Huh. If you're OK with Bluetooth range limitations, you can go on Aliexpress and get tags for under $2 each that you can remotely set to beep and blink with your smartphone.
And, apparently, the app tags them so you can select which particular item you want, and notes the last known location so you can look it up on your map app and know where to start looking. (Not so useful in my most common scenario, it's not like it'll tell me which room in my house to go to, but great for letting me know if I left something at work)
What's really wild is that the tags use button cells that are supposedly good for six months.
Imagine a proximity alert to your phone or smart watch so if somebody tries to steal it while you're distracted, you get a notification. Perhaps with GPS in case they initially get away from you.
Imagine a similar alarm on the zippers and pockets, so if someone tries to open your luggage, you know about it.
Maybe hide a small camera in there that takes photos when the bag is opened, so you can have evidence of that TSA bastard stealing your stuff.
> Essentially we will purge ourselves from this planet and allow nature to go on about its business without us screwing with it.
Nature is also responsible for Venus and Mars which may have been habitable in their youth. Like your investment portfolio - "Past performance is no guarantee of future results".
And in a few billion years the Sun's going to eat this entire rock.
I couldn''t tell if you're joking and I just don't find it funny or if you're serious and just politically bent.
A quick look through your posting history is not enlightening, as you careen wildly back and forth between rational posts and ones where I can almost see you frothing at the mouth as you're attacking the 'leftists' and the 'leftist media'.
No, a pointless one. The ultimate outcome was obvious from the beginning to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of economics and history.
Perhaps it was a somewhat interesting experiment in implementing a Byzantine fault tolerance solution, but maybe not given that the problem was solved a decade before Bitcoin's genesis block was generated.
>I would suggest a repeat of this experiment with a much larger pool of coins, that are easier to mine. However, I fear the pool of coins would have to be infinite, and the resources consumed would be unacceptable.
Most of the problems with Bitcoin go away if you give up what makes it Bitcoin. Have authorized 'admin' nodes that are permitted to release new tokens or re-assign old ones. Break the chain every so often by agreeing on a valid checkpoint and starting again from there. In fact, maybe just keep the ledger with the admin nodes so clients don't have to know anything but their own access credentials. Of course, that means no mining, no token limits, no appeal to the gamblers and criminals of the world.
You just recreated the credit card network, only it's STILL more complicated and expensive than reading numbers off a plastic rectangle!
I can actually see a use-case for a hardware token-based credit card with a one-time-password system, but apparently the fraud rates on current credit cards are low enough that the credit companies would rather take the losses to fraud than switch to a more secure system. Since they're profit-motivated, I trust their judgement on that.
It can certainly be treated as one; the goal is to have the longest uninterrupted chemical reaction (I'm at around 4 billion years, personally). You can narrow that down to a 'minigame' where the goal is for an organism to successfully replicate (I'm losing there, since I've only managed replacement at 2.0 children and generally you want some redundancy just to be sure). And that game can also be divided into a number of mini-minigames.
A game is a contest with rules, goals, and a scoring system. In chess it's to checkmate your opponent and avoid being checkmated using a variety of pieces that move in certain ways on a limited checkered surface. In life it's a bit more complicated, but that doesn't mean treating it like a game is a flawed strategy.
Of course we do - anything we can't explain as a natural phenomenon.
The real (and immense) difficulty is in getting enough photons into our detectors, because the distances are vast and unless you have some silly dream of planet-sized megastructures... anything we'd look for would be tiny.
>, were actions that may not create a net positive or negative are used over when the net outcome is positive.
Which is still a net improvement over humans, who may stick with actions that are actually net negative despite proof if they initially miscategorized them as positive.
What they should get the AI to do to minimize such artifacts is have a meta-analysis going where the positive associations are re-evaluated whenever the overall victory is judged to not be at stake in the event the action was correctly evaluated in the first place.
The Earth - the one example of intelligent life in the Milky Way known to humanity - is ~4.5 billion years old, and it's taken ~4 billion years of that time to have us evolve on it to the point we can post about it on Slashdot. We don't know, however, if that's an unusually long time, or an unusually short time.
