The difference being the people involved. The old antisemitics largely had no evidence other than racism. Antizionists on the other hand have friends and family, or themselves, who have been kicked out of their homes and regulated to ghetto life in the West Bank, Golan Heights, or the Gaza Strip. Some of them aren't even Muslims, but Christians- it's amazing the zionist racism that has gone on in Bethleham of all places.
Turkish destruction of Armenian life, 90 years ago?
I was once attacked on Usenet by a revisionist who claimed it was the Armenians who genocided the Turks- and he was complaining to me because my userid at the time "seebert", "sounded armenian". At one point I was getting a half a MB of e-mail EVERY SINGLE DAY from that guy- a lot at a time when my.edu mailbox had a 1MB limit.
At which point you're back to the problem of the bank unilaterally changing the interest rate whenever the hell they feel like it- because they control inflation, ultimately.
Ah, a Credit Snob. I suppose if you don't want the poor to have money that's one way of doing it. Must be nice in your rich ivory tower.
The poor are better off poor than they are in debt- if you're only poor you don't have stuff, if you're in debt you've become a slave to your stuff, forced to continue working forever to attempt to service that debt.
I stand corrected. It makes sense then, but I think that there are already laws about charging exuberant interest rates. I think they are capped at something like 60% or similar. This is still extremely high and very bad.
They all got wiped out by a 1986 Supreme Court ruling, which effectively said the usury laws had to be whatever was highest in whatever state the financial company was in. Suddenly, loads of financial companies opened offices in South Dakota- which has no usury law at all. They can now charge watever the market can bear- some companies now charge up to 520% interest on loans.
The problem with capping rates at anything has more to do with inflation than "creating slavery". I am on the side of freedom so I believe that anyone should be able to charge any interest they want provided it is legal. It does take *both* parties to agree on such rates. What I really loath are the contracts where there are additional fees not included in the normal interest rate and this is what is even more alarming than people having a perpetual CC debt at 20% or 30%.
What's more alarming to me is all of these contracts are one-sided; in the fine print the mortage and credit card companies usually add a clause allowing them to change the interest rate unilaterally. I've learned my lesson- and insisted on my last mortgage that I get a fixed rate that doesn't have that clause.
Anyway, what happens when inflation jumps to 10% or 15%? Interest rates on loans have to be *at least* that to just break even, but normally are at least 5% higher. Capping interest rates artificially would stop lending after inflation got high enough. That probably could stop inflation too, except we are now in the global economy era so inflation is usually imported as we are currently seeing (China/India used to export deflation so inflation was pulled very low, but now the wages in China are going up, yuan is going up and base metal and oil prices are 3X-5X higher than a few years ago, so inflation HAS TO happen worldwide. Interest rate increases will not stop it that easy, but I digress)
There's another answer to inflation if the interest rates are capped- a return to supply and demand pricing. With larger prices, demand falls in relation to supply, which triggers deflation.
Maybe the only possible solution is to flag people with debt problems so they can no longer get any loans. But that maybe seen as draconian as well.
Well, you see, that's what a usury law does- people with debt problems, who get charged those higher rates of interest, simply can't get loans anymore. If inflation goes beyond the usury, that is EVERYBODY who has a debt problem (inflation is a sign of irrational credit management) and nobody can get a loan.
In conclusion, I think people should be more responsible themselves as if they get into these debt problems it is usually their own doing.
And if everybody gets into these debt problems because a certain segment of society believes that they are owed a profit no matter what (inflation is driven by CxO salaries after all)?
PS. But if you are talking about the "payday loans" businesses, I really think they should be shut down. These prey on the uninformed or otherwise and I do not think there is ANY reason for their existence. If one cannot get a loan from a normal bank (ie. a line of credit) or does not have a CC because of current debt load, then they should not get more debt. Sadly these "payday loan" sharks are allowed to exist. Very sad.
Payday loans are just an extension of the primary problem- they would not be able to exist if their ability to charge interest was limited. Bring back the usury laws, and predatory lending such as Credit Cards and Payday Loans disappear- because their profit margin is such that they can't survive without those interest rates.
