Yeah, this is one of my points of contention with UBI. Essentially I think it belies an incomplete understanding of the problem space. Namely: money doesn't equal wealth, although it is related to it.
A good example is how universal health insurance doesn't really ensure that everyone has health care: it only affects the demand side, not the supply side.
Unless there is something about UBI that addresses the question of "How do you ensure that production of goods and services is maintained at the same level - or increases - when you switch to UBI?" I think it's only an interesting exercise, not something that can be sustained.
At least have "real" patent reform, probably along these lines:
1. Adjust patent periods to two or three times the typical new-product release cycle in the target industry. Pharma or manufacturing tech? Yeah you can have a 15 or 20 year patent. Computers: Here you go, 24-36 months.
That's it, that's all you'd need to do. Even if there was an "obvious" patent in this case, who cares, because the duration is short enough that only really valuable patents would even make it into the system, reducing the workload on the USPTO so grant times would be shorter, better examination of prior art and obviousness, and the like.
If the problem, as stated above, was "Have the perceived vibration be constant regardless of where the device was held", any mechanical engineer would tell you the obvious solution is to vary the amplitude and/or frequency of the vibration at the source point so the amplitude at the measurement / sense point is constant.
In fact, due to physics, this is the only way to possibly do that.
So unless the patent is some novel way of determining the sense point and then from there the desired input intensity, where "novel" means "not just doing some kind of exact or simulated wave simulation", I'd say that is indeed an obvious solution and should not have been granted a patent.
So many ideas along these lines...I don't even know where to begin.
Optimizing for profits only works in the long run if those profits are the result of real productivity increases (more output per unit work). Increased profits due to regulatory capture, monopolies, or trade imbalances harm society, not help it.
Assignment of the benefits of productivity to a small number of "owners" also may benefit society in the short term, while the non-owners still get many of the benefits of increased productivity. But as soon as benefits from increases in productivity do not make it "to the masses", then the ability to sustain such a system falters.
You only have these few options: A - the owners of means of production choose to produce goods and services and give them to non-owners, B - the non-owners force the owners of means of production to produces goods and services and give them to non-owners (taxes, making it illegal for individuals to own means of production, etc.), or C - the owners of means of production have enough power to withhold goods from the non-owners, and the non-owners cease to exist.
Now, reality is kind of a mixture of those things, rather than any one extreme. The whole course of human politics and history has been based around managing the balance between those things. In order to transition to a post-scarcity society, we're going to have to somehow modify that balance again, and it's probably going to have to be something more towards having less concentrated "ownership" of means of production.
It's not even that - even if all your parts have the same MTTF, they will not all fail at the same time. The only way you can cause all your parts to fail at the same time is if they all have dependencies on other parts such that if one part fails, the others are guaranteed to fail. Or, effectively, a self-destruct mechanism.
Americans aren't a danger to America. We are America!
I would argue that Americans are, in fact, the greatest threat to America.
Both the parties' debates had that question about "what is the biggest threat to the US" and the candidates talked about terrorism and climate change. I think they were all wrong: not a single one said "internal conflict."
What I wish for isn't a president who will stand against terrorism, or address income inequality, or whatever else has most of the platforms' focus. I wish for a president who would lead, foster cooperation, and encourage people to focus on being united rather than divided.
Note I didn't say anything about "how much" farmland - I mentioned the distribution of that farmland and how the distribution affects supply shocks due to geographic affects like weather or disease.
It's like colocation for IT - you don't put all your IT basket in one location, why would you concentrate your food basket?
Exactly - I even explicitly stated that: you can pay for things that provide less economic benefit than they cost only until a surplus runs out. Doesn't matter if it's a designer handbag or a textile factory or the latest app.
This sounds well and good, but I see a similar issue around where I live - lots of farmland being converted into subdivisions and shopping centers. What good is the Cloud when there is no food left to eat?
Why is this a problem, you ask? One thing strikes me as interesting - the more farmland we lose, the more our farming becomes concentrated in fewer geographic areas. This means farming is much more susceptible to drought, flooding, etc. This is notably a Bad Thing.
We really should be more involved with our local zoning commissions and other legislative bodies to address property laws - for tenants, landowners, and conversion of property from one type to another.
Ah actually, I see I misread the original quote, which was "a simple life." Are you saying that landscapers don't currently lead "simple" lives?
I know a fair number of landscapers, and they live pretty reasonable middle-class lives. But not luxurious ones. (Excepting the owner of the landscaping company, they live upper-middle-class.)
Why can't someone who mows lawns for a living not make enough money for a simple life?
