>Let's take the anthropomorphic out of this discussion and start over.
If we generalize too much, we might realize that intelligence represents a threat (something with goals that may conflict with ours, and a way of planning how to achieve them despite that conflict). Humans are intelligent. Therefore humans are a threat and we really ought to kill each other for our own protection.
Ahh. Do one thing, then; add a sunset clause to that fund, stage it in based on anticipated rate of natural disasters by area and decade.
Maybe you get 90% assistance now, but 80% in the event of flooding after ten years, etc. And maybe add another clause that the rate can be adjusted as models are improved and annual measurements accumulate. Possibly add a third bit that says you can take a (small but non-zero) payout from the fund to assist with relocation, and set the amount to be less than the anticipated payout for rebuilding if the person stays another 10 years.
Essentially, ya'll need to be told, "This area is becoming uninhabitable for people, and we're not going to continue supporting your efforts to live in denial of that fact".
Private companies should not be permitted to collect data on people not in a business relationship with them just because someone else shares it with them.
Let my sister mention my email address on her Facebook wall - Facebook shouldn't be able to do anything with it unless I am already a Facebook user and have provided that same email address.
Legislate them into purging any such mapped relationships from their databases, legislate them to ban rebuilding those relationship maps.
Just because privacy isn't important to someone else doesn't mean I should have to surrender mine.
I still solve a lot of problems off the clock, usually while on a drive when (other than attention required for driving) my mind can wander. I can spend hours at my desk, extremely focused, but go around in circles... and then during a trip to a satellite office the answer will come to me.
Find a way to measure that!
Much like wait and call timers for telemarketing firms (and shitty customer service cube farms), these systems are not for good companies... they're for shitty companies paying shitty wages for basic monkey work, and they want to make sure the monkeys are mashing keys.
>Earth gets to heal Herself and people become less of a plague on Earth
The attitude of 'humans are the pinnacle of Creation and Nature should be bent to their will' was admittedly extremely ignorant... however, so is the hippy bullshit you're spouting.
The reason we need biodiversity now is we recognize our ignorance and technological limitations prevent us from intelligently managing a sustainable biosphere that is human-friendly, not because Gaia's sad if we destroy the wetlands.
Life on Earth is in its geriatric phase; it's been here over 4 billion years and has less than a billion left before it's gone. And that's just if things chug along as they always have - there's no guarantee that some tipping point won't hit and turn Earth into a lifeless hell hole long before that. Nature is not intelligent, and thus not intelligently managing the environment.
If we learn how to manage a global biosphere (including some difficult things like moving the planet's orbit), we might extend this planet's habitability until the point as which the Sun no longer provides enough energy to drive an energy gradient.
On a 100-year timeline, you're going to see problems within a human lifetime, but not so quickly people can't react to them.
I say... don't bother doing much at all. People will move out on their own as the ground becomes soggy with seawater. Or we get New Nice replacing Little Havana.
Mostly I think the government ought to be looking at removing anything that will cause large-scale pollution problems if it ends up abandoned and at least partially submerged.
People really should feel OK about some degree of retributive dissemination of confidential corporate documents.
It means that as the company has a gun to your head - do as you're told or you're fired - you have a gun to theirs - treat me properly or I'll cut you.
Of course it still has to be worth the legal consequences, but that too is good because it stops you from screwing over the company for petty grievances.
In the olden days, if you had sufficient money you'd have a servant or tradesmen's entrance to your property.
These days you might have a 'mud room' or something, if not a double entrance to the foyer of your house to keep out inclement weather.
If I were designing a home today, I'd do something like have an electronic outer lock that supported easy remote addition of temporary codes, and put a security camera in it. Put the door code in the 'special instructions' for the delivery, and the courier - and nobody else - can get past the first set of doors to drop off a package, but no further. And when they're done, or the time allotted expires, the access code is disabled.
>when the Richard Bransons and Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts of the world get together and talk about their grand schemes they laugh at the little people who make it all possible
This is what really gets me - there is NO way that any of those people are providing value to civilization that is proportionate to the wealth they control. No human being could possibly be worth so much to us collectively that they should make more in a few minutes than another productive human can possibly make in a lifetime.
And I think ultimately that is what we should be aiming for when we talk about correcting wealth inequity - your personal cost/benefit to the planet should more or less balance out to zero under ideal circumstances. Obviously that's not possible even in a world where you could accurately calculate that, because most of us have at least an ounce of compassion and wouldn't write off the disabled, the sick, the elderly, or the merely redundant (this last one becoming more of a problem as human labour becomes less economically important). And communism sure as hell didn't work out well for anyone in the long run.
However, I think it's a good general target we should be aiming for while trying to figure out something better than the current system. You should get a share of benefits from the system more or less equivalent to the share of value you put in.