I submit that perhaps there aren't that many dissenters regarding climate change in New York City because we've been the most consistently exposed to all sides of the arguments and dismissed the reactionary, red-state stance a long time ago.
And thus have created for yourself a bubble every bit as impenetrable as George W Bush discussing the invasion of Iraq- and you consider this a good thing?
The red staters are RIGHT- you are a bunch of elitest pricks who just don't give a shit about the rest of the nation as long as YOU are protected to have your $1000 omelettes.
Just restricting the topic to education, the free education from K through 12 that Americans have come to expect as natural and inevitable is only just over a century old. It is a direct result of the industrial revolution, where companies were complaining that they needed more educated workers. that need for more educated workers has not dimmed as we have moved into the information era.
Actually, I'm kind of schizophrenic when it comes to who pays for what. If companies need more educated workers, perhaps companies should be paying for the education of workers instead of dumping the cost of said education on the workers themselves.
That would absolutely KILL the current housing market. It would put *millions* in the street because they could no longer get credit or find an affordable apartment. I think the country would go bankrupt in short order as 70% (or more?) of the economy is consumer spending.
If we cannot figure out how to live within our means- maybe we need to have EXACTLY that happen.
Furthermore, very few people use cash anymore. All transactions are done on credit cards or similar. If you limit the credit limit to 10% of income, then suddenly credit cards become useless. Remember that in the early 80s almost no one used credit cards.
Usury is about interest rates, not about "percent of income". IF you have good credit, loans of up to 600% of income are common in the United States at high interest rates. Loans of 300% of income are easy to find for under 10% interest.
Removing these laws allowed more freedom for the consumer. It is sad that they have used this freedom to enslave themselves. Maybe it was a mistake to get away with these laws in the 80s. Maybe people in general are not as responsible as some thought:)
So you'd rather leave them in slavery than create laws that fit the responsibility level of the general population? Guess we know which side you're on.
Considering your.sig, I would have thought you'd know that the housing bubble is alive and well in the Greater Seattle area.
Plus, we have math and science jobs here.
Only if you're an H-1b visa holder- and the Subprime meltdown is begining to affect Seattle. Unlike Manhattan- you can find a reasonable rent on an appartment in Seattle still.
If *everyone* would learn to adjust their expectations about what constitutes a minimal acceptable standard of living so that they can live without debt within or - gasp - below their means - our culture would be wealthier, stronger, and better equipped to face challenges.
Exactly right. Instead, we had 20 generations of Americans where EACH GENERATION had a higher standard of living than the previous- up until the elimination of usury laws in the 1980s. Suddenly, the next generation had a lower standard of living than their parents.
Reinstate usury laws maximizing credit card and student debt at 10%, and I'd bet the easy credit would dry up- those currently paying 20% would get a break ont their debt, but they'd also never get a credit card again!
Of all the people I know personally (most of which are under 30), they all have decent quality of life and live reasonably within their means.
Perhaps you don't know just how far in debt they are- or perhaps your idea of "a better standard of living than one's parents", which was once part of the American Dream, is the same as immigrants from South America.
But really, I think you are wrong. You can easily get a starting job in Austin for between $50 to 60K in the computer fields. Housing will run you about $12K a year renting a 1-bedroom (and that's a decent neighborhood, not the slums). That's plenty left over for food, car, gas, etc.
And if that's all that you were spending, that would be fine. But there's also the usury on those student loans (most people don't know this- but the banks can change the interest rate *after* the contract has been signed, unless it's explicitly in the contract not to- after a couple of deferments those student loans could easily exceed 20% APR), and to service the debt on the student loans, you need consumer debt when the car breaks down, etc. Also, $50 to 60K isn't a good enough salary to pay off the student debt anymore- you need $75-100k for that. At which point instead of Austin, you're looking at Manhattan.
There's good reason why Generation X and the Millenial Generation is now being called Generation Debt- on average we're spending 108% of our income just to survive.
The point is that the most dedicated will always want those few tenths of a second difference between live and canned.
And doing so will always result in bad decisions.
Just watching the ticker on the floor puts you ahead of reloading a web page!