Hopefully it's long or average, because our star is near the end of it's current Earth-supporting phase. If you assume you need a Sun-like star (smaller gets you a longer-lasting star, but the habitable zone gets closer to requiring planets to be tidally locked, and stellar temperament becomes a problem, too), then you pretty much want to know people can pop up on an orbiting rock in less than 4 billion years.
Anyway, at speeds we can reach with our technology, it would take around 5 million years to cross the galaxy. 5 million years is peanuts compared to the 4 billion years life has been on Earth so far. Now consider there are probably ~10 billion potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way based on our current models.
Only ONE of those 10 billion worlds has to have intelligent life begin to colonize the galaxy a mere 5 million years before we started talking about it to arrive by tea time tomorrow.
And the Sun wasn't the first star of its class to be born. There's at least one similar star we know of that's over 11 billion years old, which potentially means there's an extra 7 billion years of leeway for aliens to set up shop everywhere. Well, not everywhere - obviously if they were zipping around the Milky Way more than 4 billion years ago, Earth would just have been a hot damp rock. On the other hand, you'd expect that with the extra lead time, they'd be around pretty much every star in the sky and we'd have seen SOMETHING by now.
There are multiple levels of foolishness and ignorance in your post.
Maybe you're a kid, maybe you're an idiot... either way, it's really convenient to put people on a/. 'Foe' list and now I'll never again waste my time reading one of your comments!
>Because ST:D is literally one of the worse Sci-Fi series in years
According to Rotten Tomatoes 'certified critics', ST:D is awesome while "The Orville" is a one of the worst (major) sci-fi series in years. Oddly enough, according to Rotten Tomatoes user reviews the situation is almost exactly the opposite.
That makes me wonder who is paying those critics - because even if ST:D was somehow technically superior on multiple fronts (and I'm not seeing how that's possible), a good critic should be able to see what makes a show good for its target audience and adjust their assessment accordingly.
People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.
You get rid of the current system, it will be quickly replaced with tens of thousands of little vicious despotic governments practicing feudalism, with all the reductions in quality of life that implies.
>Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.
Bitcoin was a marginally successful experiment in creating a trustless secure distributed public ledger. It was initially used for a few fun purchases, then the crazy cryptoanarchists and libertarians took up the banner and it just started getting weirder. But hey, I'm pretty sure the mining craze drove improvements in gaming video cards, so we did get that out of it before it morphed into an 'investment' pyramid scheme.
However secure the ledger itself may theoretically be... in practical use Bitcoin is about as secure as having a wad of cash hanging out the back pocket of your pants. It's only anonymous until a person can be linked to a ledger entry, and then it's the least anonymous way in the world to transfer wealth.
And Bitcoin was never going to replace money, which quickly became obvious once you looked at the scaling issues. I'm sure the original coder was well aware of that and didn't worry about it because they never expected it to grow beyond a small circle of friends using it for shits and giggles. Or not.
Bitcoin was also never going to replace money because it enforces some basic economic policies on its use that have been proven disastrous by history; the coder was obviously neither an economist nor a historian.
As an investment, Bitcoin's a lottery ticket. If you're lucky and you get in and out at the right times, Bitcoin may still make you some money - but odds are pretty good it won't. Just ask the last round of people who invested in tulips or beanie babies.
>It's a good concept due to the environmental impact, but I fail to see why you believe internal costs won't ultimately be passed on to the consumer.
You misunderstand me - I recognize they will be, I just want to ensure the full cost of the product's life is included in the cost to the consumer.
>Other than something extreme like a flat tax, corporate tax laws don't have to apply to "everyone else", because everyone else is not running a for-profit business
Again, you misunderstand. I was not referring in this case to corporate taxes, but personal taxes. Efforts to prevent business owners from sheltering their wealth within a corporation would require laws that would affect the personal taxes everyone else too. (Academic answer: "More study is required")
> If a corporation can make a billion dollars doing unethical and greedy shit and only get fined $50 million for it, then unethical behavior is proven to be profitable, and becomes the business mantra.
Agreed. A legal principle of not allowing an offence to be profitable should be standard. A fine that is insufficient to remove the incentive for the offense, that a corporation writes off as a cost of doing business, is not a fine but a tax.
> Sadly, over 5,000 "little" people were fired while the CEO was afforded a lavish retirement.
Another principle is required here... that the general is responsible for the conduct of the troops under their command. Because if you're excused from responsibility on the grounds you were unaware of the crime, you're not a very good general, are you?