This is a good example, actually. In the limit, the activity of mowing a lawn does not generate enough production of real wealth to fund its own existence.
Specifically, I mean this: the increased production of food, tools, etc. from the landscaped lawn combined with the reduction in costs of dealing with rodents, bugs, difficulty of travel, etc. you'd have if the lawn wasn't landscaped is not enough to pay a person "well" for that landscaping.
Now, you might argue that people may be willing to pay a landscaper excessively to maintain an image, etc. This may be possible for a time, but if you're paying them more than their efforts generate, you're going to deplete your savings and eventually have an issue.
But this example also shows an artifact of the political methods of assigning people wealth in conflicting ways: "the landscaper should only get paid based on the economic value they directly produce" but "property owners should be compensated for people using their land, even though property owners don't necessarily do any direct work." Or said slightly differently: risking capital is physically different than performing labor, but many systems don't account for those differences.
This is just sensationalism. The real issue is that, if people are willing to give up their responsibilities to control a vehicle, they necessarily give up their freedom to decide how that vehicle behaves in certain situations. If you want to decide how a vehicle behaves there are probably two options: get a manually operated vehicle, or build your own "automatic" vehicle with your own rules. But good luck on that latter; just as there are regulations on acceptable behavior with manually-operated vehicles*, I bet there are going to be regulations on the "rules" automatic vehicles are going to have to include.
*Yes, you can choose to save yourself and drive into a trolley or crowd. But you will also have to suffer the consequences of that decision. You might be alive, but if you intentionally chose to harm others, you might not like where you spend your life.
Hell, the general US public just spent that much money in four days to go watch a movie.
While there may be some argument that perhaps that money could have been spent elsewhere, complaining over this one small amount of cash is a bit silly. Now, if we talk about a systemic problem - for instance, what percentage of projects like this get cancelled? - that is going to be much more productive.
$230M is something like, what, the salary of 1500 well-paid engineers and managers? Split across 5 years, that's only 300 people, which is a mid-size engineering company. Even if you figure that 10% of that went to line someone's pockets, the rest to actual employees of companies, I'd tend to agree with this - $230M is chump change, and probably actually kept some people employed. And it's not even like it was a lot of people (you might be able to change the number by a factor of 2 or 3 if you are paying median or low-end salaries). So it's not like there is much direct money spent on "political influence" here.
The problem here isn't that a company patented something; it's that there is a patent-encumbered standard. Patents on implementations are fine, but patents on protocols or interfaces (even connector geometry and signal definition, in my opinion) should be disallowed.
First - how do you force the creation of supermarkets so that there is one within walking distance of everyone? Also, what is "walking distance" - 2 miles is walkable, that's probably a 30 minute walk.
Second, I (and many people) don't want to spend a portion of my time every day foraging for food in the supermarket. I'd rather have one big trip a week than a small one every day.
Third: There's this thing called a refrigerator. If you have food that spoils in the span of a week, you're doing it wrong. (Didn't we see an article recently about how the most game-changing invention of the 20th century could be argued to be the fridge, since it reduced the amount of time people spend on food preparation by an order of magnitude or so?)
I agree that the regular exercise is good, but the rest of the arguments seem to be non-sequiturs.
Indeed! Even though I already had a couple copies of Star Wars IV-VI, I broke down and bought that release solely so I could have the non-special editions.
Hadn't quite finished the coffee - I should have added, the above (directly fund carbon sequestration) should be part of the solution, not the only piece. I'd also have policies to reduce the production of new "polluting" activities, but I wouldn't directly tax/ban existing things; they would wear out on their own. That is, I'd use sequestration to mitigate the existing install base and only allow "clean" stuff going forward.
This should be way more politically palatable, when you aren't asking people to give up something they already have.
PS: Zoning laws might also need to be revised. Lots of farmland / forest being turned into retail space doesn't help the climate much (at least to first-order effects).
The US still needs to figure out how to burn 1/2 as much petroleum.
Lets say a desirable change time frame is 1 year. So I challenge Slashdotters: how would we do that?
The technical side of such a drastic change is clear: Drive a lot lot less. Fly a whole lot less.
Maintaining our society and every person's life style and economic condition are the social problems that must be solved.
All we get are these suggestions like "you'd better stop doing what you're doing now and enjoying an easy life. We'll tax you for it otherwise!"
If governments were really serious about controlling emissions, they would be willing to directly pay for carbon sequestration - that is, forget carbon credits and all that, simply establish companies that would use solar/wind to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, and pay them per ton removed. After all, this would be a good investment, right? Spend $10 now to prevent $100 damage due to war/famine/whatever in 100 years is a very good deal for society (well, relatively, that's about 2.3% compounded return). If the future is so "catastrophic" this is what the government should be doing.