Doesn't have to- the ticker on the floor is just data, there's no reason why it can't be displayed on a streaming push application as easily as on a web page or on the ticker disply on the floor itself.
If everyone is going to be close to the action you're going to have real issues with resolving conflicts and trades will have to be delayed by as much as seconds for all trades to be reconciled in the correct order.
Oh, gee, everybody's equal, such a horrible fate.
This is a clusterfuck waiting to happen...
Only if you're stupid enough not to process it in parallel.
Nah, they're on their way out. No, I mean become a Hedge Fund Manager. Or a high class banker. Move to NYC, the only place the housing market bubble still exists.
It's not a bad thing to ask which jobs will help you pay your student loans and give you a decent quality of life versus ones that will doom you to debt and a monastic lifestyle for years to come.
It's virtually guaranteed that the first type of jobs do not exist, and the second type are the only jobs open to people under the age of 37. Even if you earn $160,000/year, to earn that much you're going to have to live in a place that costs you $100,000/year for a studio apartment.
Get an MBA, then do something in the financial industry, which has a stranglehold on everything else to the extent of destroying progress. American corporations and government no longer care for education or REAL progress, unless it can make a buck, and even then aren't willing to reward the people who actually create that progress.
What I see there is something that could just as easily have been an online discussion over webcams- in fact, I've hosted such discussions (here at ODOT, we have rules about unneccessary waste of travel time and the technology not to). Worse yet- he was sitting in on pretty much an echo chamber of climate change- one to which dissenters were simply not available due to his location.
That is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that person-to-person contact only gets you lies.
The point is, why not create an NYSE.COM, which puts out the stories immediately, kind of like technocrat.net did when Bruce Perens got fed up with seeing "Nothing to See Here"?
At the risk of strawmanning you, did you also think we'd move to a "paperless economy" in the '90s, when in fact the volume of paper rose exponentially as the internet grew?
I think we will move to a paperless economy one day- but display technology has not kept up with Moore's law, and we've got to kill off the Baby Boomers first. I suspect we'll need direct NIC cards for human brains before we move to a paperless society- though I know a couple of guys who are working on it.
Seems to have been a similar argument, and flawed for similar reasons.
The flaw exists in putting up with imperfect human brains for information. NEVER believe what a human being tells you- they're all liars and cheats.
Also, how can you argue against the fact that people in cities will always be at least as well off as those who depend solely on the internet for information?
I don't care if they are "at least as well off". They're idiots to trust other people at all- there isn't a single person in the urban areas who isn't just out for their own enrichment.
After all, city-dwellers have access to "meatspace" networks (ugh I hate that term), in addition to the internet.
The meatspace networks are null value at best, and negative value at worst, spreading nothing more than lies and ignorance. Likewise those portions of the internet that depend upon human beings for input. I trust only automated sensors- anything else is subjective and impossible to know the difference between truth and lies.
Ever stop to think maybe there's a reason urban real estate is so expensive? This is where people want to live, because it's where information arrives first.
And it is now technically feasible to have the ENTIRE GLOBE recieve EXACTLY THE SAME INFORMATION within 700 ms. Urban doesn't matter anymore to anybody who isn't a luddite.
Here in the media capital of the world you get all the benefits of being wired to the internet--what, you think you give up the internet when you move to the city?--as well as the conscious and unconscious advantages of claiming membership in the most intricately entwined human networks in society.
Human networks are suboptimal methods of delivering information- didn't you ever play telephone in preschool? In comparison to the internet, they're worthless.
Based on experience, I submit that information-dependent industries will always cluster around physical hubs where the built and human infrastructure exists to support them.
Why? What need do information-dependant industries have of meatspace to begin with? Or at least, what do information-dependant industries that are actually dependant upon TRUTH instead of LIES and RUMOR have need of human beings who can't seem to get away from negative and false forms of information? I submit that the entire economy would be better run by expert systems- human beings should not be allowed to have money or stocks.
The lag experienced sending a packet across the internet can literally mean the difference between a successful or unsuccessful trade, based on who gets their order in first.
So the whole trading system needs an upgrade to the 21st century- if a 700ms ping is the difference between a successfull and an unsucessfull trade, then certainly HUMANS, with a minimum 900ms response time on the trading floor, are WAY too slow.