Now, perhaps it's a bit extreme to say the CEO should be criminally liable for a VP's crimes... but they shouldn't be rewarded, either. A nice law limiting payouts to responsible individuals in the event a crime is committed by an underling wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
I think that one is possible. I can see that being humanity's legacy - creating such a 'species'.
I also think the fact that we've never found any evidence of such is probably a pretty good indication that the difficulty of traversing the void between stars is likely insurmountable even if you're an AI in radiation-hardened hardware.
If you forcibly reapportion economic output to provide housing and food for all... they'll make more babies. Or, more realistically in current Western society... we'll import more people and their babies to continually ratchet up the GDP to pay for the previous generation's retirement.
We really ought to be looking at a static population. Infinite growth in a finite world isn't possible, and eventually there will be a population crash if we push it too far. To date predictions have been horribly wrong about when that crash would happen... but unless growth is curbed it WILL happen eventually.
Most people who feel the need to add, 'for life as we know it' when the subject comes up seem to be ignorant of the reasons we have for believing it is probably very safe to say 'life' instead of 'life as we know it'.
No, Si can't replace C as a backbone for complex molecules. Yes, you need a liquid in which chemistry can happen. And a (fairly gentle) energy gradient - enough to help chemistry along without breaking molecules apart before anything interesting happens with them.
There aren't any plasma beings living in a star's corona, or balloon animals floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant. No living rocks. These are INCREDIBLY safe assumptions.
What we don't have a firm grasp on is how abiogenesis happens, or how long it takes on average to develop from a chemical soup into an intelligent animal (and what factors might reasonably be used to predict variations from the average). We don't have a great understanding of where life might successfully start and take root, other than something identical to Earth... but at least we understand it is theoretically possible to be under the crust of an icy moon, in a rogue planet with enough core heat, etc.
It's not being given away, we (the more technically-inclined users) simply say that because nobody gets paid for it with money.
However, people are paid with services - search, maps, and social networking. Now, most of those people are ignorant of the trade they're making and imagine they're getting something for free, but that doesn't mean they're not trading something of value for the service they're getting.
> then expect a funding result about as good as getting them to pay taxes today
When you look at it, it's just another income distribution scheme. Somebody's losing wealth and having it given to someone else.
That's not necessarily evil, by the way. UBI solves some of the problems with traditional welfare systems - like being locked in because income quickly cuts your welfare to the point it's easier to not work. It removes some of the stress of poverty because you know you'll always be able to afford food and a warm bed. It saves money because there's less need to police the system for fraud.
In a society that is so productive that it doesn't need large portions of its population to work, UBI is probably the best way to prevent obscene concentration of wealth.
>...I can think of a dozen ways corporations weasel out of paying their fair share.
Yeah... our tax systems suck. I don't think corporations should pay taxes on income as a general rule - it all gets passed on to the consumer as a hike in price of items or services anyway. I do think they need to be taxed to internalize costs - a company that pollutes should be paying taxes to cover the cost society bears dealing with cleanup and health issues. A company that produces anything tangible should be taxed to cover recycling costs. And of course they should be taxed to cover land and municipal services to their offices, just like any other land owner.
Of course, you still have to find a way to tax the owners or they'll just keep everything in the company and control their wealth indirectly while avoiding their social tax obligations... and ultimately the required tax laws will have to apply to everyone else. It gets complicated quickly.
>The level of income gained from owning (and cultivating) a few acres of land would be astonishingly poor compared to the opportunities provided by the _mind_ of the smartest enterpreneurs.
Yet without those few acres of land anchoring the economy, everything else is impossible.
> No one needs to work and no one needs to witness scarcity.
Except for two things (assuming super-magical future tech like Star Trek replicators): land and energy.
People are physical entities, so they need a place to be. They require energy to exist (in the form of heat and food at a minimum). Neither land nor energy are infinite in supply, so there will always be competition for them.
When there's competition, an economy emerges. It can be based on barter, political capital, strength of arms, or abstracted as money, but in the end people are trading something they have for something they want.
This is why I don't see AI-controlled robots solving all of humanity's issues. Sure, maybe nobody has to mine, nobody has to farm, nobody has to manufacture, nobody has to clean, or be a cop or soldier... but no matter how easy life gets, we're going to compete for land and energy.
