It does have its advantages in some situations, but it's also going to seriously pollute low-level airspace with drone traffic. I call it pollution, because it's like light pollution - definitely beneficial, but something is lost in the exchange.
I think it would be interesting to know just how many out of all initiated video views are cancelled within 3 seconds. How many people are saying "A video? I'm not watching this!" is very relevant I would say.
You do know that dealers don't make money on new car sales, right? They make it on used car sales and service. Ever price out basic maintenance at a dealer? Or major maintenance?
Fact of the matter is, Tesla could have chosen to go through dealers, and they didn't - I wouldn't say this was wholly altruistic, either. In some ways direct sales are good, in others they aren't.
All those previous things you mentioned were technologies that greatly increased productivity - that is, they produced greatly more output with less input, so they had a significant effect of reducing cost of pretty much everything. This meant the temporary effects of job transitions were not as harsh, because there was an environment of increased standard of living.
We aren't in a world like that any more - technology is not passing the results of increased productivity on to higher standards of living at the same rate to the people whose jobs got displaced* so the transient effect of disruptive technology is going to be more severe.
*This is important - yes, people in "third world" countries are having their standards of living increased rapidly, but this is now at the expense of standard of living of people in the highly-developed nations. We just got out of a strange century or so where people were gaining standard of living without reducing others' standards of living.
The potential for productivity increases for automated personal transport is low - we are so far along the curve of diminishing returns that it is costing society significant amounts for small gains in this industry, and when it comes to automotive safety, we are actually now probably spending more as a society (at least in the US) to eliminate one accident than that accident itself - even a fatal one - would cost society in terms of productivity.
I don't care what causes it, but it drives me nuts. I've had this on a Dell laptop (circa 2012) and on my current (2014) Macbook Pro. It's kind of terrible that this is now spreading to phones.
I'm more and more convinced that society hit a local peak in technology quality in about the 2000-2010 decade. I hope the next stage of improvement comes soon; even purely mechanical things are going downhill at the moment (the front panel of my 2-year-old dishwasher is detaching from the door frame; makes we want to go ask the person who designed and/or approved it would find that acceptable on their appliances).
It's not even as simple as just issues due to externalities - markets can fail all the time when there is incorrect or unequal information across all participants in the market. A market can also "fail" if the interested parties in the market are aiming for some effect other than what is perceived as a "success".
Put another way: markets are not magic and are inherently subject to "garbage in, garbage out."
True leaders create more leaders, not more followers.
I would probably amend that to be "One aspect of a good leader is to teach people to know when best to lead and when best to follow." After all, it's simply not possible for everyone to be a leader simultaneously in a universe with limited physical resources. And you can't by definition be a leader if nobody is following you...
So what you're saying is, that Google's own employees - not one among the vast number of them - cannot find this type of exploit, or aren't allocated to this type of exploit finding, so basically Google has opted to contract that work out in the form of a "bounty program"?
Right, long term, UBI is going to have be implemented by some kind of modification to what it means to be able to own productive capital. Taxes have kind of done this in the past, but I'm thinking it might need to go further - something like companies must issue dividends, and the general public is always allocated, say, 5% of the shares. This would mean the public has fractional ownership in all companies, so isn't "total" state-owned means of production. But the public would then always get a portion of the productivity of those companies.
This would sidestep the nonsense where companies can claim no profits (and therefore pay no taxes) but still issue dividends.
Otherwise you'd need some kind of wealth (not income!) tax to prevent the rich from buying up all productive capital and then refusing to produce things for those who now no longer have any capital left to purchase. But that's the eternal struggle isn't it - how much compulsion should an individual be under to provide for the population in general?
If Apple didn't have mountains of cash, would this even be in the news at all?
The smell of this situation is that Apple is successful, so let's go after their huge pocketbook, because of course they must have been doing something wrong.
It also smells that it's always companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. that we hear in the news, which are all non-EU companies. If there are EU companies under investigation, why don't we hear about them in the news?
I don't actually think you need strong AI to make a machine that can design or repair machines. You give a computer basic rules for machines and constraint solvers, then give it a problem to solve (e.g., move parts from location A to location B), and I bet it could easily design a machine that could do that. Industrial design firms already have software that does this, actually.
Machine design isn't strong AI - it's just an optimization problem. The only part of machine design that is "strong AI" is deciding that you want a machine for a specific task in the first place.
How is barter anonymous? They may not know your name, but they sure know your face and possibly other information. Or are you bartering by placing items at some random location at different times, hoping the other party actually leaves the items at the location?
And that can only work for goods - I don't know how it's possible to barter services anonymously.
Or maybe people have changed the meaning of what 'anonymous' means?
Ah yes, well, that's true - you do always pay more for insurance than you would if you didn't and the insured event doesn't occur. But that's kind of a moot point isn't it?