Dude, don't even TALK to me about this place. Slashdot is a circus of stupidity. Moderation is a complete failure, it is abused constantly every day. And even as it is, the system frequently takes a crap and cannot handle the load.
But it seems to do way better at diseminating information to a vast number of people than the trading floor at the NYSE does- or maybe that's the point? Controling information in an effort to become the dictators of American free enterprise?
Slashdot is a prime example of how NOT to run a website. You should use it only as a counterexample, and as an exception to any rule about needing a well-executed website to draw in traffic.
We weren't talking traffic- we were talking dissemination of news.
You're always going to need people on the trading floor, because news propagates there
Then those people need to step into the 21st century and get their news on the blogs like the rest of us.
and is automatically filtered by the crowd in a way that may never be possible through purely technical means.
Ever hear of this thing called slashdot?
But it's already true that the people who support them (and all the people trading from someplace other than the floor) already don't need to be there.
Which is as it should be. The rest of the country should get *something*.
I'm a commie- and even I think the free market has a better idea at this point. Instead of doing multiple redundancy in New York City, why not move the entire damned stock market into cyberspace where it belongs, on geographically redundant servers? It would have all sorts of good effects- you could then make the entire finanical industry work by telecomuting, and because people wouldn't have to live in that hellhole that is NYC anymore, they could see a huge exodus from the impossible housing prices.
We're definately splitting into two separate discussions- the first by what I meant as a soft science, the second on cosmology itself. But at least both are still somewhat interesting.
I will agree that human social organizations evolve. I'll even grant you that our understandings of them evolve as we refine our conceptual models. That is how all human understanding works - we address a situation where we have incomplete understanding and slowly pick out errors and correct them. How is this a reaction to an infinite universe, and why did you bring up the infinite universe thing? How does the infinite universe relate to these being soft sciences? You suggest they are soft sciences because they employ the concept of randomness as a crutch?
To me, that's the common denominator- hidden causes that come from elsewhere in space and time affecting what happens today. To me, that's the difference between a hard science- which depends on evidence that everybody can agree on as being objective- and a soft science- which incorporates some form of subjective data or hidden causes. The soft science is no less "true science" than the hard science is- we just don't understand all of the causes in a soft science (yet? Another interesting discussion is, by this definition, can a soft science *evolve into* a hard science? Meta levels there- wheels within wheels).
Ah, as so many disagreements show themselves to be, I think we have a mismatch of definitions here. I'm always happy to find this, as it is typically the root of the misunderstanding. If math and high energy physics aren't hard sciences, then what do you consider hard science to be?
Standard Newtonian physics comes close- it's based on evidence everybody can agree is objective, with no subjective beliefs or unknown causes. Another good example is chemistry- we're pretty darn sure how the 92 naturally occuring elements interact with each other now. Geology is a third- nobody can deny with the evidence there. Notice that *both* of these were indeed once soft sciences.
Here's one definition for you: Hard science is a term used to describe certain fields of the natural sciences, usually physics, geology, chemistry, and many fields of biology. The hard sciences rely on experimental, quantifiable data or the scientific method and focus on accuracy and objectivity. The hard sciences are often contrasted with soft sciences, which by contrast have less rigor.
That fits my definition- and I'd argue that Godel's incompleteness theorem in math, and the reliance on unknown causes in high energy physics and quantum physics, means they don't quite fit (yet? Once again- they may fit in the future).
This definition specifically includes physics, which I take as a superset of cosmology. We could debate on math, I suppose, but the point I'm getting at here is about cosmology.
Hmm- that's an interesting idea. Here's why I don't buy physics as a superset of Cosmology- at best they're related fields that intersect on a huge number of points, but both of which have points outside of the circle of the other. Cosmology by definition includes the begining of our universe- including the inflation problem, which happened before Planck Time, which specifically is *before* the constants many of our laws of physics are formed on existed. That's where I see the intersection of cosmology and PHILOSOPHY- before physics existed.
Slashdot Mirror
A new round of antisemitism?