Whoever builds the first human-level general AI potentially owns the world - and they won't need the rest of us any more. We'll be inconvenient obstructions to whatever they want to do.
Our economic system is first built on land ownership and natural resources, then on services extracting, processing, and delivering product from those resources. Everything else is just moving little green pieces of paper around when those first two groups are done with them.
You can't take something like 'mining personal data for sales and marketing' and turn it into an economy-driving primary natural resource, and any economic scheme that isn't ultimately rooted in property and natural resources is doomed to fail before it is even implemented.
>It's a truly sickening perversion of Christianity.
Well, you could always ask the Pope to start preaching the virtues of charity and an austere lifestyle... from his palace, on his throne, surrounded by treasures and with servants ensuring he doesn't get dirt on his gold-encrusted robes.
"implement a plan to allow for website blockades without judicial oversight."
At present, the CRTC enforces net neutrality - pricing may be based on bandwidth and transfer, but not content.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if the ISPs actually try this, because the CRTC isn't all that strong a regulatory body from the consumer perspective, and nobody complains about illegal content being blocked.
Somewhere, though, somebody's site will be incorrectly blacklisted and there will be a lawsuit that could be a major headache for Bell, Rogers, or Telus.
>See elsewhere in this thread; it's Trump's corrupting influence, dontchaknow.
People often mix up cause and effect; Trump is an effect, not a cause.
Trump is what happens when you ignore the fact that humans are fundamentally emotional, tribal animals and you allow a significant group of disgruntled people to form a tribal identity and blame their problems on another 'tribe'... that's sad but it happens.
The people you really need to string up and beat like pinatas are the opportunists who feed the flames of such situations for personal gain. Those are the same people who could be calming the situation down, but they're too lacking in empathy and too greedy to do so. They need to be identified and eliminated from the gene pool.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh. If you're OK with Bluetooth range limitations, you can go on Aliexpress and get tags for under $2 each that you can remotely set to beep and blink with your smartphone.
And, apparently, the app tags them so you can select which particular item you want, and notes the last known location so you can look it up on your map app and know where to start looking. (Not so useful in my most common scenario, it's not like it'll tell me which room in my house to go to, but great for letting me know if I left something at work)
What's really wild is that the tags use button cells that are supposedly good for six months.
I might have to buy a bag of them.
>WTF is "smart luggage"?
I have no idea but...
>Why would I want it?
Imagine a proximity alert to your phone or smart watch so if somebody tries to steal it while you're distracted, you get a notification. Perhaps with GPS in case they initially get away from you.
Imagine a similar alarm on the zippers and pockets, so if someone tries to open your luggage, you know about it.
Maybe hide a small camera in there that takes photos when the bag is opened, so you can have evidence of that TSA bastard stealing your stuff.
> Essentially we will purge ourselves from this planet and allow nature to go on about its business without us screwing with it.
Nature is also responsible for Venus and Mars which may have been habitable in their youth. Like your investment portfolio - "Past performance is no guarantee of future results".
And in a few billion years the Sun's going to eat this entire rock.
I couldn''t tell if you're joking and I just don't find it funny or if you're serious and just politically bent.
A quick look through your posting history is not enlightening, as you careen wildly back and forth between rational posts and ones where I can almost see you frothing at the mouth as you're attacking the 'leftists' and the 'leftist media'.
>I do think it's a great experiment in economics.
No, a pointless one. The ultimate outcome was obvious from the beginning to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of economics and history.
Perhaps it was a somewhat interesting experiment in implementing a Byzantine fault tolerance solution, but maybe not given that the problem was solved a decade before Bitcoin's genesis block was generated.
>I would suggest a repeat of this experiment with a much larger pool of coins, that are easier to mine. However, I fear the pool of coins would have to be infinite, and the resources consumed would be unacceptable.
Most of the problems with Bitcoin go away if you give up what makes it Bitcoin. Have authorized 'admin' nodes that are permitted to release new tokens or re-assign old ones. Break the chain every so often by agreeing on a valid checkpoint and starting again from there. In fact, maybe just keep the ledger with the admin nodes so clients don't have to know anything but their own access credentials. Of course, that means no mining, no token limits, no appeal to the gamblers and criminals of the world.