Now, if you are arguing that you "always" get less payout than your premiums even if you have an insured event, then either you need to pick a different insurance provider, try to change legislation to fix the rules that facilitate such economic inefficiency, or challenge insurance fraud investigators' prowess by trying to extract the maximum payout for any insured event.
No, that's not quite how it works. An individual buying an insurance policy does not, on average, pay more than they would without insurance. All the insured in aggregate, however, do pay more than they would without insurance*.
If an individual on average paid more for insurance than for losses, insurance wouldn't exist with rational individuals. Insurance only works, and makes financial sense, when the individual cost is lower than the loss.**
*It's a little more tricky than straight comparison, because you have to look at discount rates and the like, and the availability of liquid funds to cover a loss. But in general the rule still applies; society in general pays more for insurance than it would without it - but then there is the even trickier thing, when thinking about if the people employed in the insurance industry would be more productive doing other things.
**Things get more murky when insurance is mandated or insurance is used to do more things beside just provide insurance. Consider health insurance in the US - it's not really just insurance, but it's also a population health program. If it was just insurance, it wouldn't do proactive things like preventive maintenance. (Consider - auto insurance doesn't cover driver safety training or periodic car maintenance, even though in aggregate those things would reduce insurance costs).
Well, almost - the devil is in the details. At any given point in time, for goods, the rate of consumption plus the rate of change of goods in storage is equal to the rate of production. For services, the rate of consumption is always the rate of production ( you cannot store a service ).
So you can "borrow" against storage to have a really high short-term consumption rate - but as soon as that storage is exhausted, then you get consumption of goods must equal supply of goods.
The "problems" with our economy are wholly social - that is, they are rarely based in "physical economics*". They are wholly based on the social systems we have put in place governing the allowed use of resources. So if everyone "lived within their means" - what would that look like? In terms of production and consumption - nothing would have to change. People are already producing things and consuming things - so what is structurally different "the day after" a financial meltdown? Nothing - It's wholly social - and that's the crazy thing. It's all about allocation. If the system just said "nope, sorry, you're not allowed to change things that drastically from yesterday to today" then crashes (or booms!) might not happen - things could be slow and steady. But that is a bit different system than we have today - and it would necessarily look markedly different in terms of how ownership is assigned and changed.
*Sometimes there are physical events, like disasters, droughts, etc. that adversely (or beneficially!) affect production, but those usually don't result in the kinds of nonsense that is the result of our financial laws.
There's nothing inherent in a system that taxes wealth to cause "the money they've saved is simply taken away from them until they're back down to having only what you have". That would only happen if a person stops being productive and so has no more income, so their wealth is monotonically depleted over time. All the system I'm proposing does is make it less attractive for the significantly wealthy to try and gain more wealth. Our current system just makes it less attractive for the significantly wealthy to have high incomes - which is nowhere near the same thing.
At one point I revised my proposal to tax income based on wealth percentile - so you could then "sit on your accumulated wealth" without having it taken away, and if you were poor and had an income windfall you wouldn't be dinged. But I think that if you're interested in a functioning society, you don't really want holders of large wealth to just sit there and hoard it - you do indeed want to tax it and encourage productive use of that wealth.
Security theater doesn't get people to fly. Bosses, prestige, or significant others who don't want to sit in a car for more than 5 hours gets people to fly (since 5 hours is usually about the cutoff to where driving can make more sense than flying if it only takes 5 hours to drive).
The simplest way to start addressing wealth concentration (not income concentration) is to change to only tax wealth, never income. Make the tax rate proportional not to total amount of wealth, but wealth percentile. Those two things would immediately start addressing wealth inequality, something you rightly assert that income equality won't (can't?) accomplish.
But nobody is willing to tax wealth other than property taxes (and the general public wants to reduce those, too!), which don't really apply to enough types of wealth as it is. I'd say it probably really is a combination of those with lots of power holding it tight, and convincing other people that the status quo is actually better than they suspect.
The thing that's most interesting is that it appears to violate conservation of momentum and/or energy, which means that, at least locally, the universe is not necessarily isotropic - which is currently a huge base assumption.
One thing I've not seen - I wonder if the thing can produce thrust if it is moving, or only if it is stationary? So far aren't all the tests based on static mounting?
Consider - what if the actual effect is a torque, which cannot be used to translate the center of mass of a system but only rotate it. When you have a rigidly-mounted device, torques and thrusts are easy to conflate.
Slashdot Mirror
It does have its advantages in some situations, but it's also going to seriously pollute low-level airspace with drone traffic. I call it pollution, because it's like light pollution - definitely beneficial, but something is lost in the exchange.
"Social media reactions" is basically mob rule. Are you really advocating that mob rule is a desirable characteristic for a society?
