almost always the problem is that the organization complaining is trying to be cheap.
It's also the beginning of the fiscal year, and the middle of the calendar year. Nobody is stressing about making their numbers for the year at this point. At the end of the year, fiscal or calendar, you often see a lot more pressure on retailers to show sales good numbers, and reduce inventory carried into the next year.
Where are these internet ads?? (I use uBlock origin personally, no ties).
The first late-night, auto-playing, pants staining ad that I ran into sometime around 1999 was the first and last. It's been open warfare since then, and the malware spreading ads that have popped up in the last 5 years or so have just reinforced my position.
I don't really see ads. If someone does and has some issue with them, that's their problem. It's a choice on their part, knowingly or not, and any issue they have is theirs.
I agree completely.
I just hope that the two main parties adopt this thinking it's going to benefit them and hurt the other to the extent that the third parties/candidates can actually make a real difference. For the 2016 election, I don't think we disagree that it would have been better for the country to have had this voting method. We had two of the most disliked candidates ever, and to not have to vote for either one of them would have made most of both parties happier.
If Maine can do it, that shows it's possible. We just need enough other motivated people in other states to push it forward.
Absolutely. I can't see Trump being cool with providing a service to a company for free either.
EV sales aren't being driven by the market though.
Absolute bullshit. There's a reason Tesla is sitting on a 2 year wait-list for cars. That's 100% market, and 0% California laws.
As soon as I'm out of my current condo and in somewhere I can easily add a 220V charging port, I'm on that list too. I'd trade the current maintenance and $30 fills for minimal maintenance and $2 fills in a heartbeat. All that's stopping me is some red tape due to the place I live, and I'm changing that soon.
To claim that it's a law driving EV sales outs you as an irrational hater of EVs. That's fine if that's your position. Just stop with the bullshit and own up to it.
When Tesla's biggest problem isn't being able to produce enough cars fast enough, it's laughable that you'd point to the law as what's driving EV sales.
Um, pretty much all of it. Median household income in the richest countries of the world is often right around there. For a young person in a single income household, that's rich.
In the long run, you can....though that hasn't happened since the Civil War.
No, you can't change anything by voting third party, by your own admission.
Look at what Maine did. In the span of just a couple of years they started the process of breaking the two party hegemony with ranked-choice voting. That's a little quicker than the 150+ year example you cited as an example of how voting 3rd party in first past the post elections can work.
I don't see how that's a preferable option, unless you're a die-hard republican or democrat interested in self-preservation.
OMG GUYS!!!! WE SLASHDOTTED IT!!!! WE DID IT!!!!!!
How many YEARS has it been since we could to this?
WE ARE SLASHDOT. WE ARE LEGION. WE RISE ONCE MORE!!!!!*
*When pointed to .edu sites with no cloudflare- or AWS-like services to mirror them.
Good idea! Lets pick minority candidates who can't win, making it a toss-up between whether we get the greater or lesser evil. That's much better than picking the lesser evil, right?
In a first-past-the-post system, the majority party candidates are the only choices. If you don't like that, you're SOL. The only option is to change the system. You can't fix anything by choosing a third party candidate.
You are absolutely incorrect. I can understand why it doesn't seem like it could impact national elections, but it absolutely does.
Gerrymandering has allowed mostly republicans to hold onto state legislative majorities while receiving far less than half the vote. In 2012 in Wisconsin, Democrats won 52% of the aggregate vote but only 39% of the seats in the Assembly.
That majority in state legislature has allowed republicans to install laws designed to prevent voting, which disproportionately impacts democratic voters. If likely democratic voters aren't allowed to vote at all, national elections are absolutely impacted by gerrymandering.
As a great example, look at Wisconsin. While I know Mother Jones isn't necessarily a great source, feel free to click through and listen to the interview where Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel says:
How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?
It should be noted that you can count the voter fraud convictions in WI over the last decade on one hand. "if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest" is absolutely saying, "if we didn't have Voter ID to keep democrats, especially blacks, from voting".
23k-45k voters are estimated to have not been able to vote due to the voter ID law. Trump won the state by 22k votes.
If the state wasn't gerrymandered, that law wouldn't have passed, and those people would have voted. The supreme court has decided to pass on this lawsuit, because apparently the democrats didn't have standing? Apparently it will take someone losing a gerrymandered district to sue, and then proving that it was the gerrymandering that caused it. I.E., gerrymandering by political parties is fine according to the supreme court. That's fucked up, and pretty undemocratic.
But we got a supreme court that thinks this way in part due to gerrymandering. How's that for full circle?
Absolutely correct.
The GP has tried to work around the problem rather than finding a solution for it. The solution is preferential or ranked voting.
As an example of how this works, see what Maine just did for their primaries. And that's what will happen there in November too.
Yes, it's more complicated, but it's far less complicated than the "solution" that the GP describes. Imagine that happening twice in a row!
Spent.
How does having another non-tax source of income change that?