You just recreated the credit card network, only it's STILL more complicated and expensive than reading numbers off a plastic rectangle!
I can actually see a use-case for a hardware token-based credit card with a one-time-password system, but apparently the fraud rates on current credit cards are low enough that the credit companies would rather take the losses to fraud than switch to a more secure system. Since they're profit-motivated, I trust their judgement on that.
>life isn't a game
It can certainly be treated as one; the goal is to have the longest uninterrupted chemical reaction (I'm at around 4 billion years, personally). You can narrow that down to a 'minigame' where the goal is for an organism to successfully replicate (I'm losing there, since I've only managed replacement at 2.0 children and generally you want some redundancy just to be sure). And that game can also be divided into a number of mini-minigames.
A game is a contest with rules, goals, and a scoring system. In chess it's to checkmate your opponent and avoid being checkmated using a variety of pieces that move in certain ways on a limited checkered surface. In life it's a bit more complicated, but that doesn't mean treating it like a game is a flawed strategy.
Of course we do - anything we can't explain as a natural phenomenon.
The real (and immense) difficulty is in getting enough photons into our detectors, because the distances are vast and unless you have some silly dream of planet-sized megastructures... anything we'd look for would be tiny.
>, were actions that may not create a net positive or negative are used over when the net outcome is positive.
Which is still a net improvement over humans, who may stick with actions that are actually net negative despite proof if they initially miscategorized them as positive.
What they should get the AI to do to minimize such artifacts is have a meta-analysis going where the positive associations are re-evaluated whenever the overall victory is judged to not be at stake in the event the action was correctly evaluated in the first place.
Unfortunately, the math says otherwise.
The Earth - the one example of intelligent life in the Milky Way known to humanity - is ~4.5 billion years old, and it's taken ~4 billion years of that time to have us evolve on it to the point we can post about it on Slashdot. We don't know, however, if that's an unusually long time, or an unusually short time.
Hopefully it's long or average, because our star is near the end of it's current Earth-supporting phase. If you assume you need a Sun-like star (smaller gets you a longer-lasting star, but the habitable zone gets closer to requiring planets to be tidally locked, and stellar temperament becomes a problem, too), then you pretty much want to know people can pop up on an orbiting rock in less than 4 billion years.
Anyway, at speeds we can reach with our technology, it would take around 5 million years to cross the galaxy. 5 million years is peanuts compared to the 4 billion years life has been on Earth so far. Now consider there are probably ~10 billion potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way based on our current models.
Only ONE of those 10 billion worlds has to have intelligent life begin to colonize the galaxy a mere 5 million years before we started talking about it to arrive by tea time tomorrow.
And the Sun wasn't the first star of its class to be born. There's at least one similar star we know of that's over 11 billion years old, which potentially means there's an extra 7 billion years of leeway for aliens to set up shop everywhere. Well, not everywhere - obviously if they were zipping around the Milky Way more than 4 billion years ago, Earth would just have been a hot damp rock. On the other hand, you'd expect that with the extra lead time, they'd be around pretty much every star in the sky and we'd have seen SOMETHING by now.
There are multiple levels of foolishness and ignorance in your post.
Maybe you're a kid, maybe you're an idiot... either way, it's really convenient to put people on a /. 'Foe' list and now I'll never again waste my time reading one of your comments!
>The fact that anyone watches a game drag on for four hours or longer is amazing.
I went to a football game once, and ever since I have understood why pre-game tailgate parties are so popular.
How anyone other than the players could maintain interest for the whole game while sober is a mystery to me.
>Because ST:D is literally one of the worse Sci-Fi series in years
According to Rotten Tomatoes 'certified critics', ST:D is awesome while "The Orville" is a one of the worst (major) sci-fi series in years. Oddly enough, according to Rotten Tomatoes user reviews the situation is almost exactly the opposite.
That makes me wonder who is paying those critics - because even if ST:D was somehow technically superior on multiple fronts (and I'm not seeing how that's possible), a good critic should be able to see what makes a show good for its target audience and adjust their assessment accordingly.
People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.
You get rid of the current system, it will be quickly replaced with tens of thousands of little vicious despotic governments practicing feudalism, with all the reductions in quality of life that implies.
>Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people.