I think it would be interesting to know just how many out of all initiated video views are cancelled within 3 seconds. How many people are saying "A video? I'm not watching this!" is very relevant I would say.
You do know that dealers don't make money on new car sales, right? They make it on used car sales and service. Ever price out basic maintenance at a dealer? Or major maintenance?
Fact of the matter is, Tesla could have chosen to go through dealers, and they didn't - I wouldn't say this was wholly altruistic, either. In some ways direct sales are good, in others they aren't.
All those previous things you mentioned were technologies that greatly increased productivity - that is, they produced greatly more output with less input, so they had a significant effect of reducing cost of pretty much everything. This meant the temporary effects of job transitions were not as harsh, because there was an environment of increased standard of living.
We aren't in a world like that any more - technology is not passing the results of increased productivity on to higher standards of living at the same rate to the people whose jobs got displaced* so the transient effect of disruptive technology is going to be more severe.
*This is important - yes, people in "third world" countries are having their standards of living increased rapidly, but this is now at the expense of standard of living of people in the highly-developed nations. We just got out of a strange century or so where people were gaining standard of living without reducing others' standards of living.
The potential for productivity increases for automated personal transport is low - we are so far along the curve of diminishing returns that it is costing society significant amounts for small gains in this industry, and when it comes to automotive safety, we are actually now probably spending more as a society (at least in the US) to eliminate one accident than that accident itself - even a fatal one - would cost society in terms of productivity.
I don't care what causes it, but it drives me nuts. I've had this on a Dell laptop (circa 2012) and on my current (2014) Macbook Pro. It's kind of terrible that this is now spreading to phones.
I'm more and more convinced that society hit a local peak in technology quality in about the 2000-2010 decade. I hope the next stage of improvement comes soon; even purely mechanical things are going downhill at the moment (the front panel of my 2-year-old dishwasher is detaching from the door frame; makes we want to go ask the person who designed and/or approved it would find that acceptable on their appliances).
It's not even as simple as just issues due to externalities - markets can fail all the time when there is incorrect or unequal information across all participants in the market. A market can also "fail" if the interested parties in the market are aiming for some effect other than what is perceived as a "success".
Put another way: markets are not magic and are inherently subject to "garbage in, garbage out."
I would probably amend that to be "One aspect of a good leader is to teach people to know when best to lead and when best to follow." After all, it's simply not possible for everyone to be a leader simultaneously in a universe with limited physical resources. And you can't by definition be a leader if nobody is following you...
So what you're saying is, that Google's own employees - not one among the vast number of them - cannot find this type of exploit, or aren't allocated to this type of exploit finding, so basically Google has opted to contract that work out in the form of a "bounty program"?
Right, long term, UBI is going to have be implemented by some kind of modification to what it means to be able to own productive capital. Taxes have kind of done this in the past, but I'm thinking it might need to go further - something like companies must issue dividends, and the general public is always allocated, say, 5% of the shares. This would mean the public has fractional ownership in all companies, so isn't "total" state-owned means of production. But the public would then always get a portion of the productivity of those companies.
This would sidestep the nonsense where companies can claim no profits (and therefore pay no taxes) but still issue dividends.
Otherwise you'd need some kind of wealth (not income!) tax to prevent the rich from buying up all productive capital and then refusing to produce things for those who now no longer have any capital left to purchase. But that's the eternal struggle isn't it - how much compulsion should an individual be under to provide for the population in general?
Wait, what? In what world is this happening? I wish it were thus...
In aggregate, yes. For any particular individual, not necessarily. And that's an important devil in the details.
If Apple didn't have mountains of cash, would this even be in the news at all?
The smell of this situation is that Apple is successful, so let's go after their huge pocketbook, because of course they must have been doing something wrong.
It also smells that it's always companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. that we hear in the news, which are all non-EU companies. If there are EU companies under investigation, why don't we hear about them in the news?
I think it would have just been simpler if they said "It appears the net angular momentum of the visible universe is zero (to one part in 121000)."
I don't actually think you need strong AI to make a machine that can design or repair machines. You give a computer basic rules for machines and constraint solvers, then give it a problem to solve (e.g., move parts from location A to location B), and I bet it could easily design a machine that could do that. Industrial design firms already have software that does this, actually.
Machine design isn't strong AI - it's just an optimization problem. The only part of machine design that is "strong AI" is deciding that you want a machine for a specific task in the first place.
So you think "they" will never make machine-repairing-machines and machine-designing-machines?
How is barter anonymous? They may not know your name, but they sure know your face and possibly other information. Or are you bartering by placing items at some random location at different times, hoping the other party actually leaves the items at the location?
And that can only work for goods - I don't know how it's possible to barter services anonymously.
Or maybe people have changed the meaning of what 'anonymous' means?