The difference being the people involved. The old antisemitics largely had no evidence other than racism. Antizionists on the other hand have friends and family, or themselves, who have been kicked out of their homes and regulated to ghetto life in the West Bank, Golan Heights, or the Gaza Strip. Some of them aren't even Muslims, but Christians- it's amazing the zionist racism that has gone on in Bethleham of all places.
Turkish destruction of Armenian life, 90 years ago?
.edu mailbox had a 1MB limit.
I was once attacked on Usenet by a revisionist who claimed it was the Armenians who genocided the Turks- and he was complaining to me because my userid at the time "seebert", "sounded armenian". At one point I was getting a half a MB of e-mail EVERY SINGLE DAY from that guy- a lot at a time when my
At which point you're back to the problem of the bank unilaterally changing the interest rate whenever the hell they feel like it- because they control inflation, ultimately.
Ah, a Credit Snob. I suppose if you don't want the poor to have money that's one way of doing it. Must be nice in your rich ivory tower.
The poor are better off poor than they are in debt- if you're only poor you don't have stuff, if you're in debt you've become a slave to your stuff, forced to continue working forever to attempt to service that debt.
I stand corrected. It makes sense then, but I think that there are already laws about charging exuberant interest rates. I think they are capped at something like 60% or similar. This is still extremely high and very bad.
They all got wiped out by a 1986 Supreme Court ruling, which effectively said the usury laws had to be whatever was highest in whatever state the financial company was in. Suddenly, loads of financial companies opened offices in South Dakota- which has no usury law at all. They can now charge watever the market can bear- some companies now charge up to 520% interest on loans.
The problem with capping rates at anything has more to do with inflation than "creating slavery". I am on the side of freedom so I believe that anyone should be able to charge any interest they want provided it is legal. It does take *both* parties to agree on such rates. What I really loath are the contracts where there are additional fees not included in the normal interest rate and this is what is even more alarming than people having a perpetual CC debt at 20% or 30%.
What's more alarming to me is all of these contracts are one-sided; in the fine print the mortage and credit card companies usually add a clause allowing them to change the interest rate unilaterally. I've learned my lesson- and insisted on my last mortgage that I get a fixed rate that doesn't have that clause.
Anyway, what happens when inflation jumps to 10% or 15%? Interest rates on loans have to be *at least* that to just break even, but normally are at least 5% higher. Capping interest rates artificially would stop lending after inflation got high enough. That probably could stop inflation too, except we are now in the global economy era so inflation is usually imported as we are currently seeing (China/India used to export deflation so inflation was pulled very low, but now the wages in China are going up, yuan is going up and base metal and oil prices are 3X-5X higher than a few years ago, so inflation HAS TO happen worldwide. Interest rate increases will not stop it that easy, but I digress)
There's another answer to inflation if the interest rates are capped- a return to supply and demand pricing. With larger prices, demand falls in relation to supply, which triggers deflation.
Maybe the only possible solution is to flag people with debt problems so they can no longer get any loans. But that maybe seen as draconian as well.
Well, you see, that's what a usury law does- people with debt problems, who get charged those higher rates of interest, simply can't get loans anymore. If inflation goes beyond the usury, that is EVERYBODY who has a debt problem (inflation is a sign of irrational credit management) and nobody can get a loan.
In conclusion, I think people should be more responsible themselves as if they get into these debt problems it is usually their own doing.
And if everybody gets into these debt problems because a certain segment of society believes that they are owed a profit no matter what (inflation is driven by CxO salaries after all)?
PS. But if you are talking about the "payday loans" businesses, I really think they should be shut down. These prey on the uninformed or otherwise and I do not think there is ANY reason for their existence. If one cannot get a loan from a normal bank (ie. a line of credit) or does not have a CC because of current debt load, then they should not get more debt. Sadly these "payday loan" sharks are allowed to exist. Very sad.
Payday loans are just an extension of the primary problem- they would not be able to exist if their ability to charge interest was limited. Bring back the usury laws, and predatory lending such as Credit Cards and Payday Loans disappear- because their profit margin is such that they can't survive without those interest rates.