Bitcoin was a marginally successful experiment in creating a trustless secure distributed public ledger. It was initially used for a few fun purchases, then the crazy cryptoanarchists and libertarians took up the banner and it just started getting weirder. But hey, I'm pretty sure the mining craze drove improvements in gaming video cards, so we did get that out of it before it morphed into an 'investment' pyramid scheme.
However secure the ledger itself may theoretically be... in practical use Bitcoin is about as secure as having a wad of cash hanging out the back pocket of your pants. It's only anonymous until a person can be linked to a ledger entry, and then it's the least anonymous way in the world to transfer wealth.
And Bitcoin was never going to replace money, which quickly became obvious once you looked at the scaling issues. I'm sure the original coder was well aware of that and didn't worry about it because they never expected it to grow beyond a small circle of friends using it for shits and giggles. Or not.
Bitcoin was also never going to replace money because it enforces some basic economic policies on its use that have been proven disastrous by history; the coder was obviously neither an economist nor a historian.
As an investment, Bitcoin's a lottery ticket. If you're lucky and you get in and out at the right times, Bitcoin may still make you some money - but odds are pretty good it won't. Just ask the last round of people who invested in tulips or beanie babies.
>It's a good concept due to the environmental impact, but I fail to see why you believe internal costs won't ultimately be passed on to the consumer.
You misunderstand me - I recognize they will be, I just want to ensure the full cost of the product's life is included in the cost to the consumer.
>Other than something extreme like a flat tax, corporate tax laws don't have to apply to "everyone else", because everyone else is not running a for-profit business
Again, you misunderstand. I was not referring in this case to corporate taxes, but personal taxes. Efforts to prevent business owners from sheltering their wealth within a corporation would require laws that would affect the personal taxes everyone else too. (Academic answer: "More study is required")
> If a corporation can make a billion dollars doing unethical and greedy shit and only get fined $50 million for it, then unethical behavior is proven to be profitable, and becomes the business mantra.
Agreed. A legal principle of not allowing an offence to be profitable should be standard. A fine that is insufficient to remove the incentive for the offense, that a corporation writes off as a cost of doing business, is not a fine but a tax.
> Sadly, over 5,000 "little" people were fired while the CEO was afforded a lavish retirement.
Another principle is required here... that the general is responsible for the conduct of the troops under their command. Because if you're excused from responsibility on the grounds you were unaware of the crime, you're not a very good general, are you?
Now, perhaps it's a bit extreme to say the CEO should be criminally liable for a VP's crimes... but they shouldn't be rewarded, either. A nice law limiting payouts to responsible individuals in the event a crime is committed by an underling wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
I think that one is possible. I can see that being humanity's legacy - creating such a 'species'.
I also think the fact that we've never found any evidence of such is probably a pretty good indication that the difficulty of traversing the void between stars is likely insurmountable even if you're an AI in radiation-hardened hardware.
There's GDP and there's what you do with it.
If you forcibly reapportion economic output to provide housing and food for all... they'll make more babies. Or, more realistically in current Western society... we'll import more people and their babies to continually ratchet up the GDP to pay for the previous generation's retirement.
We really ought to be looking at a static population. Infinite growth in a finite world isn't possible, and eventually there will be a population crash if we push it too far. To date predictions have been horribly wrong about when that crash would happen... but unless growth is curbed it WILL happen eventually.
Most people who feel the need to add, 'for life as we know it' when the subject comes up seem to be ignorant of the reasons we have for believing it is probably very safe to say 'life' instead of 'life as we know it'.
No, Si can't replace C as a backbone for complex molecules. Yes, you need a liquid in which chemistry can happen. And a (fairly gentle) energy gradient - enough to help chemistry along without breaking molecules apart before anything interesting happens with them.
There aren't any plasma beings living in a star's corona, or balloon animals floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant. No living rocks. These are INCREDIBLY safe assumptions.
What we don't have a firm grasp on is how abiogenesis happens, or how long it takes on average to develop from a chemical soup into an intelligent animal (and what factors might reasonably be used to predict variations from the average). We don't have a great understanding of where life might successfully start and take root, other than something identical to Earth... but at least we understand it is theoretically possible to be under the crust of an icy moon, in a rogue planet with enough core heat, etc.