But we don't see plans like that, which would cause change "overnight" as people would be falling over themselves to start building atmospheric condensers. Instead we get suggestions do "live with less". It's no wonder there is so much push back - most of it is on the policy, not the science (I think people push back on the science because it is used to justify onerous policy.)
That probably won't bring down the entire array though; just reduce its output slightly. Plus, "tossing bricks" requires a physical presence (I don't think any commercially available drones can carry bricks yet, although if people start stealing Amazon drones, I guess they will...) so has much higher risk.
Or at least portions of it. Most of this thread seems to be authored by A.C., so it's hard to get a discussion going...
That said: The one concept in the article about "continuously pushing code to production" sounds great, but I think it has serious limitations. Especially when coupled with the "don't be afraid to fail" concept. Perhaps for news aggregating websites or something that is fine, but you don't want to be developing safety-critical software that way.
The things that are useful, perhaps, are the automation aspect, where you write tests first and have code automatically tested whenever it is committed - that part I think is important. I like the hand-wavy bit about "assuming your tests are correct" bit though - that takes significant effort!
But saying that "you're doing it wrong" if you have a slow release process is not helpful; in some cases you absolutely want a slow release process, because those releases must be vetted.
TLDR version: Automation of processes is good, but I have to disagree on "good devops" to requires "continuous release."
I can see how that might work - in theory. In practice, is it really that easy to switch your crops (climate, soil composition, etc.)? Also... where would one of these farmers get the seed/starter crops to switch?
Also what's interesting to me here is that - why do these farmers need the internet to do this? What about word of mouth? Why don't the European / Middle Eastern purchasers approach the farmers and say "hey, we want lower prices for these goods, let's cut out the middlemen and if you grow these crops..."
But in general I agree that the only way out of poverty is easy access to resources, and I do see that the internet does reduce barriers to access. I think what surprised me was the 1-in-10 claim.
"The internet is so important that for every 10 people who gain internet access, about one person is lifted out of poverty and about one new job is created."
Interesting, but I've never heard such a claim before. That also sounds like correlation but perhaps not causation. And is the person who is lifted out of poverty and/or the job created one of those 10 people who gained internet access? What type of job is created? How is someone lifted form poverty? How soon after getting internet access? Maybe it's "eventually" due to education?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this is one of my points of contention with UBI. Essentially I think it belies an incomplete understanding of the problem space. Namely: money doesn't equal wealth, although it is related to it.
A good example is how universal health insurance doesn't really ensure that everyone has health care: it only affects the demand side, not the supply side.
Unless there is something about UBI that addresses the question of "How do you ensure that production of goods and services is maintained at the same level - or increases - when you switch to UBI?" I think it's only an interesting exercise, not something that can be sustained.
At least have "real" patent reform, probably along these lines:
1. Adjust patent periods to two or three times the typical new-product release cycle in the target industry. Pharma or manufacturing tech? Yeah you can have a 15 or 20 year patent. Computers: Here you go, 24-36 months.
That's it, that's all you'd need to do. Even if there was an "obvious" patent in this case, who cares, because the duration is short enough that only really valuable patents would even make it into the system, reducing the workload on the USPTO so grant times would be shorter, better examination of prior art and obviousness, and the like.
The law is "obvious to one skilled in the art".
If the problem, as stated above, was "Have the perceived vibration be constant regardless of where the device was held", any mechanical engineer would tell you the obvious solution is to vary the amplitude and/or frequency of the vibration at the source point so the amplitude at the measurement / sense point is constant.
In fact, due to physics, this is the only way to possibly do that.
So unless the patent is some novel way of determining the sense point and then from there the desired input intensity, where "novel" means "not just doing some kind of exact or simulated wave simulation", I'd say that is indeed an obvious solution and should not have been granted a patent.
So many ideas along these lines...I don't even know where to begin.
Optimizing for profits only works in the long run if those profits are the result of real productivity increases (more output per unit work). Increased profits due to regulatory capture, monopolies, or trade imbalances harm society, not help it.
Assignment of the benefits of productivity to a small number of "owners" also may benefit society in the short term, while the non-owners still get many of the benefits of increased productivity. But as soon as benefits from increases in productivity do not make it "to the masses", then the ability to sustain such a system falters.
You only have these few options: A - the owners of means of production choose to produce goods and services and give them to non-owners, B - the non-owners force the owners of means of production to produces goods and services and give them to non-owners (taxes, making it illegal for individuals to own means of production, etc.), or C - the owners of means of production have enough power to withhold goods from the non-owners, and the non-owners cease to exist.