Marx said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". I say, "From each according to their will and society's need, to each according to their contribution and personal need". Not quite as catchy, though.
You're covering for your side's criminal now, by trying to deflect public interest from Trump's Russian ties onto the other side's most visible figurehead.
>Japan, Europe and China also have appropriate satellites, as mentioned in the article.
Which seems wasteful to me. Monitoring the planet (for non-military / intelligence reasons) seems like a natural mandate for the UN. (Or maybe a non-political equivalent)
Let scientists around the world decide what needs to be monitored, and use the UN as an umbrella operation to get the required systems in place. Go to RFP and let the country that can meet the specs for the least money (including guaranteed system lifetime) get the job, and supply the results to any nation that's not in arrears with the UN.
Tax avoidance being a problem means the tax laws need to be rewritten. Expecting people not to keep as much of their wealth as possible within the law is foolish. You 'avoid' taxes every time you claim a deduction... go ahead, tell me you never claim a deduction on your taxes...
Tax evasion, on the other hand... that's effectively treason, since you're not giving your share as required by the laws of the society within which you generated your wealth in the first place. Tax evasion makes you a parasite.
The problem is when those doing the tax avoiding start to look a lot like the tax evaders because they have influence and lawyers who let them have the rules altered or escape the consequences of pushing the grey areas too much.
>I suspect real Americans take a dim view of a high administration official who maintains financial ties to companies being sanctioned by the US government.
I suspect 'real' Americans are comprised of citizens of the USA, and a significant number of them will ignore this because it reflects poorly on Trump, who isn't one of those dirty Dems and certainly isn't a black secret Muslim who was born in Kenya.
I think the term is 'squee'. I had no idea there was a movie adaptation in the works.
I'd hope they follow the books, only put them in chronological order and clean up the inconsistencies caused by McCaffrey writing them out of sequence.
And definitely tone down the 'strong woman except eventually she has to be rescued by a stronger man' vibe that many of the stories give off.
And out of all of the stories, I think I'd most like to see the Harper Hall trilogy adapted. On the other hand, Dragonsdawn and All the Weyrs of Pern would be a nice science-fiction / action pair to lead into what is more or less a fantasy series of all the stories in between with the scifi elements missing.
Whenever someone with authority over you says you're to be treated as an equal, they're either a fool or a liar.
The mere fact they have power over you means you can never trust them, because when it comes down to it THEIR pay depends on making you do your job to the corporate standard. If you exercise your supposed 'equality' in a way that threatens their position, you're going to lose.
Because of this, an invitation to open discussion is ultimately an invitation to be a 'yes man' or out yourself as a troublemaker.
> Workplaces are invariably structured for how men like to interact (hierarchical authority), not women (peer authority, different than Japanese workplace consensus). This immediately puts a big burden on women, to act like men regardless of how awkward or wrong it feels to do so... and then to be scolded from time to time for being too masculine. Men NEVER face a similar problem, so their stress level is invariably MUCH LESS from the job.
Well... IF you accept the above as true, then the average woman isn't intellectually capable of handling a properly organized environment.
Hierarchy works better than committee once you have more than a half-dozen people involved in a task.
>The very fact our revenge system is so expected to dole out revenge and ignore justice, such that people actively see justice as a negative thing simply because it is so far from the norm, is a very poor reflection on us as a nation.
Justice is historically synonymous with 'getting your just desserts' or similar idea. It's all about revenge.
Fundamentally though, the purpose of the legal system is to ensure the rules are followed to the benefit of the society. Locking someone up punitively doesn't really have a net benefit. You lock someone up to prevent recidivism, you lock them up to scare the next person into thinking twice (only works against calculated crimes, not those based on issues with impulse control or extreme circumstances), you lock them up to have control while you attempt rehabilitation. Maybe you 'lock them up' - in the sense of parole requirements - to get some kind of restitution out of them.
Punishment for punishment's sake just gives a temporary emotional boost to the victims or their family/friends/associates, and that's not really the kind of thing we should encourage.
>Modern civilization dates from the first widespread use of the automobile
Actually, science and politics in the West started some significant change in the late 1600s. "Modern civilization" can mean anything from 'since yesterday' to a date set at the introduction of whatever change you consider an essential building block of today's world.
Personally, I think of the modern world as 'Post-WWII'. I imagine my children will think of it as synonymous with the 'Information Age'.
It's a vague term, and shouldn't have been used in this context.
Slashdot Mirror
>Let's take the anthropomorphic out of this discussion and start over.
If we generalize too much, we might realize that intelligence represents a threat (something with goals that may conflict with ours, and a way of planning how to achieve them despite that conflict). Humans are intelligent. Therefore humans are a threat and we really ought to kill each other for our own protection.
Ahh. Do one thing, then; add a sunset clause to that fund, stage it in based on anticipated rate of natural disasters by area and decade.