It's not being given away, we (the more technically-inclined users) simply say that because nobody gets paid for it with money.
However, people are paid with services - search, maps, and social networking. Now, most of those people are ignorant of the trade they're making and imagine they're getting something for free, but that doesn't mean they're not trading something of value for the service they're getting.
> then expect a funding result about as good as getting them to pay taxes today
When you look at it, it's just another income distribution scheme. Somebody's losing wealth and having it given to someone else.
That's not necessarily evil, by the way. UBI solves some of the problems with traditional welfare systems - like being locked in because income quickly cuts your welfare to the point it's easier to not work. It removes some of the stress of poverty because you know you'll always be able to afford food and a warm bed. It saves money because there's less need to police the system for fraud.
In a society that is so productive that it doesn't need large portions of its population to work, UBI is probably the best way to prevent obscene concentration of wealth.
>...I can think of a dozen ways corporations weasel out of paying their fair share.
Yeah... our tax systems suck. I don't think corporations should pay taxes on income as a general rule - it all gets passed on to the consumer as a hike in price of items or services anyway. I do think they need to be taxed to internalize costs - a company that pollutes should be paying taxes to cover the cost society bears dealing with cleanup and health issues. A company that produces anything tangible should be taxed to cover recycling costs. And of course they should be taxed to cover land and municipal services to their offices, just like any other land owner.
Of course, you still have to find a way to tax the owners or they'll just keep everything in the company and control their wealth indirectly while avoiding their social tax obligations... and ultimately the required tax laws will have to apply to everyone else. It gets complicated quickly.
>The level of income gained from owning (and cultivating) a few acres of land would be astonishingly poor compared to the opportunities provided by the _mind_ of the smartest enterpreneurs.
Yet without those few acres of land anchoring the economy, everything else is impossible.
> No one needs to work and no one needs to witness scarcity.
Except for two things (assuming super-magical future tech like Star Trek replicators): land and energy.
People are physical entities, so they need a place to be. They require energy to exist (in the form of heat and food at a minimum). Neither land nor energy are infinite in supply, so there will always be competition for them.
When there's competition, an economy emerges. It can be based on barter, political capital, strength of arms, or abstracted as money, but in the end people are trading something they have for something they want.
This is why I don't see AI-controlled robots solving all of humanity's issues. Sure, maybe nobody has to mine, nobody has to farm, nobody has to manufacture, nobody has to clean, or be a cop or soldier... but no matter how easy life gets, we're going to compete for land and energy.
Whoever builds the first human-level general AI potentially owns the world - and they won't need the rest of us any more. We'll be inconvenient obstructions to whatever they want to do.
Our economic system is first built on land ownership and natural resources, then on services extracting, processing, and delivering product from those resources. Everything else is just moving little green pieces of paper around when those first two groups are done with them.
You can't take something like 'mining personal data for sales and marketing' and turn it into an economy-driving primary natural resource, and any economic scheme that isn't ultimately rooted in property and natural resources is doomed to fail before it is even implemented.
>It's a truly sickening perversion of Christianity.
Well, you could always ask the Pope to start preaching the virtues of charity and an austere lifestyle... from his palace, on his throne, surrounded by treasures and with servants ensuring he doesn't get dirt on his gold-encrusted robes.
"implement a plan to allow for website blockades without judicial oversight."
At present, the CRTC enforces net neutrality - pricing may be based on bandwidth and transfer, but not content.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if the ISPs actually try this, because the CRTC isn't all that strong a regulatory body from the consumer perspective, and nobody complains about illegal content being blocked.
Somewhere, though, somebody's site will be incorrectly blacklisted and there will be a lawsuit that could be a major headache for Bell, Rogers, or Telus.
>See elsewhere in this thread; it's Trump's corrupting influence, dontchaknow.
People often mix up cause and effect; Trump is an effect, not a cause.
Trump is what happens when you ignore the fact that humans are fundamentally emotional, tribal animals and you allow a significant group of disgruntled people to form a tribal identity and blame their problems on another 'tribe'... that's sad but it happens.
The people you really need to string up and beat like pinatas are the opportunists who feed the flames of such situations for personal gain. Those are the same people who could be calming the situation down, but they're too lacking in empathy and too greedy to do so. They need to be identified and eliminated from the gene pool.