Now, reality is kind of a mixture of those things, rather than any one extreme. The whole course of human politics and history has been based around managing the balance between those things. In order to transition to a post-scarcity society, we're going to have to somehow modify that balance again, and it's probably going to have to be something more towards having less concentrated "ownership" of means of production.
It's not even that - even if all your parts have the same MTTF, they will not all fail at the same time. The only way you can cause all your parts to fail at the same time is if they all have dependencies on other parts such that if one part fails, the others are guaranteed to fail. Or, effectively, a self-destruct mechanism.
Why would a critical system like this not have a redundant generator? The 1-hour battery backup claimed is definitely not effective redundancy.
Seems crazy that a couple-pound, maybe thousand-dollar generator would be forgone because a vehicle loss is "only" a couple million dollars.
I would argue that Americans are, in fact, the greatest threat to America.
Both the parties' debates had that question about "what is the biggest threat to the US" and the candidates talked about terrorism and climate change. I think they were all wrong: not a single one said "internal conflict."
What I wish for isn't a president who will stand against terrorism, or address income inequality, or whatever else has most of the platforms' focus. I wish for a president who would lead, foster cooperation, and encourage people to focus on being united rather than divided.
Some of us own garages and don't want our cars to be able to be started by a remote actor.
Always remember: if you can do something remotely, someone else can too.
Note I didn't say anything about "how much" farmland - I mentioned the distribution of that farmland and how the distribution affects supply shocks due to geographic affects like weather or disease.
It's like colocation for IT - you don't put all your IT basket in one location, why would you concentrate your food basket?
Exactly - I even explicitly stated that: you can pay for things that provide less economic benefit than they cost only until a surplus runs out. Doesn't matter if it's a designer handbag or a textile factory or the latest app.
This sounds well and good, but I see a similar issue around where I live - lots of farmland being converted into subdivisions and shopping centers. What good is the Cloud when there is no food left to eat?
Why is this a problem, you ask? One thing strikes me as interesting - the more farmland we lose, the more our farming becomes concentrated in fewer geographic areas. This means farming is much more susceptible to drought, flooding, etc. This is notably a Bad Thing.
We really should be more involved with our local zoning commissions and other legislative bodies to address property laws - for tenants, landowners, and conversion of property from one type to another.
Ah actually, I see I misread the original quote, which was "a simple life." Are you saying that landscapers don't currently lead "simple" lives?
I know a fair number of landscapers, and they live pretty reasonable middle-class lives. But not luxurious ones. (Excepting the owner of the landscaping company, they live upper-middle-class.)
This is a good example, actually. In the limit, the activity of mowing a lawn does not generate enough production of real wealth to fund its own existence.
Specifically, I mean this: the increased production of food, tools, etc. from the landscaped lawn combined with the reduction in costs of dealing with rodents, bugs, difficulty of travel, etc. you'd have if the lawn wasn't landscaped is not enough to pay a person "well" for that landscaping.
Now, you might argue that people may be willing to pay a landscaper excessively to maintain an image, etc. This may be possible for a time, but if you're paying them more than their efforts generate, you're going to deplete your savings and eventually have an issue.
But this example also shows an artifact of the political methods of assigning people wealth in conflicting ways: "the landscaper should only get paid based on the economic value they directly produce" but "property owners should be compensated for people using their land, even though property owners don't necessarily do any direct work." Or said slightly differently: risking capital is physically different than performing labor, but many systems don't account for those differences.
This is just sensationalism. The real issue is that, if people are willing to give up their responsibilities to control a vehicle, they necessarily give up their freedom to decide how that vehicle behaves in certain situations. If you want to decide how a vehicle behaves there are probably two options: get a manually operated vehicle, or build your own "automatic" vehicle with your own rules. But good luck on that latter; just as there are regulations on acceptable behavior with manually-operated vehicles*, I bet there are going to be regulations on the "rules" automatic vehicles are going to have to include.
*Yes, you can choose to save yourself and drive into a trolley or crowd. But you will also have to suffer the consequences of that decision. You might be alive, but if you intentionally chose to harm others, you might not like where you spend your life.
Hell, the general US public just spent that much money in four days to go watch a movie.
While there may be some argument that perhaps that money could have been spent elsewhere, complaining over this one small amount of cash is a bit silly. Now, if we talk about a systemic problem - for instance, what percentage of projects like this get cancelled? - that is going to be much more productive.