Maybe you get 90% assistance now, but 80% in the event of flooding after ten years, etc. And maybe add another clause that the rate can be adjusted as models are improved and annual measurements accumulate. Possibly add a third bit that says you can take a (small but non-zero) payout from the fund to assist with relocation, and set the amount to be less than the anticipated payout for rebuilding if the person stays another 10 years.
Essentially, ya'll need to be told, "This area is becoming uninhabitable for people, and we're not going to continue supporting your efforts to live in denial of that fact".
>I'm not sure I follow your logic there, it seems to be nonsense
I'm not sure I follow the motivation behind your post, but I'm guessing you have no sense of humour and a stick lodged up your backside.
Time for new privacy laws, I guess.
Private companies should not be permitted to collect data on people not in a business relationship with them just because someone else shares it with them.
Let my sister mention my email address on her Facebook wall - Facebook shouldn't be able to do anything with it unless I am already a Facebook user and have provided that same email address.
Legislate them into purging any such mapped relationships from their databases, legislate them to ban rebuilding those relationship maps.
Just because privacy isn't important to someone else doesn't mean I should have to surrender mine.
The definition of 'AI' has been updated. It now stands for 'Algorithm Implementation'.
I still solve a lot of problems off the clock, usually while on a drive when (other than attention required for driving) my mind can wander. I can spend hours at my desk, extremely focused, but go around in circles... and then during a trip to a satellite office the answer will come to me.
Find a way to measure that!
Much like wait and call timers for telemarketing firms (and shitty customer service cube farms), these systems are not for good companies... they're for shitty companies paying shitty wages for basic monkey work, and they want to make sure the monkeys are mashing keys.
>Earth gets to heal Herself and people become less of a plague on Earth
The attitude of 'humans are the pinnacle of Creation and Nature should be bent to their will' was admittedly extremely ignorant... however, so is the hippy bullshit you're spouting.
The reason we need biodiversity now is we recognize our ignorance and technological limitations prevent us from intelligently managing a sustainable biosphere that is human-friendly, not because Gaia's sad if we destroy the wetlands.
Life on Earth is in its geriatric phase; it's been here over 4 billion years and has less than a billion left before it's gone. And that's just if things chug along as they always have - there's no guarantee that some tipping point won't hit and turn Earth into a lifeless hell hole long before that. Nature is not intelligent, and thus not intelligently managing the environment.
If we learn how to manage a global biosphere (including some difficult things like moving the planet's orbit), we might extend this planet's habitability until the point as which the Sun no longer provides enough energy to drive an energy gradient.
On a 100-year timeline, you're going to see problems within a human lifetime, but not so quickly people can't react to them.
I say... don't bother doing much at all. People will move out on their own as the ground becomes soggy with seawater. Or we get New Nice replacing Little Havana.
Mostly I think the government ought to be looking at removing anything that will cause large-scale pollution problems if it ends up abandoned and at least partially submerged.
>This is why I work from home.
As someone who has had an (abysmally bad) driver determine that their home was a valid roadway... I question the value of your choice.
People really should feel OK about some degree of retributive dissemination of confidential corporate documents.
It means that as the company has a gun to your head - do as you're told or you're fired - you have a gun to theirs - treat me properly or I'll cut you.
Of course it still has to be worth the legal consequences, but that too is good because it stops you from screwing over the company for petty grievances.
In the olden days, if you had sufficient money you'd have a servant or tradesmen's entrance to your property.
These days you might have a 'mud room' or something, if not a double entrance to the foyer of your house to keep out inclement weather.
If I were designing a home today, I'd do something like have an electronic outer lock that supported easy remote addition of temporary codes, and put a security camera in it. Put the door code in the 'special instructions' for the delivery, and the courier - and nobody else - can get past the first set of doors to drop off a package, but no further. And when they're done, or the time allotted expires, the access code is disabled.
The law defines what your fair share is; you're setting an overriding, undocumented, vague 'standard' and then complaining when people don't meet it.
>when the Richard Bransons and Bill Gates and Warren Buffetts of the world get together and talk about their grand schemes they laugh at the little people who make it all possible
This is what really gets me - there is NO way that any of those people are providing value to civilization that is proportionate to the wealth they control. No human being could possibly be worth so much to us collectively that they should make more in a few minutes than another productive human can possibly make in a lifetime.
And I think ultimately that is what we should be aiming for when we talk about correcting wealth inequity - your personal cost/benefit to the planet should more or less balance out to zero under ideal circumstances. Obviously that's not possible even in a world where you could accurately calculate that, because most of us have at least an ounce of compassion and wouldn't write off the disabled, the sick, the elderly, or the merely redundant (this last one becoming more of a problem as human labour becomes less economically important). And communism sure as hell didn't work out well for anyone in the long run.