Ah yes, well, that's true - you do always pay more for insurance than you would if you didn't and the insured event doesn't occur. But that's kind of a moot point isn't it?
Now, if you are arguing that you "always" get less payout than your premiums even if you have an insured event, then either you need to pick a different insurance provider, try to change legislation to fix the rules that facilitate such economic inefficiency, or challenge insurance fraud investigators' prowess by trying to extract the maximum payout for any insured event.
No, that's not quite how it works. An individual buying an insurance policy does not, on average, pay more than they would without insurance. All the insured in aggregate, however, do pay more than they would without insurance*.
If an individual on average paid more for insurance than for losses, insurance wouldn't exist with rational individuals. Insurance only works, and makes financial sense, when the individual cost is lower than the loss.**
*It's a little more tricky than straight comparison, because you have to look at discount rates and the like, and the availability of liquid funds to cover a loss. But in general the rule still applies; society in general pays more for insurance than it would without it - but then there is the even trickier thing, when thinking about if the people employed in the insurance industry would be more productive doing other things.
**Things get more murky when insurance is mandated or insurance is used to do more things beside just provide insurance. Consider health insurance in the US - it's not really just insurance, but it's also a population health program. If it was just insurance, it wouldn't do proactive things like preventive maintenance. (Consider - auto insurance doesn't cover driver safety training or periodic car maintenance, even though in aggregate those things would reduce insurance costs).
Well, almost - the devil is in the details. At any given point in time, for goods, the rate of consumption plus the rate of change of goods in storage is equal to the rate of production. For services, the rate of consumption is always the rate of production ( you cannot store a service ).
So you can "borrow" against storage to have a really high short-term consumption rate - but as soon as that storage is exhausted, then you get consumption of goods must equal supply of goods.
The "problems" with our economy are wholly social - that is, they are rarely based in "physical economics*". They are wholly based on the social systems we have put in place governing the allowed use of resources. So if everyone "lived within their means" - what would that look like? In terms of production and consumption - nothing would have to change. People are already producing things and consuming things - so what is structurally different "the day after" a financial meltdown? Nothing - It's wholly social - and that's the crazy thing. It's all about allocation. If the system just said "nope, sorry, you're not allowed to change things that drastically from yesterday to today" then crashes (or booms!) might not happen - things could be slow and steady. But that is a bit different system than we have today - and it would necessarily look markedly different in terms of how ownership is assigned and changed.
*Sometimes there are physical events, like disasters, droughts, etc. that adversely (or beneficially!) affect production, but those usually don't result in the kinds of nonsense that is the result of our financial laws.
There's nothing inherent in a system that taxes wealth to cause "the money they've saved is simply taken away from them until they're back down to having only what you have". That would only happen if a person stops being productive and so has no more income, so their wealth is monotonically depleted over time. All the system I'm proposing does is make it less attractive for the significantly wealthy to try and gain more wealth. Our current system just makes it less attractive for the significantly wealthy to have high incomes - which is nowhere near the same thing.
At one point I revised my proposal to tax income based on wealth percentile - so you could then "sit on your accumulated wealth" without having it taken away, and if you were poor and had an income windfall you wouldn't be dinged. But I think that if you're interested in a functioning society, you don't really want holders of large wealth to just sit there and hoard it - you do indeed want to tax it and encourage productive use of that wealth.
Security theater doesn't get people to fly. Bosses, prestige, or significant others who don't want to sit in a car for more than 5 hours gets people to fly (since 5 hours is usually about the cutoff to where driving can make more sense than flying if it only takes 5 hours to drive).
The simplest way to start addressing wealth concentration (not income concentration) is to change to only tax wealth, never income. Make the tax rate proportional not to total amount of wealth, but wealth percentile. Those two things would immediately start addressing wealth inequality, something you rightly assert that income equality won't (can't?) accomplish.
But nobody is willing to tax wealth other than property taxes (and the general public wants to reduce those, too!), which don't really apply to enough types of wealth as it is. I'd say it probably really is a combination of those with lots of power holding it tight, and convincing other people that the status quo is actually better than they suspect.
Not necessarily - if their equipment isn't set up to measure reaction torque, but only reaction force, it might be getting missed.
Given the force values are so small, it was just a question I had.
But yes, if it is generating torque, force, etc. without an appropriate reaction, then there is a problem with the assumption of isotropy...
The thing that's most interesting is that it appears to violate conservation of momentum and/or energy, which means that, at least locally, the universe is not necessarily isotropic - which is currently a huge base assumption.
One thing I've not seen - I wonder if the thing can produce thrust if it is moving, or only if it is stationary? So far aren't all the tests based on static mounting?
Consider - what if the actual effect is a torque, which cannot be used to translate the center of mass of a system but only rotate it. When you have a rigidly-mounted device, torques and thrusts are easy to conflate.