I submit that perhaps there aren't that many dissenters regarding climate change in New York City because we've been the most consistently exposed to all sides of the arguments and dismissed the reactionary, red-state stance a long time ago.
And thus have created for yourself a bubble every bit as impenetrable as George W Bush discussing the invasion of Iraq- and you consider this a good thing?
The red staters are RIGHT- you are a bunch of elitest pricks who just don't give a shit about the rest of the nation as long as YOU are protected to have your $1000 omelettes.
They changed the bankruptcy law in 2001 to prevent people from disposing of debt in that way.
Just restricting the topic to education, the free education from K through 12 that Americans have come to expect as natural and inevitable is only just over a century old. It is a direct result of the industrial revolution, where companies were complaining that they needed more educated workers. that need for more educated workers has not dimmed as we have moved into the information era.
Actually, I'm kind of schizophrenic when it comes to who pays for what. If companies need more educated workers, perhaps companies should be paying for the education of workers instead of dumping the cost of said education on the workers themselves.
Oh, no, we can't do that! It's too socialist!
That would absolutely KILL the current housing market. It would put *millions* in the street because they could no longer get credit or find an affordable apartment. I think the country would go bankrupt in short order as 70% (or more?) of the economy is consumer spending.
:)
If we cannot figure out how to live within our means- maybe we need to have EXACTLY that happen.
Furthermore, very few people use cash anymore. All transactions are done on credit cards or similar. If you limit the credit limit to 10% of income, then suddenly credit cards become useless. Remember that in the early 80s almost no one used credit cards.
Usury is about interest rates, not about "percent of income". IF you have good credit, loans of up to 600% of income are common in the United States at high interest rates. Loans of 300% of income are easy to find for under 10% interest.
Removing these laws allowed more freedom for the consumer. It is sad that they have used this freedom to enslave themselves. Maybe it was a mistake to get away with these laws in the 80s. Maybe people in general are not as responsible as some thought
So you'd rather leave them in slavery than create laws that fit the responsibility level of the general population? Guess we know which side you're on.
Considering your .sig, I would have thought you'd know that the housing bubble is alive and well in the Greater Seattle area.
Plus, we have math and science jobs here.
Only if you're an H-1b visa holder- and the Subprime meltdown is begining to affect Seattle. Unlike Manhattan- you can find a reasonable rent on an appartment in Seattle still.
If *everyone* would learn to adjust their expectations about what constitutes a minimal acceptable standard of living so that they can live without debt within or - gasp - below their means - our culture would be wealthier, stronger, and better equipped to face challenges.
Exactly right. Instead, we had 20 generations of Americans where EACH GENERATION had a higher standard of living than the previous- up until the elimination of usury laws in the 1980s. Suddenly, the next generation had a lower standard of living than their parents.
Reinstate usury laws maximizing credit card and student debt at 10%, and I'd bet the easy credit would dry up- those currently paying 20% would get a break ont their debt, but they'd also never get a credit card again!
Of all the people I know personally (most of which are under 30), they all have decent quality of life and live reasonably within their means.
Perhaps you don't know just how far in debt they are- or perhaps your idea of "a better standard of living than one's parents", which was once part of the American Dream, is the same as immigrants from South America.
But really, I think you are wrong. You can easily get a starting job in Austin for between $50 to 60K in the computer fields. Housing will run you about $12K a year renting a 1-bedroom (and that's a decent neighborhood, not the slums). That's plenty left over for food, car, gas, etc.
And if that's all that you were spending, that would be fine. But there's also the usury on those student loans (most people don't know this- but the banks can change the interest rate *after* the contract has been signed, unless it's explicitly in the contract not to- after a couple of deferments those student loans could easily exceed 20% APR), and to service the debt on the student loans, you need consumer debt when the car breaks down, etc. Also, $50 to 60K isn't a good enough salary to pay off the student debt anymore- you need $75-100k for that. At which point instead of Austin, you're looking at Manhattan.
There's good reason why Generation X and the Millenial Generation is now being called Generation Debt- on average we're spending 108% of our income just to survive.
The point is that the most dedicated will always want those few tenths of a second difference between live and canned.
And doing so will always result in bad decisions.
Just watching the ticker on the floor puts you ahead of reloading a web page!