However, I think it's a good general target we should be aiming for while trying to figure out something better than the current system. You should get a share of benefits from the system more or less equivalent to the share of value you put in.
Marx said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". I say, "From each according to their will and society's need, to each according to their contribution and personal need". Not quite as catchy, though.
You should have capitalized that last 'trumped'.
While other replies to my post have been more informative, yours is the most depressingly and most likely dead-on accurate response.
You're covering for your side's criminal now, by trying to deflect public interest from Trump's Russian ties onto the other side's most visible figurehead.
>Japan, Europe and China also have appropriate satellites, as mentioned in the article.
Which seems wasteful to me. Monitoring the planet (for non-military / intelligence reasons) seems like a natural mandate for the UN. (Or maybe a non-political equivalent)
Let scientists around the world decide what needs to be monitored, and use the UN as an umbrella operation to get the required systems in place. Go to RFP and let the country that can meet the specs for the least money (including guaranteed system lifetime) get the job, and supply the results to any nation that's not in arrears with the UN.
Tax avoidance being a problem means the tax laws need to be rewritten. Expecting people not to keep as much of their wealth as possible within the law is foolish. You 'avoid' taxes every time you claim a deduction... go ahead, tell me you never claim a deduction on your taxes...
Tax evasion, on the other hand... that's effectively treason, since you're not giving your share as required by the laws of the society within which you generated your wealth in the first place. Tax evasion makes you a parasite.
The problem is when those doing the tax avoiding start to look a lot like the tax evaders because they have influence and lawyers who let them have the rules altered or escape the consequences of pushing the grey areas too much.
>I suspect real Americans take a dim view of a high administration official who maintains financial ties to companies being sanctioned by the US government.
I suspect 'real' Americans are comprised of citizens of the USA, and a significant number of them will ignore this because it reflects poorly on Trump, who isn't one of those dirty Dems and certainly isn't a black secret Muslim who was born in Kenya.
Besides, look at this fake news about Hillary!
I think the term is 'squee'. I had no idea there was a movie adaptation in the works.
I'd hope they follow the books, only put them in chronological order and clean up the inconsistencies caused by McCaffrey writing them out of sequence.
And definitely tone down the 'strong woman except eventually she has to be rescued by a stronger man' vibe that many of the stories give off.
And out of all of the stories, I think I'd most like to see the Harper Hall trilogy adapted. On the other hand, Dragonsdawn and All the Weyrs of Pern would be a nice science-fiction / action pair to lead into what is more or less a fantasy series of all the stories in between with the scifi elements missing.
Hmm. I wonder why you'd want to look at the proven liar wielding power over the the person without power he keeps pointing to as a distraction?
Are you Russian or stupid?
Whenever someone with authority over you says you're to be treated as an equal, they're either a fool or a liar.
The mere fact they have power over you means you can never trust them, because when it comes down to it THEIR pay depends on making you do your job to the corporate standard. If you exercise your supposed 'equality' in a way that threatens their position, you're going to lose.
Because of this, an invitation to open discussion is ultimately an invitation to be a 'yes man' or out yourself as a troublemaker.
> Workplaces are invariably structured for how men like to interact (hierarchical authority), not women (peer authority, different than Japanese workplace consensus). This immediately puts a big burden on women, to act like men regardless of how awkward or wrong it feels to do so ... and then to be scolded from time to time for being too masculine. Men NEVER face a similar problem, so their stress level is invariably MUCH LESS from the job.
Well... IF you accept the above as true, then the average woman isn't intellectually capable of handling a properly organized environment.
Hierarchy works better than committee once you have more than a half-dozen people involved in a task.
>The very fact our revenge system is so expected to dole out revenge and ignore justice, such that people actively see justice as a negative thing simply because it is so far from the norm, is a very poor reflection on us as a nation.
Justice is historically synonymous with 'getting your just desserts' or similar idea. It's all about revenge.
Fundamentally though, the purpose of the legal system is to ensure the rules are followed to the benefit of the society. Locking someone up punitively doesn't really have a net benefit. You lock someone up to prevent recidivism, you lock them up to scare the next person into thinking twice (only works against calculated crimes, not those based on issues with impulse control or extreme circumstances), you lock them up to have control while you attempt rehabilitation. Maybe you 'lock them up' - in the sense of parole requirements - to get some kind of restitution out of them.
Punishment for punishment's sake just gives a temporary emotional boost to the victims or their family/friends/associates, and that's not really the kind of thing we should encourage.
>Modern civilization dates from the first widespread use of the automobile
Actually, science and politics in the West started some significant change in the late 1600s. "Modern civilization" can mean anything from 'since yesterday' to a date set at the introduction of whatever change you consider an essential building block of today's world.
Personally, I think of the modern world as 'Post-WWII'. I imagine my children will think of it as synonymous with the 'Information Age'.
It's a vague term, and shouldn't have been used in this context.