$230M is something like, what, the salary of 1500 well-paid engineers and managers? Split across 5 years, that's only 300 people, which is a mid-size engineering company. Even if you figure that 10% of that went to line someone's pockets, the rest to actual employees of companies, I'd tend to agree with this - $230M is chump change, and probably actually kept some people employed. And it's not even like it was a lot of people (you might be able to change the number by a factor of 2 or 3 if you are paying median or low-end salaries). So it's not like there is much direct money spent on "political influence" here.
The problem here isn't that a company patented something; it's that there is a patent-encumbered standard. Patents on implementations are fine, but patents on protocols or interfaces (even connector geometry and signal definition, in my opinion) should be disallowed.
This sounds good, except for a couple things.
First - how do you force the creation of supermarkets so that there is one within walking distance of everyone? Also, what is "walking distance" - 2 miles is walkable, that's probably a 30 minute walk.
Second, I (and many people) don't want to spend a portion of my time every day foraging for food in the supermarket. I'd rather have one big trip a week than a small one every day.
Third: There's this thing called a refrigerator. If you have food that spoils in the span of a week, you're doing it wrong. (Didn't we see an article recently about how the most game-changing invention of the 20th century could be argued to be the fridge, since it reduced the amount of time people spend on food preparation by an order of magnitude or so?)
I agree that the regular exercise is good, but the rest of the arguments seem to be non-sequiturs.
Indeed! Even though I already had a couple copies of Star Wars IV-VI, I broke down and bought that release solely so I could have the non-special editions.
Hadn't quite finished the coffee - I should have added, the above (directly fund carbon sequestration) should be part of the solution, not the only piece. I'd also have policies to reduce the production of new "polluting" activities, but I wouldn't directly tax/ban existing things; they would wear out on their own. That is, I'd use sequestration to mitigate the existing install base and only allow "clean" stuff going forward.
This should be way more politically palatable, when you aren't asking people to give up something they already have.
PS: Zoning laws might also need to be revised. Lots of farmland / forest being turned into retail space doesn't help the climate much (at least to first-order effects).
All we get are these suggestions like "you'd better stop doing what you're doing now and enjoying an easy life. We'll tax you for it otherwise!"
If governments were really serious about controlling emissions, they would be willing to directly pay for carbon sequestration - that is, forget carbon credits and all that, simply establish companies that would use solar/wind to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, and pay them per ton removed. After all, this would be a good investment, right? Spend $10 now to prevent $100 damage due to war/famine/whatever in 100 years is a very good deal for society (well, relatively, that's about 2.3% compounded return). If the future is so "catastrophic" this is what the government should be doing.
But we don't see plans like that, which would cause change "overnight" as people would be falling over themselves to start building atmospheric condensers. Instead we get suggestions do "live with less". It's no wonder there is so much push back - most of it is on the policy, not the science (I think people push back on the science because it is used to justify onerous policy.)
That probably won't bring down the entire array though; just reduce its output slightly. Plus, "tossing bricks" requires a physical presence (I don't think any commercially available drones can carry bricks yet, although if people start stealing Amazon drones, I guess they will...) so has much higher risk.
Or at least portions of it. Most of this thread seems to be authored by A.C., so it's hard to get a discussion going...
That said: The one concept in the article about "continuously pushing code to production" sounds great, but I think it has serious limitations. Especially when coupled with the "don't be afraid to fail" concept. Perhaps for news aggregating websites or something that is fine, but you don't want to be developing safety-critical software that way.
The things that are useful, perhaps, are the automation aspect, where you write tests first and have code automatically tested whenever it is committed - that part I think is important. I like the hand-wavy bit about "assuming your tests are correct" bit though - that takes significant effort!
But saying that "you're doing it wrong" if you have a slow release process is not helpful; in some cases you absolutely want a slow release process, because those releases must be vetted.
TLDR version: Automation of processes is good, but I have to disagree on "good devops" to requires "continuous release."
Rent seeking always sucks when you're the renter.
I can see how that might work - in theory. In practice, is it really that easy to switch your crops (climate, soil composition, etc.)? Also... where would one of these farmers get the seed/starter crops to switch?
Also what's interesting to me here is that - why do these farmers need the internet to do this? What about word of mouth? Why don't the European / Middle Eastern purchasers approach the farmers and say "hey, we want lower prices for these goods, let's cut out the middlemen and if you grow these crops..."
But in general I agree that the only way out of poverty is easy access to resources, and I do see that the internet does reduce barriers to access. I think what surprised me was the 1-in-10 claim.
Interesting, but I've never heard such a claim before. That also sounds like correlation but perhaps not causation. And is the person who is lifted out of poverty and/or the job created one of those 10 people who gained internet access? What type of job is created? How is someone lifted form poverty? How soon after getting internet access? Maybe it's "eventually" due to education?