Doesn't have to- the ticker on the floor is just data, there's no reason why it can't be displayed on a streaming push application as easily as on a web page or on the ticker disply on the floor itself.
If everyone is going to be close to the action you're going to have real issues with resolving conflicts and trades will have to be delayed by as much as seconds for all trades to be reconciled in the correct order.
Oh, gee, everybody's equal, such a horrible fate.
This is a clusterfuck waiting to happen...
Only if you're stupid enough not to process it in parallel.
You mean work for the RIAA?
Nah, they're on their way out. No, I mean become a Hedge Fund Manager. Or a high class banker. Move to NYC, the only place the housing market bubble still exists.
It's not a bad thing to ask which jobs will help you pay your student loans and give you a decent quality of life versus ones that will doom you to debt and a monastic lifestyle for years to come.
It's virtually guaranteed that the first type of jobs do not exist, and the second type are the only jobs open to people under the age of 37. Even if you earn $160,000/year, to earn that much you're going to have to live in a place that costs you $100,000/year for a studio apartment.
Get an MBA, then do something in the financial industry, which has a stranglehold on everything else to the extent of destroying progress. American corporations and government no longer care for education or REAL progress, unless it can make a buck, and even then aren't willing to reward the people who actually create that progress.
What I see there is something that could just as easily have been an online discussion over webcams- in fact, I've hosted such discussions (here at ODOT, we have rules about unneccessary waste of travel time and the technology not to). Worse yet- he was sitting in on pretty much an echo chamber of climate change- one to which dissenters were simply not available due to his location.
That is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that person-to-person contact only gets you lies.
The point is, why not create an NYSE.COM, which puts out the stories immediately, kind of like technocrat.net did when Bruce Perens got fed up with seeing "Nothing to See Here"?
At the risk of strawmanning you, did you also think we'd move to a "paperless economy" in the '90s, when in fact the volume of paper rose exponentially as the internet grew?
I think we will move to a paperless economy one day- but display technology has not kept up with Moore's law, and we've got to kill off the Baby Boomers first. I suspect we'll need direct NIC cards for human brains before we move to a paperless society- though I know a couple of guys who are working on it.
Seems to have been a similar argument, and flawed for similar reasons.
The flaw exists in putting up with imperfect human brains for information. NEVER believe what a human being tells you- they're all liars and cheats.
Also, how can you argue against the fact that people in cities will always be at least as well off as those who depend solely on the internet for information?
I don't care if they are "at least as well off". They're idiots to trust other people at all- there isn't a single person in the urban areas who isn't just out for their own enrichment.
After all, city-dwellers have access to "meatspace" networks (ugh I hate that term), in addition to the internet.
The meatspace networks are null value at best, and negative value at worst, spreading nothing more than lies and ignorance. Likewise those portions of the internet that depend upon human beings for input. I trust only automated sensors- anything else is subjective and impossible to know the difference between truth and lies.
Ever stop to think maybe there's a reason urban real estate is so expensive? This is where people want to live, because it's where information arrives first.
And it is now technically feasible to have the ENTIRE GLOBE recieve EXACTLY THE SAME INFORMATION within 700 ms. Urban doesn't matter anymore to anybody who isn't a luddite.
Here in the media capital of the world you get all the benefits of being wired to the internet--what, you think you give up the internet when you move to the city?--as well as the conscious and unconscious advantages of claiming membership in the most intricately entwined human networks in society.
Human networks are suboptimal methods of delivering information- didn't you ever play telephone in preschool? In comparison to the internet, they're worthless.
Based on experience, I submit that information-dependent industries will always cluster around physical hubs where the built and human infrastructure exists to support them.
Why? What need do information-dependant industries have of meatspace to begin with? Or at least, what do information-dependant industries that are actually dependant upon TRUTH instead of LIES and RUMOR have need of human beings who can't seem to get away from negative and false forms of information? I submit that the entire economy would be better run by expert systems- human beings should not be allowed to have money or stocks.
The lag experienced sending a packet across the internet can literally mean the difference between a successful or unsuccessful trade, based on who gets their order in first.
So the whole trading system needs an upgrade to the 21st century- if a 700ms ping is the difference between a successfull and an unsucessfull trade, then certainly HUMANS, with a minimum 900ms response time on the trading floor, are WAY too slow.
Dude, don't even TALK to me about this place. Slashdot is a circus of stupidity. Moderation is a complete failure, it is abused constantly every day. And even as it is, the system frequently takes a crap and cannot handle the load.
But it seems to do way better at diseminating information to a vast number of people than the trading floor at the NYSE does- or maybe that's the point? Controling information in an effort to become the dictators of American free enterprise?
Slashdot is a prime example of how NOT to run a website. You should use it only as a counterexample, and as an exception to any rule about needing a well-executed website to draw in traffic.
We weren't talking traffic- we were talking dissemination of news.
You're always going to need people on the trading floor, because news propagates there
Then those people need to step into the 21st century and get their news on the blogs like the rest of us.
and is automatically filtered by the crowd in a way that may never be possible through purely technical means.
Ever hear of this thing called slashdot?
But it's already true that the people who support them (and all the people trading from someplace other than the floor) already don't need to be there.
Which is as it should be. The rest of the country should get *something*.
I'm a commie- and even I think the free market has a better idea at this point. Instead of doing multiple redundancy in New York City, why not move the entire damned stock market into cyberspace where it belongs, on geographically redundant servers? It would have all sorts of good effects- you could then make the entire finanical industry work by telecomuting, and because people wouldn't have to live in that hellhole that is NYC anymore, they could see a huge exodus from the impossible housing prices.
We're definately splitting into two separate discussions- the first by what I meant as a soft science, the second on cosmology itself. But at least both are still somewhat interesting. I will agree that human social organizations evolve. I'll even grant you that our understandings of them evolve as we refine our conceptual models. That is how all human understanding works - we address a situation where we have incomplete understanding and slowly pick out errors and correct them. How is this a reaction to an infinite universe, and why did you bring up the infinite universe thing? How does the infinite universe relate to these being soft sciences? You suggest they are soft sciences because they employ the concept of randomness as a crutch?
To me, that's the common denominator- hidden causes that come from elsewhere in space and time affecting what happens today. To me, that's the difference between a hard science- which depends on evidence that everybody can agree on as being objective- and a soft science- which incorporates some form of subjective data or hidden causes. The soft science is no less "true science" than the hard science is- we just don't understand all of the causes in a soft science (yet? Another interesting discussion is, by this definition, can a soft science *evolve into* a hard science? Meta levels there- wheels within wheels).
Ah, as so many disagreements show themselves to be, I think we have a mismatch of definitions here. I'm always happy to find this, as it is typically the root of the misunderstanding. If math and high energy physics aren't hard sciences, then what do you consider hard science to be?
Standard Newtonian physics comes close- it's based on evidence everybody can agree is objective, with no subjective beliefs or unknown causes. Another good example is chemistry- we're pretty darn sure how the 92 naturally occuring elements interact with each other now. Geology is a third- nobody can deny with the evidence there. Notice that *both* of these were indeed once soft sciences.
Here's one definition for you: Hard science is a term used to describe certain fields of the natural sciences, usually physics, geology, chemistry, and many fields of biology. The hard sciences rely on experimental, quantifiable data or the scientific method and focus on accuracy and objectivity. The hard sciences are often contrasted with soft sciences, which by contrast have less rigor.
That fits my definition- and I'd argue that Godel's incompleteness theorem in math, and the reliance on unknown causes in high energy physics and quantum physics, means they don't quite fit (yet? Once again- they may fit in the future).
This definition specifically includes physics, which I take as a superset of cosmology. We could debate on math, I suppose, but the point I'm getting at here is about cosmology.
Hmm- that's an interesting idea. Here's why I don't buy physics as a superset of Cosmology- at best they're related fields that intersect on a huge number of points, but both of which have points outside of the circle of the other. Cosmology by definition includes the begining of our universe- including the inflation problem, which happened before Planck Time, which specifically is *before* the constants many of our laws of physics are formed on existed. That's where I see the intersection of cosmology and PHILOSOPHY- before physics existed.